Real Climate Science

The “war on coal” has five new casualties.  A lawsuit brought by environmental groups has forced the shutdown of five Indiana coal-fired power plants by 2018, totalling 668 megawatts of power.  Duke Energy announced that it would retire five coal plants as part of a settlement reached with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups in a dispute over a clean air permit Duke was issued by the state of Indiana for its new coal-gasification plant in the southwestern part of the state. The five plants will be retired by 2018.

The Sierra Club then explained that massively reducing the supply of energy will lower prices.

“While today’s settlement is a step in the right direction, more must be done to ensure that Hoosier families are protected from rising energy bills and the enormous health threats posed by Indiana’s reliance on coal-fired power plants,” said Jodi Perras with the Sierra Club’s anti-coal campaign.

Enviro-lawsuit forces five Indiana coal plants to shut down | The Daily Caller

They learned that at the Karl Marx school of economics.

Rebels and local residents in Ghouta accuse Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan of providing chemical weapons to an al-Qaida linked rebel group.

 from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the dealing gas attack.

“My son came to me two weeks ago asking what I thought the weapons were that he had been asked to carry,” said Abu Abdel-Moneim, the father of a rebel fighting to unseat Assad, who lives in Ghouta.

Abdel-Moneim said his son and 12 other rebels were killed inside of a tunnel used to store weapons provided by a Saudi militant, known as Abu Ayesha, who was leading a fighting battalion. The father described the weapons as having a “tube-like structure” while others were like a “huge gas bottle.”

Ghouta townspeople said the rebels were using mosques and private houses to sleep while storing their weapons in tunnels.  Abdel-Moneim said his son and the others died during the chemical weapons attack. That same day, the militant group Jabhat al-Nusra, which is linked to al-Qaida, announced that it would similarly attack civilians in the Assad regime’s heartland of Latakia on Syria’s western coast, in purported retaliation.

EXCLUSIVE: Syrians In Ghouta Claim Saudi-Supplied Rebels Behind Chemical Attack

Two days ago Obama was claiming that they had intercepted a panicked phone call from Damascus, which occurred when Damascus heard about the chemical weapons attack.

Last Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people.

Exclusive: Intercepted Calls Prove Syrian Army Used Nerve Gas, U.S. Spies Say | The Cable

Now Obama is claiming that Damascus planned the attack – which they didn’t know about until after it occurred.

American intelligence agencies had indications three days beforehand that the Syrian regime was poised to launch a lethal chemical attack that killed more than a thousand people and has set the stage for a possible U.S. military strike on Syria.

The disclosure — part of a larger U.S. intelligence briefing on Syria’s chemical attacks — raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions for the American government. First and foremost: What, if anything, did it do to notify the Syrian opposition of the pending attack?

U.S. Had Intel on Chemical Strike Before It Was Launched | The Cable

So Washington knew about the attack three days before Damascus. That’s the Obama story, and he is sticking with it. Until he changes it later.

Summarizing : Damascus didn’t plan the attack, but someone connected to US intelligence knew that it was going to happen. What a surprise.

21 Jul 1945 – HUGE POISON GAS DUMP PROVIDES PROBLEM

• Risk of voting against war : nothing – Syria doesn’t threaten the US
• Risk of voting for war : huge – all kinds of things could go wrong
• Amount of behind the scenes blackmail and bribery : huge

Twitter / Revkin: Lindzen re-re-boots …

House Speaker John Boehner announced in a joint statement with the House leadership that he expected to consider a measure that would authorize the president to carry out a military strike the week of Sept. 9

Obama asks Congress to OK strike on Syria

Another possibility would be to wait until Sept. 11, and rather than wasting valuable cruise missiles, have some of the Al Qaeda folks on the payroll fly an airliner into a building in downtown Damascus.

Only Congress can declare war. The reason for that law is because only Congress is accountable to the citizenry of the US.

One way or another, Obama has faced his last election. He will either leave the White House peaceably in three years, or he will attempt a coup. But he won’t face another election. That makes him completely unaccountable to the American people and why it is absolutely essential that Congress makes it clear that he will be impeached if he goes to war without Congressional approval.

Remarkable how the same US intelligence services who haven’t been able to figure out what happened at the US Embassy in Benghazi nearly twelve months ago, were able to piece together in a matter of hours – exact details of what happened at a remote location in Syria.

When John Kerry stood in as surrogate president yesterday making the case for war in Syria (Apparently Obama was leading from behind again. Either that or he wanted someone with the ‘Voice of God’ making the pitch for him. Sorry Mr. Kerry, only Charleton Heston had the Voice of God and you’re no Charleton Heston.). Kerry talked about and emphasized the ‘thousands of pieces of evidence’ we should look at for ourselves, things Kerry said he had witnessed with his own eyes. And this photo was one of them.

Then he repeated his challenge to look for ourselves. And I did. And I knew I had seen this ‘evidence’ picture, a long time ago. And I knew he was lying, again! And I knew what Kerry seems not to have learned yet. That in this age of the internet and information you can’t lie for long. You will be caught.

This picture was taken by Marco Di Lauro. Rather than try to explain it I’ll use his own words. The ones he used on his web site to describe it.

“Al Musayyib, Iraq – May 27, 2003

An Iraqi child jumps over a line of hundreds of bodies, in a school where they have been transported from a mass grave, to be identified. They were discovered in the desert in the outskirts of Al Musayyib, 40 km south of Baghdad. It has been estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 Iraqis had been reported missing in the region south of Baghdad. People have been searching for days for identity cards or other clues among the skeletons to try to find the remains of brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters and even children who disappeared when Saddam’s government crushed a Shi’ite uprising following the 1991 Gulf War.”

Breitbart – One Voice Silenced, Millions Awakened

h/t to TedSunday