April 24, 2008 10:26 PM UTC

Fisking Ross Kaminsky

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• by: Steve Balboni

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Now that Josh Sharf has left to run in the HD-6 GOP primary the Denver Post has turned to Ross Kaminsky to play the role of glibertarian on their Politics West blog. What has Ross’ dander up today? The governor’s Earth Day Executive Order concerning greenhouse gas emissions.

Kaminsky starts off with this kicker of a post title:

“The Imperial Bill Ritter (hint: he’s not a scientist)”

You know who else isn’t a scientist? Ross Kaminsky. Just so everyone is up to speed, Ritter is not a scientist so he shouldn’t take action as governor on climate change. Ross is not a scientist but he has opinions and everyone should listen to them.  Not a strong opener from our friend Ross and it doesn’t get much better.

Moving on to the body of the post,

In typical imperial Ritter style, governing by Executive Order rather than through the legislature which at least might represent the will of the people, Ritter is trying to force the state to cut overall emissions by 20% in just over a decade, and by 80% by 2050.

That’s the 2nd use of the word imperial, this time combined with a grandiose statement about the will of the people. I hate to break it to Ross but Bill Ritter was duly elected by the people of Colorado and his environmental positions were a prominent feature of his campaign. There’s nothing undemocratic about a properly elected governor using his constitutional power to guide state policy. Especially when that policy has been a focal point for his campaign and his administration.

Notice too how Ross uses the word “force.” That implies that the Executive Order in question has set hardline standards for reduction, has an enforcement mechanism in place and prescribes some sort of penalties for a failure to meet these numbers. Except the EO does nothing of the sort, it merely sets the reduction numbers as “goals.” It then instructs various state agencies to gather data (Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment) and (Governors Energy Office and the Department of Revenue) to identify “regulatory and legislative changes that may be needed to provide investor-owned utilities with the incentives to invest in renewable energy resources…” That’s it. There are no mandates to private business. There’s no hard cap that carries some sort of punitive measures for anyone who does not mean the standards. They are merely goals and the EO merely instructs various agencies and departments of the Executive branch to cooperate with each other and develop a climate plan.

Of course if you didn’t read the Executive Order and merely read Ross’ blog you wouldn’t know that. You would think that the governor had just issued strict and far reaching mandates. I realize that blogs are by their nature partisan opinion pieces but this bit from Ross is shockingly dishonest.

Read the Executive Order yourself right here.

Moving on Ross launches another dishonest attack, this time on biofuels.

The headlong rush by liberal elites in the US and the EU to the use of ethanol is now causing food shortages and riots in the Third World, and bringing zero benefit to the environment.

Again, so much to unpack from this one sentence. First, corn based biofuels are not being pushed by “liberal elites” so much as they were being pushed by various government leaders. First and foremost among them was George W. Bush,

In his 2005 State of the Union Address, President Bush stated that there is “strong funding for…ethanol.” In his 2006 Address, he revealed his plan to make ethanol “practical and competitive within six years” after he famously stated “America is addicted to oil.” It was this announcement that established ethanol as an alternative energy powerhouse as ethanol stocks immediately bubbled to new highs.

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In his 2007 Address, Bush announced that “we must continue investing in new methods of producing ethanol, using everything from wood chips to grasses, to agricultural wastes” in hope of “reducing gasoline usage in the United States by 20 percent in the next 10 years.”

This year, however, President Bush didn’t specifically acknowledge ethanol in his State of the Union Address; the first time since 2004

Second we have the issue of food shortages. They are real and ethanol biofuels are a factor but not an especially large factor. The current food crisis is being driven by shortages of wheat and rice, not corn. Also contributing is the growing wealth of China and India. Ethanol is, at best, a break even proposition for the environment but it’s probably not even that. That is of course why you don’t hear leaders pushing for the use of such biofuels.

Which brings us to our third point where Kamisnky seems to imply that Ritter’s Executive Order is advocating for biofuels when, in fact, the terms biofuel and ethanol never appear anywhere in the document.

3 dishonest statements in 1 sentence. That is quite a feat.

Next Ross tries his hand at science,

All the recent data that I’ve seen from reliable sources such as NASA show that the planet has been cooling slightly for much of the past decade.

I’d like to see what data Ross is referring to because when I go to NASA’s website I don’t see anything of the sort. Instead we see statements such as this,

The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis.

That bit of data, from NASA, directly contradicts what Kamisnky claims that NASA’s data shows. He’s either uninformed or a bald-faced liar. I’ll let you decide.

The gross distortions continue,

the Arctic sea ice regained more than everything it lost in the prior summer

Really? Perhaps Kaminsky should let the folks at NOAA know that because they are pretty concerned. From an article at the Science Daily website published just 15 days ago,

NOAA scientists are now flying through springtime Arctic pollution to find out why the region is warming – and summertime sea ice is melting – faster than predicted. Some 35 NOAA researchers are gathering with government and university colleagues in Fairbanks, Alaska, to conduct the study through April 23…

Observations from instruments on the ground, balloons, and satellites show the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the globe. Summer sea-ice extent has decreased by nearly 40 percent compared to the 1979-2000 average, and the ice is thinning.

I could continue, there are other distortions and lies scattered throughout Kaminsky’s post but I think I’ve made my point. It’s clear that Ross Kaminsky is at best grossly uninformed on the issues. Why the Denver Post would employ him to fill their apparent glibertarian quota is beyond me. Some amount of partisan spin is to be expected in blog posts but this is just embarrassing. Shame on the post for publishing such fact-free nonsense and shame on Kaminsky for being so utterly dishonest.

Cross-posted at https://steampoweredopinions.bl…