Chinese President Hu Jintao captured headlines yesterday, promising the PRC would “endeavor to cut carbon-dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by a notable margin by 2020.” Reviews have ranged from an important step toward emissions caps to vague and disappointing. For those serious about climate change, China is the whole ballgame. If 2000-2006 trends in Chinese and American emissions held in 2007, then the PRC’s emissions were nearly 15% larger than America’s and pulling away fast. The financial crisis altered everyone’s carbon trajectory but lending-induced resilience in China’s heavy industries …
Many predicted President Barack Obama would receive a standing ovation from the United Nations General Assembly today. Heritage fellow Nile Gardiner explains why: It is not hard to see why a standing ovation awaits the president at Turtle Bay. Obama’s popularity at the UN boils down essentially to his willingness to downplay American global power. He is the first American president who has made an art form out of apologizing for the United States, which he has done on numerous occasions on foreign soil, from Strasbourg to Cairo. The Obama …
What is the proper role of the federal government in public safety? Are Congress and the Department of Homeland Security helping or hurting when they take millions of tax dollars from Americans and then redistribute them as they see fit? Both the latest research and practical experience say no. From FY 2001 to FY 2009, Congress appropriated over $5.7 billion in funding for “fire grants” through the Assistance for Firefighter Grant (AFG) Program, Fire Prevention and Safety (FP&S) grants, and the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) programs. …
Students who entered and won a lottery to attend a charter school in New York outperformed their peers who entered the lottery but did not win a spot and instead enrolled in a traditional public school. According to new research by Stanford Professor Caroline Hoxby, which is highlighted today in both the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, students attending charter schools in New York outperform their peers who remained in traditional public schools in math and reading. New York Charter school students, which typically come from disadvantaged …
The Heritage Foundation recently hosted an event on the economic impacts of cap and trade. Multiple organizations have modeled the effects of cap and trade and found varied results but none of them provided the news you’d want to hear, especially in a recession. Despite repeated attempts to sell cap and trade as a jobs bill, not one scenario of even one presenter (including the three government agencies) projected a net increase in income or employment from cap and trade. The entire debate was over the magnitude of income, consumption …
Yesterday, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hosted a climate summit in New York designed to improve the chances that the December U.N. Copenhagen Climate Conference would produce a substantive treaty that would cap and cut carbon emissions. The Copenhagen agreement would replace the Kyoto Protocol that was rejected by the United States Senate 95 – 0. But as the Washington Post reports, even President Barack Obama’s star power failed to move nations towards meaningful carbon reductions: Initially, many climate activists had hoped this year would yield a pact in …
This morning, President Obama delivered his climate change speech at a United Nations Summit on Climate Change. Stressing the need for urgent action, Obama told the Assembly that the United States, in his first eight months as President, is becoming a leader in the war against a warming planet. Obama began his speech by declaring that the time to act is now: That so many of us are here today is a recognition that the threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing. Our generation’s response …
Yesterday, the new Breitbart Web site BigGovernment.com broke more corruption news by releasing an audio recording and transcript of a controversial conference call that took place in early August between officials at the National Endowment for the Arts, the White House Office of Public Engagement, the Corporation for National and Community Service, and various people in the arts community who had supported President Obama’s campaign. When the story of the call first broke a few weeks ago, the NEA denied that it had organized the call and also denied that …
With the President and Congress’s plan to pass comprehensive health care reform reaching increasingly high levels of unpopularity, and reconciliation becoming an impediment, the leadership of the Senate is rumored to be preparing a new secret plan to railroad the bill through the Senate in record time by using a seldom used parliamentary procedure. Their plan is to proceed to a House passed non-health care bill to provide a shell of legislation to give Obamacare a ride to the House then to the President’s desk. Sound confusing? We lay out …
“There’s a point at which you’ve got to ask yourself, what are we doing here? What’s the point?” That’s Elaine Kamarck, a former Clinton administration official and advisor to then-Vice President Gore, and she’s talking about the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill. In order to garner enough votes to pass the House of Representatives, policymakers made promises that have groups like Greenpeace questioning the environmental effectiveness of the bill. One of the most contentious provisions in the bill is the use of carbon offsets to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Offsets …
