Texas set to build new coal-fired power plants
Everyone is justifiably excited about the good news out of California, but a much more representative microcosm of the climate debate can be found in the great state of Texas. Texas leads the nation in GHG emissions -- it spews more than Canada or the U.K. It has no plan for reducing those emissions. It has rejected legislative efforts to reduce them for years. In essence, Governor Rick Perry has said that he won't do anything until the feds do, which we all know is never. Now it seems Texas is set to dramatically increase its emissions. The state may soon approve the construction of 16 old-school coal-fired power plants.

Alarm on global warming just a load of hot air
Alarmist stories about greenhouse gases causing catastrophic warming continue to be aired in the media. Notwithstanding the lack of evidence, global warming is even being blamed for hurricanes and an apocryphal disappearance of polar bears. Yet, the only solid measure of the warming, the NASA satellite data, shows that over the 27 years that data has been available, warming has been at a negligible rate of 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade.

Climate change forged first civilizations
he earliest civilizations were not a product of favorable conditions but rather a last resort in the face of dramatic shifts in the weather, a climate scientist said on Thursday. Flying in the face of accepted theory that settled societies emerged from the development of static farming in good climatic conditions that produced food surpluses and allowed specialization, Nick Brooks said the opposite was true. "Civilization did not arise as the result of a benign environment which allowed humanity to indulge a preference for living in complex, urban civilized societies," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.