Environment New Jersey Research and Policy Center released a report predicting all sorts of doom and gloom for New Jersey unless the state establishes a mandatory cap on carbon emissions, institutes a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants and creates a long-term emissions reduction plan that would ensure an 80 percent reduction in green house gases by 2050.

Interestingly, there’s not a scientist on Environment New Jersey Research and Policy Center’s staff, although report writer Suzanne Leta Liou did take a college course in statistics. She also leads the group’s campaign to close Oyster Creek nuclear power plant, undeterred by the fact New Jersey relies on nuclear energy for about 50 percent of the state's electricity.

Electricity generation accounts for the largest portion of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, nearly 40 percent. Because the Garden Sate relies so heavily on nuclear power, New Jersey ranks 47th in the nation in per capita emissions from electric power generation. New Jersey ranks 18th in greenhouse gas emissions related to transportation and accounts for about half the state's total carbon dioxide emissions.

We figure the state’s strategy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is to drive jobs and people out of New Jersey though high taxes and other policies ruinous to the state’s economy. It seems to be working.

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions dropped 1.3 percent last year even as the economy grew by 3.3 percent.

The 1.3 percent drop in CO{-2} emissions marks the first time that U.S. pollution linked to global warming has declined in absolute terms since 2001 and the first time it has gone down since 1990 while the economy was thriving. Carbon dioxide emissions declined in both 2001 and 1991, in large part because of economic slowdowns during those years.

That’s good news, right? No, not in some circles.

"This is more proof that this President just doesn't get it when it comes to combating climate change," Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said in a statement yesterday.

Let’s see, if U.S. greenhouse gas emissions continue to drop by 1.3 percent per year, by 2050 they’ll have been cut by 60% without destroying the economy. What’s Kerry got in mind?

Jeremy Symons, who directs the National Wildlife Federation's global warming program, wasn’t happy with the news either:

"Unfortunately, until we have government mandates to cut global warming pollution from big polluters, this year's good news will be swallowed by the trend of rising pollution levels."

In fact, since 1990 green house gas emissions from U.S. industry (“big polluters”) have been flat and U.S. methane emissions are slightly down in absolute terms.

The Nation magazine’s Alexander Cockburn has joined the ranks of heretics. He doesn’t believe anthropogenic CO2 is primarily responsible for global warming. That’s an amazing admission from one manning “the flagship of the left’.

No response is more predictable than the reflexive squawk of the greenhouse fearmongers that anyone questioning their claims is in the pay of the energy companies

He calls Al Gore “the world's best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man's physical and moral responsibility for global warming”.

As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years, Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump budgets and rouse voters. By the mid-'90s he'd positioned himself at the head of a strategic alliance formed around "the challenge of climate change," which stepped forward to take Communism's place in the threatosphere essential to political life.

Cockburn notes the well established cycle of alarmist predictions. It begins with doomsday scenarios from “multibillion-dollar computer modeling bureaucracies … intent on self-preservation”. Next, we get a “tremulous statement about the accelerating tempo of the warming crisis” from a “prominent fearmonger” with a UN imprimatur. Finally, “the cry is taken up by the IPCC and headlined by the New York Times”.

The foot soldiers in this alliance have been the grant-guzzling climate modelers and their Internationale, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose collective scientific expertise is reverently invoked by devotees of the fearmongers' catechism. The IPCC has the usual army of functionaries and grant farmers and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists with the prime qualification of being climatologists or atmospheric physicists.

As Richard Kerr, Science's man on global warming, remarked, "Climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long it's almost become respectable."

When measured reality doesn't cooperate with the lurid model predictions, new compensating factors are "discovered," such as the sulfate aerosols popular in the 1990s, recruited to cool off the obviously excessive heat predicted by the models. Or inconvenient data are waterboarded into submission, as happened with ice-core samples that failed to confirm the modelers' need for record temperatures today.

The consequence he says is that “hysteria rules the day” and “vast sums of money will be uselessly spent on programs that won't work against an enemy that doesn't exist. … Meanwhile, real and curbable environmental perils are scanted.”

Global Warming Debate

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Global Warming Facts from the Heartland.