SEE UPDATE BELOW FROM MONCKTON
I’m out of the political loop, and have no way of judging the merit of the claim, so I’m just going to link to this story. If it is true, it shows just how bad the treatment of different viewpoints has become in Washington. Perhaps Lord Monckton can give a comment or two here to either bolster or refute this story.
Report: Democrats Refuse to Allow Skeptic to Testify Alongside Gore At Congressional Hearing
Thursday, April 23, 2009 By Marc Morano
‘House Democrats don’t want Gore humiliated’
Climate Depot Exclusive
Washington DC — UK’s Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington. Monckton told Climate Depot that the Democrats rescinded his scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday. Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday afternoon.
“The House Democrats don’t want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face,” Monckton told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “They are cowards.”
UPDATE 8:30PM PST Lord Monckton weighed in on this story in comments. I thank hi for his candor and for telling his story firsthand here. He writes:
Once again I’m most grateful to Anthony Watts and his hard-working team for their kindness in exposing the less than democratic tactics of the Obama Democrats. The story circulated by the indefatigable Marc Morano is – as one would expect – accurate in every particular.
Early this week the Democrats told the Republicans they would have a “celebrity witness” for this morning’s hearing on the Waxman/Markey Bill, but they would not say who. The Republicans immediately contacted me and asked if they could tell the Dems they too were putting forward an undisclosed celebrity witness – me.
When the Dems eventually revealed that their “celebrity” was Al Gore, the Republicans told them I was to testify at the same time. The Dems immediately refused to allow the Republicans their first choice of witness. By the time they had refused, my jet was already in the air from London and I did not get the message till I landed in the US.
At first the Dems tried to refuse the Republicans the chance to replace me with a witness more congenial to them, but eventually – after quite a shouting-match – they agreed to let Newt Gingrich testify. The former Speaker of the House gave one of his best performances.
I attended the session anyway, as a member of the public, and tried to shake hands with Gore when he arrived, but his cloud of staffers surrounded him and he visibly flinched when I called out a friendly “Hello” to him.
His testimony was as inaccurate as ever. He repeated many of the errors identified by the High Court in the UK. He appeared ill at ease and very tired – perhaps reflecting on the Rasmussen poll that shows a massive 13.5% swing against the bedwetters’ point of view in just one year.
My draft testimony will be posted at http://www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org shortly, together with a brief refutation of Gore’s latest errors.
Finally, I have never said what one of your less polite correspondents has said I said about HIV. However, in 1987, at the request of the earliest researchers into the disease, I wrote articles in journals on both sides of the Atlantic recommending that AIDS should be treated as a notifiable disease, just like any other fatal, incurable infection. Had that standard public-health measure been taken – immediate, compulsory, permanent, but humane isolation of the then rather few carriers – many of the 25 million (UNAIDS figures) who have died and the 40 million who are currently infected and heading for death would have been spared. Sometimes, unfashionable points of view are right, and sometimes ignoring them can be a matter of life and death.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Anthony,
Maybe a two-part article with Roger and fuelmaker providing their points of view. I know I have looked for information on this subject several times and nowhere can I find information with the assumptions provided along with the opinion.
Back on topic, I’ll close by saying that it was Lord Monckton’s Sunday Telegraph articles aboout two years ago that began my quest to understand the science of ‘global warming’ and to change from lukewarm believer to passionate sceptic. So I’d also like to add my vote of thanks, and very much welcome the chance to do so!
The American Thinker article was, of course, wrong on about everything, but the one Outright Canard that jumped out at me was the assertion that ethanol was responsible for a 15% rise in the cost of food.
What the CBO actually said was, “ethanol was responsible for up to 15% of the 5.1% rise in the cost of food. In other words, from 0.5% to 0.8%
Big Difference.
If your grocery bill was $100.00 it became $100.50, to $100.80.
Meanwhile, if you used 10 gallons of gas you probably saved about $3.50.
If Moncton had been allowed allowed to testify, Schwarzenegger did not have to find new ways to reduce CO2:
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/459/Schwarzenegger-touts-airdrying-your-clothes-for-6-months-to-save-700-pounds-of-carbon-dioxide
Anthony,
My sincere apologies to you personally. I didn’t proofread my earlier post well enough to notice that with the salutation, you might interpret that as a personal attack. I love this site and find it to be one of the few that really let comments of differing opinion have their say.
My comment was directed at the people who repeatedly post without seeming to really ask a question ar answer one directed to them. For example, after mentioning that fermentation does not require energy, someone tried to correct the statement with an ignorant total energy calculation that was totally beside the point. And there are a lot of people out there who just want to point to irrelevant ecologist studies about all sorts of tangential energy inputs to prove that more energy is used than produced, which is beside the point because ethanol is a very valuable liquid fuel and if you can make it with coal or biomass, that is a good thing because I can’t buy a stanley steamer that runs on coal.
I can also educate on the volatility, octane value, stability, water susceptibility, and compatibility with older engines.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
According to this article, a ground breaking technology has been developed to process CO2 into methanol.
http://www.gizmag.com/research-carbon-dioxide-methanol/11483/
“Former U.S. Vice-President urged lawmakers to overcome partisan differences and take action to reduce greenhouse gases, calling the climate issue the most important ever put before Congress”
Therefore it makes him feel significant to be a crusader for that cause. I think the attraction of this feeling of significance accounts for half the AGWAns’ motivation. It makes them feel important. If CO2 is not a threat, they feel diminished. So they cling to their alarmism.
Anthony Re Ethanol
I think Fuelmaker is right. Why not start a new thread on this very subject.
In passing for any British readers
1 Visit the No 10 website for an interesting petition
2 If you near London on 20th May, I am organising a session with Prof Bob Carter at 11:00. Limited numbers.
My e-mail is pmaynard@pmaynard.plus.com
Regards
Paul
Fuelmaker (17:01:04) :
I for one would be very interested in the piece you suggest and to change my mind or at least show that it is more open on ethanol than my posts suggest. A lot of the arguments here, generally, arise because comments are necessarily short and not set in context or able to include all the assumptions and provisos. Also there is so much traffic here that comments are read quickly and frequently misconstrued.
If you note the hanging word “Let..” in my (10:26:58) comment, I accidently hit the enter key early in writing the comment so the rest of my statement is missing – I let it go. I intended to say: “Obviously as a biological process fermentation happens naturally and does not need energy per se but it is misleading to say that as you cannot divorce the process from the energy required to ‘run’ it in an industrial context.” It is clear from the rest of your comments that you would understand that and I should not have jumped on the statment.
My “ignorant total energy calculation” is relevant because whatever choices we make for future fuels, those choices need to be as high as possible in energy conservation and efficiency from well to wheel (or field to wheel). I am aware, personally, of several non-public-domain research efforts to increase that efficiency for ethanol. That is where my data comes from. That research and the current push to give us future options would not be happening at anything like the same intensity without the incentives and subsidies which in turn are there because of AGW. AGW also has dictated that we need “irrelevant ecologist studies about all sorts of tangential energy inputs” to look at the ‘lifetime carbon balance’.
Fossil fuels have been (and will be) around for a long time. If we had gone down an ethanol and peanut oil route at the time Ford and Diesel concieved their engines, the efficiences and processes for biofuel production now would be mature; our agricultural landscapes, fuel production and whole economies would be very different.
Thanks Ellie,
I think we are more in agreement than not. Like I said in my first post, we need to educate and refer, not snipe. I am very wary of any “study” that “finds” that a whole industry is not what we think. These always have an agenda, and it is always the same–I envy your success and I want some for myself.
Biofuels will never be more than a niche fuel in the Industrialized world, but they can certainly help.
I would be happy to collaborate with Roger on this as well. It is true that there is a lot of fossil fuel used to produce ethanol when you consider fertilizer, harvesting, and transport of the feedstock, especially for plants that were built to take advantage of a poorly conceived government subsidy (all of them ). The elite ignorant idealists out there should be warned that biofuels can not solve the problem. This includes the dreamers that think that switchgrass and algae will have a breakthrough and save the day, and they can continue to ignore more urgent problems like declining US oil production.
Back on track…
Dont the Democrats have a point in dis-inviting Monkton in that he had only just a month ago had already testified?
Harry,
… and how long ago had Gore testified? January? So what? Are frequent appearances to testify only useful if you have the “right” thing to say?
Anthony I would also like to see a thread on fuel ethanol to allow proper discussion of the misinformation surrounding the fuel. You have my permission to share my email with fuelmaker if it would facilitate that goal. Fuel ethanol is mired in the same sort of misrepresentation and misdirection that the AGW agenda shows. Much of the “common knowledge” about it, is either out right wrong, or is a skillful misrepresentation of a partial truth to lead to an unsupported conclusion.
I have no wish to crap up this thread with more of this discussion as the primary topic of Lord Monkton is too important to get side tracked on this tangent.
Larry
Stefan (04:07:13) :
It is not about whether global warming is perfectly right. It is about whether global warming is even half right.
The concept that Man Made Emissions of CO2 will cause Catastrophic Global Warming is not even wrong – it’s that bad.
Lucy Skywalker (09:30:25) :
BobW in NC (07:00:53) : Could/would Lord Monckton provide WUWT with a post of the presentation he was going to give before congress, complete with any illustrations? Even better, a link to a You Tube interview…
I second that
Neven (08:39:11) : Come on, this blog is moving in the right direction, don’t spoil it all by mentioning Monckton in your articles… As for Morano: Please go beyond being Morano’s errand boy. You’ve got something going here.
Can someone please tell me the name of this particular tactic?
It’s an attempt at diversion.
The structure is as follows.
[1 – initial condition] Person A does not like what Person B is doing, but has no control or coercive effect over Person B’s actions. I.e. Person A is in a tactically weak position.
[2 – appeal to other action to avoid loss] “Come on, this blog is moving in the right direction, don’t spoil it all by mentioning Monckton in your articles”. The loss is to spoil the blog.
[3 – appeal to other action to avoid implied ad-hom] “As for Morano: Please go beyond being Morano’s errand boy. You’ve got something going here” The ad-hom is the “errand boy” remark.
[4 – appropriate response] – Ignore it, stick to your guns. Person A is in a tactically weak position and is at most only threatening an Ad-Hom attack.
Dear readers,
This stance by the Goracle was the final straw. I suspected the Democrats/Gore at being something but was not sure.
My suspicions are now vindicated, being
Al Gore and the Democrats are FASCISTS.
From my trustworthy Chamber’s Family dictionary, “Fascism” is defined as:
“The principles and practice of those who believe in a strong centralised government similar to that in Italy from 1922-1944, with suppression of all criticism or opposition.”
While recent history has shown that both Democrat and Republican parties have tended toward bigger government (opposite to Ron Paul’s (etc.) stance), it is the strong suppression of the anti-Gore voices (e.g. Lord Monckton, NIPCC, etc.) which I have characterised as particularly “fascist”.
Let’s not forget,
“Controlling Carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream.
If you control carbon you control life.”
From:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/03/ny_climate_conference_journey.html
George E. Smith (15:34:46) :
“”” jon (05:03:17) :
If he worked for Thatcher … no wonder 🙂 She stated that leaded gasoline posed no health risks to people in the UK and that there was no need to remove lead from the fuel. “”
So name any three people you know about or have read about who were harmed by tetra-ethyl lead in gasoline.
Do you have any idea how many people have been born, and lived full healthy lives on this planet during the time that leaded gas was in use in automobiles.
George: time for you to do some research!!!
Lord Monckton’s statement to my apology for Congress’ bad behavior:
—
—
Dear Mr. Walker – Many thanks for your kind apology. The First Amendment to your Constitution does seem to have taken a bit of a battering at the hands of the less than democratic “Democrats” today. As you say, their terror at the thought of letting me testify is a tacit admission that Gore’s pseudo-science is no basis for bankrupting America and flinging millions into unemployment and poverty. – Monckton of Brenchley
—– Original Message —–
From: “David Walker”
To: “Lord Monckton”
Subject: An apology
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:54:04 -0500
Dear Lord Monckton,
On behalf of my fellow Americans, I apologize for our “liberal” politicians’ refusal to grant you the full opportunity to humiliate ManBearPig, aka Albert Gore. Obviously, they live in a state of fear that their agenda is suffering exposure, and that you are the point-man for triggering their mudslide into deserved obscurity.
It’s become quite obvious, even to the climate fear-mongers, that the global warming context is about making Albert Gore even richer by act of Congress. Why isn’t Gore’s behavior considered climate crime? After all, he’s hawking fear of destruction due to a non-problem.
Again, my sincere apologies.
Sincerely,
David H. Walker
I think that those contributors on this website who are expecting a ‘road to Damascus’ conversion to AGW scepticism from mainstream politicians, the media, and an organised and vociferous green lobby will have a long wait indeed.
AGW is politically correct, and has a powerful “feel good” factor for genuinely concerned citizens who believe that only part-filling their kettle and paying for a plastic carrier bag at the supermarket is in some way changing the weather and ‘saving the planet’. The alarmist perceptions are built on anecdotal stories and are in little need of any corroborating evidence, including rising global temperatures.
To its supporters the campaign is all good as it creates environment awareness. To a degree this is correct. The problem lies in the law of unintended consequences – for example, burning rain forests in Indonesia to produce bio-fuels that are neither green or particularly effective as fuels. Bad energy and environmental policies based upon good intentions remain bad policies.
Ironically, the logic of the universal C02 free power leads inexorably to nuclear power and not wind farms. Maybe they should re-badge the old ‘Nuclear Power – No Thanks’ as ‘Nuclear Power – all is forgiven’.
You may or may not like Michael Savage, but you can hear Christopher Monckton’s interview at Savage’s website;
http://michaelsavage.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=5614