Tmyers

"There is no doubt that the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans is troubling, but this kind of exaggeration undermines the credibility of scientists."

For much of the past decade, elected officials in Washington State have been talking about the critical need to limit carbon emissions to reduce the impact of climate change. The Governor, former Seattle Mayor Nickels and others have even highlighted their "leadership" on the issue.

Information released recently from the Energy Information Administration, however, shows that Washington is anything but a leader when it comes to actual results.

Why do environmental activists feel so free to exaggerate or say things that simply aren't true? Today's Seattle Times offers a clue.

Today's Times has a story regarding logging roads and their impact on streams. It notes that the Office of the Attorney General has decided to join other states in appealing a decision of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which ruled that foresters have to receive permits from the EPA for their logging roads.

What stood out at me is this section:

To take you into a rainy Fall weekend, here are the best quotes of the week.

The first is from the Los Angeles Times. Reporting on the California Air Resources Board (CARB) decision to institute a cap-and-trade system in that state, the Times story, "California becomes first state to adopt cap-and-trade program," contains this claim about the impact of that system on jobs:

Yesterday on KUOW, Jeremy Rifkin, who is promoting a new book, was asked by host Steve Scher about our research showing that "green" schools in Washington state don't pay for themselves and don't save energy.

Rifkin, without skipping a beat or looking at the research, answered confidently, "he doesn't know what he's talking about. I'm going to be very, very simple with you on this. If that's the case, then how is Germany doing this?" This section begins at 29:40 in the interview.

Last week I discussed my new book "Eco-Fads" on KUOW's Weekday program and one of the topics we addressed was the failure of green building standards like LEED and the state's "High Performance" school building standards. As we've noted in the past, green schools are frequently less energy efficient than non-green schools in their same districts.

The bankruptcy of solar-energy company Solyndra, taking half-a-billion taxpayer dollars down with them, has been described as the "first major scandal of the Obama Administration." E-mails are demonstrating the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had reservations about the deal and even predicted, virtually to the day when Solyndra would go bankrupt.