Another great item from Watts Up With That?:

The Department of Energy awarded $126.6 million in grants today to projects that will pump 1 million tons of CO2 into underground caverns at sites in California and Ohio. The grants are subject to approval from Congress. When private money is included, the amount spent on the projects will be about $180 million over 10 years, the DOE said. So there’s still time to write a scathing letter to your US Senator or Congressperson to tell them they’d may as well just pour money down the hole and save the trouble.

Investors Business Daily, which knows a thing or two about good investments, looks at how Al Gore is profiting from the global warming hype he spews every day. Most recently the former veep has been blaming true tragedies on supposed global warming, and has set himself up for cashing paychecks along the way:

Gore himself joined the venture capital group, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers just last September. On May 1, the firm announced a $500 million investment in maturing green technology firms called the Green Growth Fund.

The group announced another $700 million to be invested over the next three years in green-tech startup firms. But if the green technology business, uh, cools down, there will be no return on that investment. There would be no need for such investments if global warming wasn’t a threat. So Gore just launched, among other things, a $300 million on an ad campaign to convince us it is so.

Speaking at a conference in Monterey, Calif., on March 1, the former vice president admitted to having “a stake” in a number of green investments into which he recommended attendees put money rather than “subprime carbon assets” such as tar sands and shale oil. He also is co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offsets that allow rich polluters to continue polluting with a clear conscience.

We have a prediction all our own — that disastrous global warming will not occur. Then the greenies will take credit for preventing it and ask us if we’re glad we spent trillions in fighting it. Al Gore will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Get the details at Watts Up With That:

We recently said that if you let your culinary choices be guided by your scientific political beliefs, you should forgo methane-causing cows and choose chicken. Not so fast, says a different environmentalist wacko. Eat bugs, he says, to save the world!

Americans have no idea how wasteful these large mammals are,” Gracer says. “If you want to feed a lot of people, insects are the best choice in terms of getting the biggest bang for your buck.” Insects, he claims, are nutritious. Although they typically contain less protein by weight than beef or chicken—100 grams of giant water bugs or small grasshoppers, for example, have about 20 grams of protein, compared with 27 grams in the same amount of lean ground beef—they do have other benefits. For instance, grasshoppers contain just one-third of the fat found in beef, and water bugs offer almost four times as much iron. A 100-gram portion of the cooked caterpillar Usata terpsichore has about 28 grams of protein. In their dried form, as they are commonly sold in Africa, insects such as grasshoppers may contain up to 60 percent protein.

Good luck lining up a tasting menu, sir. Perhaps the most unappetizing pitch: his company’s is called Sunrise Land Shrimp.

Find out.

Don’t rightly know what to say about this … so here’s the link. You must read this. (hat tip: shopfloor.org)

Carter Wood asks of Al Gore: Is there any catastrophe he won’t politicize?

England’s Daily Mail newspaper is taking aim at celebrities who have put their carbon footprints in their big fat mouths. In the paper’s sites? Barbra Streisand, Leo Di’Caprio, Brangelina … and even a little note on Not-such-a-scientific-Prince Charles. Look right at the full hypocrisy rating earned by John Travolta … ahh, geez, Mista Carta! And the paper adds this vignette for color:

Is the hot air emitted by celebrities when they spout ecological platitudes a greenhouse gas?

If so, then the melting of the polar ice caps just moved a step closer, following calls by Trudie Styler, a leading celebrity ecological hypocrite - call them hippy-crites for short - for the general public to eat more locally grown vegetables.

Campaigning against food miles might seem an unlikely cause for Styler, given that a tribunal last year heard how she ordered her personal chef to travel over 100 miles to make a bowl of pasta for her youngest child and has sold olive oil and honey from her Tuscan estate, Il Palagio, 1,000 or so miles away, in Harrods in London.

Hat tip: Thanks for the heads up go to CEI, where their Sam Kazman says:

“Global warming activists warn us about the alleged threats from global warming, but are usually silent about the much more immediate threats from global warming policies. Restricting access to affordable energy is a sure recipe for increasing poverty, disease and human misery around the world.”

Walter E. Williams asks:

In 1970, when environmentalists were making predictions of man-made global cooling and the threat of an ice age and millions of Americans starving to death, what kind of government policy should we have undertaken to prevent such a calamity?

When Ehrlich predicted that England would not exist in the year 2000, what steps should the British Parliament have taken in 1970 to prevent such a dire outcome?

In 1939, when the Department of the Interior warned that we only had oil supplies for another 13 years, what actions should President Roosevelt have taken?

Finally, what makes us think that environmental alarmism is any more correct now that they have switched their tune to man-made global warming?

Uh-oh, Al Gore has some ’splainin’ to do. Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit has just posted some great charts on “unprecedented” sea ice levels in the Southern Hemisphere — data points which are not altogether fantastic for global warming alarmism. Pop over to check them out.