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While most European countries are working on a proposal that would effectively ban the use of Canadian tar sands in the European Union, the United Kingdom has made it clear that they will not support any measure to reduce their reliance on tar sands. Britain joins the Netherlands as one of only two countries that want to continue to have the option to use oil derived from Canadian tar sands.

The EU is working to produce a new “fuel directive” this year that would reduce the amount of emissions acceptable from fuels used for transportation. The directive would require a 6% reduction in the amount of emissions from vehicle fuel over the next 9 years. Because the emissions from tar sands run about 23% higher than those from traditional fossil fuels, this would mean that their use in the EU would be effectively prohibited.

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You know, it’s a hard life being a multinational oil executive. Billion dollar profits to reap, climate deniers to fund, indigenous and impacted community rights to trample all over. So I thought I’d help them out with some strategic planning advice. Here’s my quick guide on how to lobby based on bogus information, in three easy steps:

Step 1. Find a report that’s related (at least somewhat) to the issue you want to lobby on.

Step 2. Rewrite it completely, twisting up all the facts and drawing the opposite conclusion. Publish.

Step 3. Wine and dine all of your government friends while exhalting that you’re “just trying to help them” by providing them with some “useful analysis” that will save them money.

Sounds far fetched, doesn’t it?

It’s not.

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Author Jeff Goodell's quote, "[a] full-blown push for clean energy could unleash a jobs bonanza that would make what happened in Silicon Valley in the 1990s look like a bake sale," rings true when you look at yesterday's job report published by the UN.

The report found that solving global warming has resulted in world wide employment gains.

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As forecast, China has overtaken the U.S. in carbon-dioxide emissions due largely to China’s heavy reliance on coal. Another factor is its well-publicized population of 1.3 billion. But per-capita emissions are much higher in developed countries, where populations are exploding due to immigration. The U.S. already releases four times the carbon per-capita each year as China. And the U.S. population, which has been doubling every 40 years, is headed for one billion by the end of this century!

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Mainstream climatologists who have feared that global warming could have the paradoxical effect of cooling northwestern Europe or even plunging it into a small ice age have stopped worrying about that particular disaster, although it retains a vivid hold on the public imagination.

The bottom line is that the atmosphere is warming up so much that a slowdown of the North Atlantic Current will never be able to cool Europe,' said Helge Drange, a professor at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, Norway."