Brief video tucked below the fold: (more…)

From an article on the recent breakthrough allowing scientists to transform skin cells into stem cells, this unfortunate line:

US President George W. Bush has banned all federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells…

Sigh.

Meanwhile, we have a behind the scenes report from Jay Lefkowitz, who helped craft the President’s policy, which explains how the the White House came to approve federal funding for research on already-existing lines and includes this footnote:

There are currently 21 fully developed lines available for federally funded research, and NIH has sent out more than 700 shipments of such embryonic stem cells.

This is just another source of mushroom voters, I’m afraid.

Thanks, A.C., here goes nothing: (more…)

It’s that time of year again, time to round up the best comments, hatemail, discussions and posts of 2007. This was a year of transition, from fishkite.com to this domain. Along with that move came less frequent posts, and significantly less traffic. Still, the blog managed to generate even more (delightfully) vicious comments and reactions from readers. This year I also endeavored to inject more humanity into the blog, so this time I’ve added a category for the year’s “most personal” entries. I enjoyed blogging this year, and that’s the main thing. And I hope you enjoy this look back at The Best of 2007 at MickWright.net. (more…)

A recent post on Senator James Inhofe’s Environment and Public Works blog brings to mind the robust exchange I had with blogger/journalist Chris “Peskyfly” Davis back in May of this year, following his criticism of comments by talk show host Glenn Beck.

Peskyfly had declared Beck’s contention that Al Gore and friends at the United Nations were developing plans for a “global carbon tax” a “batsh*t crazy one-world-government conspiracy theory.”

The post by Inhofe staffer Marc Morano: Global Carbon Tax Urged at UN Climate Conference

A global tax on carbon dioxide emissions was urged to help save the Earth from catastrophic man-made global warming at the United Nations climate conference. A panel of UN participants on Thursday urged the adoption of a tax that would represent “a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations.”

“Finally someone will pay for these [climate related] costs,” Othmar Schwank, a global tax advocate, told Inhofe EPW Press Blog following the panel discussion titled “A Global CO2 Tax.” Schwank is a consultant with the Switzerland based Mauch Consulting firm…

The UN was presented with a new report from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment titled “Global Solidarity in Financing Adaptation.” The report stated there was an “urgent need” for a global tax in order for “damages [from climate change] to be kept from growing to truly catastrophic levels, especially in vulnerable countries of the developing world.”

The tens of billions of dollars per year generated by a global tax would “flow into a global Multilateral Adaptation Fund” to help nations cope with global warming, according to the report.

This would seem to confirm many of Beck’s suspicions, though some of Morano’s details appear to be incorrect.

For instance, I find no evidence that Thursday’s panel was actually titled “A Global CO2 Tax,” as Morano reports. The U.N. website and materials refer to the panel as a “High-Level Round-Table Discussion on International Technology Cooperation” (archived video of the panel available at the link, though I can’t get it to display on my iBook).

Also, the “new report” referenced by Morano is nowhere to be found in the conference materials online. However, this document would appear to be on the same order, although it is apparently not a product of “the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment,” nor titled “Global Solidarity in Financing Adaptation.”

Instead, the document goes by a more lumbering title, “Review of the experience of international funds, multilateral financial institutions and other sources of funding relevant to the current and future investment and financial needs of developing countries.”

With its 55 pages packed with jargon, technical details, charts, graphs and bureaucrat-speak, the document is a real page-turner, to be sure. But it does advance the same general idea; from page 5 of the report (emphases mine):

13. With regard to adaptation to climate change, the additional global investment and financial flows from all sources (private and public, domestic and international) needed to adapt to climate change by 2030 could be tens of billions of dollars by 2030.

14. Private sources of funding can be expected to cover a portion of the adaptation costs in sectors… with privately owned physical assets, in particular in developed countries. However, public resources will be needed to implement policies or regulations to encourage the investment of private resources in adaptation measures, especially in developing countries. Public domestic resources will be needed to cover adaptation costs related to climate change impacts on public infrastructure in all countries.

15. The background paper concludes that additional external public funding will be needed for adaptation measures. Such additional funding will be needed in particular for sectors and countries that are already highly dependent on external support, for example in the health sector in LDCs, or for coastal infrastructure in developing countries that are highly vulnerable to a rise in sea level. Current mechanisms and sources of financing are limited and it is likely that new sources of funding will be required.

So, to summarize, the UN wants world nations to institute a new tax so that it can send money to developing countires in order for them to comply with global environmental mandates.

In short, that’s a global carbon tax, which is exactly what Beck was talking about.

Morano quotes conference attendee Emma Brindal of Friends of the Earth, who writes this dispatch from Bali: “a climate change response must have at its heart a resdistribution of wealth and resources.”

It’s at times like these when you’d rather be proved wrong than right.