One of the lessons I’ve learned during my career in Washington is that the liberal media loves a “leak.” They will pounce on anything they can get their hands on, even if it means revealing classified military documents. We saw this most recently when the Pentagon leaked General Stanley McChrystal’s Afghanistan assessment. Yet, Big Media has tried to ignore “Climategate,” arguably one of the biggest scientific and political cover-ups of all time.

“Climategate” has all the makings of a news story that the liberal media would typically love: destructive emails, deception and outright fraud. Despite all of this, you would be hard-pressed to hear about the story on a major news outlet. As more information is released, Al Gore and his radical environmentalist cronies look even worse.

Professor Mike Hulme, who worked at the University of East Anglia, where the leaked e-mails originated, said, “The attitudes revealed in the e-mails do not look good. The tribalism that some of the leaked e-mails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”

But Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chairwoman the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, couldn’t care less about the information released in “Climategate.” Instead of asking for a hearing on the suspect science, Boxer is intent on investigating how the e-mails were acquired. Boxer said yesterday, “You call it ‘Climategate,’ I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate…. Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated.”

One likely outcome is that “Climategate” may derail the liberal push to pass a cap and trade scheme in the Senate. (Boxer is one of cap and trade’s biggest supporters.) These developments could also affect the upcoming Copenhagen conference on climate change. Obama and other world leaders who worship at the altar of man-made global warning suddenly have a tremendous credibility gap.

In past reports, I’ve expressed skepticism about the so-called global warming consensus. Not only did the science seem suspect, often contradicting common sense, but it was clearly ideologically driven. Like the promise that more government programs would save money, the radical environmental movement has a terrible track record of making hysterical predictions that never materialize. And its solutions are always the same – bigger government and higher taxes.

In recent days, there have been shocking revelations that the science behind the global warming scare may well be a total scam. E-mails have been leaked from key scientists that appear to expose blatant data manipulation and efforts to suppress dissent. Science and academia are supposed to be all about free inquiry. But these scientists are acting more like petty liberal ideologues determined to pursue their leftwing agenda regardless of the facts.

I won’t go into all of the details about the emails in this report. You can read more here and here. But this is not just a scientific scandal. “Climategate” is a huge political scandal as well, encompassing leading leftwing luminaries like Al Gore, who have been working for years to impose various socialist schemes aimed at undermining our sovereignty, crippling our economy and redistributing our wealth, all under the guise of combating global warming.

I’m pleased to report that Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma is demanding an investigation, and rightly so, because the stakes are tremendous. The entire premise of cap and trade – massive new energy taxes and vastly expanded government power – rests on this apparent scam.

Friday evening, when most of you probably were just beginning to relax after a long week, your elected representatives in Washington were hard at work. I’d like to report that they were working hard for the good of the country, but I can’t say that. In fact, I believe very strongly that what the House did is very detrimental to the well-being of our nation.

Just after 7:15pm Friday, the House voted 219-to-212 to pass Barack Obama’s “cap and trade” bill. Cap and trade is another attempt by Big Government to manipulate the free market. Liberal politicians think that they know better than consumers and business owners, and they intend to force you to use products (alternative sources of energy) that are not economically viable. It’s another example of government picking winners and losers.

The losers under this bill are fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas. The winners are solar, wind and other alternative fuels, which you will end up subsidizing under this bill. To give you an idea of how inefficient and expensive the alternatives are, consider this analysis from the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Energy Policy and the Environment:

“There’s an unavoidable problem with renewable-energy technologies: From an economic standpoint, they’re big losers. …The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in early 2008 that the government subsidizes solar energy at $24.34 per megawatt-hour (MWh) and wind power at $23.37 per MWh. Yet even with decades of these massive handouts, as well as numerous state-level mandates for utilities to use green power, wind and solar energy contribute less than 1% of our nation’s electricity.

“Compare the subsidies to renewables with those extended to natural gas (25 cents per MWh in subsidies), coal (44 cents), hydroelectricity (67 cents), and nuclear power ($1.59). These are the energy sources (along with oil, which undergirds transportation) that do the heavy lifting in our energy economy.

“The alternative technologies at the heart of Mr. Obama’s plan, relying on mandates and far greater handouts, will inevitably raise energy prices — and high power prices are job killers.”
Cap and trade has been described by Michigan Democrat John Dingell, who voted for the bill, as “a great big tax.” Billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who opposes cap and trade, called it “a huge tax … and a fairly regressive one.” So, supporters and opponents agree: It is a big tax and likely one of the largest in American history since it will tax energy – the lifeblood of our economy.

For the record, 96% of the votes to pass this “great big,” “huge and regressive” energy tax came from Democrats, while 94% of Republicans voted against it. The debate now shifts to the Senate, where Democrats will have to come up with 60 votes to prevent a likely filibuster.

On the merits alone, the bill is a disaster. For example: America is the Saudi Arabia of coal, from which half of the nation’s electricity is produced. But 96% of House Democrats just voted to tax coal, making it costlier to use. That makes no sense in the middle of a deep recession and with the president is predicting double digit unemployment. But, then again, this is the same logic that would not let us drill for our own oil when gas was $4.00 a gallon.

But far worse was the abuse of power liberals used to ram through one of the largest tax increases in history. Every politician who voted for this bill is guilty of gross malfeasance because not one of them read it. Not only was the bill over 1,200 pages when the debate began, but a 300-page amendment was mysteriously added just hours before the vote. For that reason alone, every member of the House would have been justified in voting no, and more of them should have.

If conservatives had done that while trying to pass the largest tax cut in history, the media would have howled about dictatorial tactics and the demise of democracy. But, so far, the media have been silent on this abuse of power, and that is a scandal of its own.