They always have and I can't stop them.

I see nothing wrong with avoiding a meaningless vote which the reps would use to demagogue the dems.

The reps have done far worse.

Really? And what does avoiding a vote on an issue the overwhelming majority of the American people support represent?

First of all, there is no "crisis" or "emergency" despite what liberals say in order to justify big government intrusions into the market and our freedoms. What we DO have is a medium- to long-term strategic issue, both with regard to energy prices and their effect on the economy, as well as our security interests in being overly reliant on foreign sources of energy.

There are no short-term solutions to these issues, and many of the what you call "bandaids" actually exacerbate the problem in the longer-term (such as tapping the SPR)

Hmmm, we have vast quatities of something we need both for our economic and security interests sitting within our sovereign territory, and it is profiteering to suggest that more of that hard earned money of the American people go to domestic businesses than to foreigners? Hell, "Buy American" and "no more outsourcing our jobs" used to be the rallying cry of the democratic party.

The optimal long-term solution would be to steadily raise the Federal Gas tax, and use EVERY penny of the increased revenue to pay for across the board income tax rate reductions.

__________________
"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

By the way, how come all the focus in the press is on the influence of "big oil", and none on the influence of the "green lobby"? What we have here undeniably is an entrenched political party which depends heavily on a particular special interest for both financing and political support who are refusing to even vote on a topic that is overwhelmingly supported by the American people. Where are the cries from all the liberal hypocrites who decry such influence when it gets in the way of what THEY want?

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"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

While some of us are perfectly comfortable with trashing the planet, most people actually want clean air and water, and for the polar ice caps to keep the water off Manhattan and Florida.

So it's a more broad than "special" interest.

Challenge with the Ice Caps ....

If there is ice in your glass of Ice Tea and then the ice turns to water, does the level in the glass change?

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Government Should Fear the People That Voted Them In!!

New Government=one that the President likes a GOP idea but then the Staff puts that Idea in a very DEEP HOLE.

Read HR143 get enlightment.

The Revolution Will not be Televised

Yes. If the ice is resting on the bottom of the glass.

And if the ice is resting on land such as Greenland or Antarctica.

Blah, Blah, Blah. We are not "trashing" the planet. The planet has been far hotter, and far colder than it is today at times long before the evolution of man, let alone the industrial revolution.

I predict over ten years ago that eventually as the prediction models used to promote the hysteria were consistently proven to be wrong (they have been) that we would start to hear less and less about "global warming" and that they would come up with something else. Well, I was right, "global warming" is being steadily pushed aside in favor of the rhetorical catch-all "global climate change", the dishonesty of which is breathtaking. There has never been, and will never be until the Earth's core goes cold and the sun burns out, a time where the global climate is static.

In fact, it no appears that we are in the midst of a cyclical cooling trend, and we had best hope that it does not continue as we are MUCH better off as a civilization with warmer climates than cooler ones for a myriad of reasons.

All of this wil go the way of the great killer bees hysteria of the late-1970s

BTW, if you don't think there are plenty of people making a very nice living (and in some instances getting really, really rich) off of all of this, then you're just ignorant of reality.

__________________
"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

I don't much believe in so-called "climate change" either, but I do believe in clean air and water. You live in DC? Step outside and take a deep breath of air. Does it stink? Yes? Now, do you remember how much worse that air smelled back in the 60's and 70's?

My point is this: don't completely trash the idea of trying to live in harmony with our planet. Just because climate change may or may not be real, it doesn't change the fact that we have made great strides in cutting down on our pollution, which is a benefit to us all.

Did you see the photos from Beijing?

And there have been tremendous floods because of it. Not to mention mass extinctions.

Please cite evidence of "hysteria." I've yet to see any mass rioting over this issue.

Ironic that you think your predictions (without computer models) are more reliable than those backed by computer models.

Please cite the evidence which shows the models have been proven wrong.

I have seen reports that the ice is actually melting faster than the models predicted. Bear in mind that models are never perfectly accurate; that does not mean they are "wrong."

Do you even understand the meaning of "climate change?"

True dat. But that does not mean that man is not changing it in ways which cause tremendous damage.

We are better off with a static climate cause that is the basis for most of our very expensive infrastructure.

I don't remember any "hysteria." I did see a few articles about it.

More irony. Far more are getting rich off of trashing the planet than (attempting to) mitigate the damage.

Interesting that when a poll done in favor of something gets the headlines, but when a poll is done on something that does not have the favor gets no word in the headlines.

This is one that is getting little to no word. People wish to drill off shore...

So the question.. Are the people smart or stupid?

__________________
Government Should Fear the People That Voted Them In!!

New Government=one that the President likes a GOP idea but then the Staff puts that Idea in a very DEEP HOLE.

Read HR143 get enlightment.

The Revolution Will not be Televised

Your solution is to apply a short-term bandaid in ten years and do nothing now. How does that make more sense? The SPRO is intended to ensure our economic security. This is exactly what it is for.

DOE - Fossil Energy: U.S. Petroleum Reserves

DOE - Fossil Energy: Drawdowns of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve

Would you like to argue that the economy is not threatened? Keep your eyes on the ball in the game, not the one in the bag.

Yeah, smog, it is not hurting "the planet", it MAY result in some local health problems there might not otherwise have been...but given that the smog is the result of activities which have on balance resulted in a steady INCREASE in overall health and life expectancy of the people living there.....well, you do the math.

So? Are you conceding the point that global climate change is a constant, rather than something man has caused?

Also, there has never been any species in this planet's history with the ability to adapt as we have.

Yes, if a massive asteroid slams into the Earth it will wipe out huge portions of human civilization, but even with that, we would survive and be thriving within several generations. But it would take something exogenous like that to do it (or large scale nuclear war). 4-5 degrees warmer (and that is based on the most extreme forecasts of climate models which have already been shown to be innaccurate to the upside by reality over the last 20 years) will not be calamitous to mankind, most evidence indicates we would be BETTER off to the upside than if temperatures stayed the same or even god forbid drops.

How about Al Gore, he's a one man hysteric over this bullshit. Hell, even you with your "trashing the planet".

Of course you could say that they are not "hysterical", but rather very empassioned, but my question is this, if people like you and Al Gore genuinely believe this nonesense, then why HAVEN'T you taken to the streets, rioting. If you actually believe we are careening towards mass extinction, or "killing" the planet, wouldn't rioting be the rational thing to do?

[QUOTE]Rooobosmith
Ironic that you think your predictions (without computer models) are more reliable than those backed by computer models.[QUOTE]

What predictions? Learn to read. What I have said is that what has ACTUALLY happened (PAST TENSE) has consistently shown that the models used are wrong. No model yet produced has been able to accurately predict what actual happens.

If your investment advisor's model predicts that the dow will double in five years, urging you to invest heavily in a dow indexed stock, at the end of five years if it has either decreased (as the temperature has over the 1990s) or fallen far, far short of the projections, then the model was WRONG.

The models used to support (and even then it requires major-league hyperbole) the notion that we are "killing" the planet or headed for anything other than perfectly normal climate changes (if you're not so utterly narcissistic as to assume that the way you personally have gotten used to the climate being over your miniscule lifespan is "normal") cannot be reconcilled with the fact that most of the warming cited over the last 120 years took place earlier in the century BEFORE the most significant increases in the emissions supposedly responsible for it OR the fact that as emissions have CONTINUED to increase over the last 5-10 years we have actually had COOLING overall.

There is no such thing as "the ice", there are hundreds of glacial icesheets around the world, some certainly more prominent than others. Some have been receeding (as they have been doing for several centuries) some have been expanding.

Again, since the end of the last mini-iceage (not coincidentally coinciding with a period generally referred to as the "dark ages"), overall glacial and icepack covereage has been receeding. The dramatic pictures the hysterics like to show are again, based on a very short period of time. Look how much they have changed in so short a time! As though the "before" pictures from less then a century ago represented exactly how it had been for all of history until man came along and started "killing" or "boiling" the planet. The fact is that if we could take picuture from 300, 200, years ago, you would see evidence of equally dramatic changes LONG before the industrial revolution.

You want evidence of massive climate changes long before man...consider oil, ask yourself what it is, how it comes to be, and then consider the implication of the fact that there is so much of it below places we would consider rather desoltate (deserts, ther arctic tundra, etc.)

Yes I do, and I also know that it is a constant. There has never been a protracted period in our planets history without climate change. That is why it has been replacing the increasingly unsupportable cries of global "warming", because when you cry climate "change", then you will never be "wrong", because the climate will ALWAYS be changing (even if the dire consequences of that change never occur).

"damage" another one of those utterly useless terms bandied about. What are the CONSEQUENCES of all this tremendous "damage", so far despite all the "tremendous damage" and the "trashing" of the planet, the average human life expectancy and overall health and prosperity has increased.

Really? Please provide some specific examples of this very expensive infrastructure that is dependent upon a static climate (which has never, and will never happen).

A few? Plenty of articles and movies warning that man's tinkering would result in africanized bees swarming across the U.S., resulting in countless deaths per year in the coming decades, and this was only assuming that the malthusian wackos of that same period predictions of massive world-wide starvation (billions dead and the "U.K. basically ceasing to exist as a nation") didn't come true (they didn't).

More people will starve and die over the next few years because of the utterly foolish things we have done to avoid the non-existant emergency of global warming, or global climate change. The single greatest threat to human lives today is starvation, exacerbated by the tremendous increase in the cost of many basic food commodities because of misallocation of resources going to ethanol. Ethanol will result in more human beings deaths than global warming or global climate change ever will.

If foolish hyperbole were a crime against humanity, Al Gore would be in the Hague today.

__________________
"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

Maybe you should learn to write:

Sorry, I have a hard time understanding you when you don't use the correct tense.

As I said, no model is perfectly accurate. That does not mean they are "wrong."

The Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than predicted by the models.

The fact that climate has always changed, does not mean that man is not speeding up climate change by releasing GHG from burning fossil fuels that have been sequestered for millions of years.

There will be cooling trends and warming trends but that does not negate the fact that CO2 will make things warmer.

And that multi-$T of infrastructure will be under water if the Antarctic ice cap melts.

NOt at all, Im simply trying to prove that the republicans are doing what the majority wants, rather than what the oil companies want.

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"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his father has acquired too much, in order to spare to others who (or whose fathers) have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "to guarantee to everyone a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

-Thomas Jefferson

So then you think that would be ok for the Republicans to do the same thing that the democrats are doing. Youve already said that the Dems are doing is good. I just want to know if you think its good anytime or only when Dems do it.

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"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his father has acquired too much, in order to spare to others who (or whose fathers) have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, "to guarantee to everyone a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

-Thomas Jefferson