Is the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) deliberately trying to sabotage the EPA’s efforts to regulate carbon dioxide emissions? Is Peter Orszag, the agency’s brainy and genial director, secretly in cahoots with Republican opponents of President Obama’s climate policies?

Not quite – though that may have been your first impression upon reading the raft of articles published yesterday that breathlessly reported that an OMB memo had strongly criticized the EPA’s proposal to regulate greenhouse gases.

I've often wondered if EPA actually stands for Environmental Pillaging Act, so contrary to environmental protection are the policies and recommendations that often come from this government organization.

However, in a victory for environmentalists, the US Appeals Court ruled against not allowing states to tighten up air quality standards.

"Global warming is a sick-souled religion."

Really?

Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens thinks so in his article, Global Warming as Mass Neurosis.

Unfortunately for Stephens' and the rest of the planet, his evidence for such an inflammatory claim doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Despite having been proved, again and again, to be out of step with the science, the Wall Street Journal is still promoting a phony "balanced" view on global warming - still trying to argue that there is a legitimate argument about climate change.

In a short feature today, the WSJ juxtaposes three decades of warnings, from sources of integrity and obvious expertise (eg., the U.S. Department of Energy), with 30 years of denial, from paid apologists for industry (eg., former tobacco and energy industry shill Dr. Fred Seitz).

The effect is to elevate the status of the deniers and to suggest that debate endures.

It's a sham that should be embarrassing to any journalist of conscience.

... But Not What Organizers Wanted

Mainstream media seem to have caught up with climate change denial (caught up with reality, really), just in time to humiliate the assembled "sceptics" at the Heartland Institute's 2008 International Conference on Climate Change.

While Heartland wants to position the conference as a "smashing success," the New York Times, CNN - even that raving left-wing apology sheet the Wall Street Journal - have all lifted their delicate hands and snickered. CNN, in a spot that left the cool dudes at Newsbusters apoplectic, went so far as to call the assembled skeptics "flat earthers." (click on the seventh item here for Miles O'Brien's actual video.)

Here's a short Wired piece adding some balance to an earlier Wall Street Journal article that dismisses climate change as an influencer of hurricane intensity.

The WSJ piece is also worth the read. It's interesting to see Bill (if-I-haven't-observed-it-with-my-own-eyes, -it's-not-happening) Gray tie himself up in knots, predicting more hurricanes of higher intensity but denying that climate change could be a contributing factor.