Jim Snyder and Kim Chipman
"I am vindicated," says Republican Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who was ridiculed by environmentalists in 2003 when he declared that [catastrophic] man-made global warming was the "greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people."
He has reason to crow: His party's sweep of the midterm elections will bring into office almost four dozen new lawmakers (11 senators and at least 36 House members) who share his skepticism about climate change, according to ThinkProgress, an arm of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a Washington research group allied with Democrats. They join a smaller group of Republican incumbents, some of whom will assume powerful committee positions in January, who also reject that global warming is an immediate threat.
Their influence could be felt soon. When Obama Administration negotiators arrive in Cancun, Mexico, on Nov. 29 for 12 days of climate-change talks, they will no longer be able to claim that their policy agenda—to push for global action on climate change—has the full backing of Congress
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Climate-Change Agency Winds Down As Federal Funding Ends
Mike de Souza
A Canadian climate-change research foundation is celebrating its 10th anniversary, but has already begun winding down its operations after failing to get new funding from the Harper government. The budget crunch at the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences comes on the heels of revelations that the government is leasing out the Amundsen, a coast guard icebreaker equipped to monitor climate change in the North, to a pair of fossil-fuel companies for oil exploration in the region.
"Research ships are very expensive to operate," said Gordon McBean, the chairman of the foundation "Part of (the problem) is probably indicative of the fact that we don't have research funds for research people to operate it at the time available."
CBC News reported earlier this week that BP and Imperial Oil have paid at least $50,000 per day to use the ship, dedicated to the study of climate change, for six weeks over the past two years.
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Green Energy Funding Slumps
Kiran Stacey
Start-up funding for clean energy companies around the world has slumped in the last quarter, falling nearly a fifth since the previous three months, according to a new report.
Investment by venture capital and private equity firms in clean technology and renewable energy companies has fallen from €4.3bn to €3.5bn ($5.5bn) since the second quarter, the survey found.
The report blamed a lack of consistent government support for the drop. Douglas Lloyd, the chief executive of VB Research, which carried out the study for Taylor Wessing, the law firm, said: “A lack of a solid, consistent policy will undermine investor support, and there is a lot of that going on.”
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U.S. Climate Skeptics Want Further Climategate Investigation
Chris Woodward
One year after the so-called "ClimateGate" scandal, several questions about global warming remain. So a number of groups are calling for a "real" investigation.
This November marks one year since thousands of e-mails and files were released from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England, which is one of the world's leading centers for research on global warming.
"These e-mails revealed that these scientists have been putting their political agenda ahead of their science, that they have been manipulating the data, and that they have been conspiring together to suppress scientific research and other scientists who don't agree with their conclusions," Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) tells OneNewsNow about the information released.
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