† When Environmental Values Collide: Almost two years ago to the day that the Copenhagen climate conference commenced, The Stiletto observed that “[o]utfits that trade or sell carbon credits or offsets are akin to those that sell naming rights to the stars in the heavens, or those that create coats of arms for families whose forebears were too humble to own a coat, much less arms” (third item). In a New York Times op-ed, Bernd Heinrich, emeritus professor at the University of Vermont, makes much the same point:

Contrary to what you might hear from energy companies and environmentally conscious celebrities, offsets don’t magically make carbon emissions disappear. Worse, relying on them to stem global warming may devastate our vital forest ecosystems.

On the industrial scale, carbon trading works like this: Limits (caps) are set on carbon emissions so that the true costs of our energy use are not just passed on to our descendants or people in some distant country. As an incentive to help the planet, savings of carbon emissions that one achieves below the designated cap can then be traded, as offsets, to another polluter who can then go over his cap by an equal amount. While carbon credits can be generated by switching to cleaner technology or nonpolluting sources in energy production, they can also be gained by unrelated steps, like planting trees, that are said to deter global warming.

Thus, if I burn coal in my business, I can plant pines in Chile and earn an offset, which will then allow me to burn even more coal. On a smaller scale, Al Gore purchases carbon offsets that he says make up for the emissions from the jets he uses in spreading his message of conservation. All this may seem logical, and energy companies would have you believe it works in the real world. But it is actually terrible for the planet, which is governed by the dictates of physics and biology.

But then, you can fool most of the environmentalists all of the time.

Editorial Note: The Financial Times of London reports that the namby-pamby agreement that President Barack Hussein Obama brokered at the Copenhagen climate conference - the signatories agreed to make a list of the things they could do to reduce carbon emissions, but won’t do since no one will be checking the list even once to see if they’ve been naughty or nice -  caused the price of carbon credits to crater:

Carbon prices plunged yesterday in the aftermath of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, dealing a blow to the credibility of the European Union's carbon-trading scheme.

Prices for carbon permits for December 2010 delivery, the benchmark contract for pricing European permits, dropped nearly 10 per cent in early trading, before recovering to end the day 8.3 per cent lower at €12.41.

Lower prices give companies less incentive to invest in cutting their greenhouse gas output. Analysts estimate that prices of more than €40 a tonne are required to stimulate investment in new low-carbon technologies.

† What Freedom Of Speech Means To Muslims: Egypt's High Appeal Court has upheld the four-year prison sentence given to blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil, 24, in 2007 for insulting Islam and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, reports The Associated Press, which notes that “Nabil was convicted for calling Islam a brutal religion in a piece he wrote in 2005 after Muslim worshippers attacked a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria.” Nabil has now exhausted all legal avenues to have his conviction overturned.

† Better Living Through Science (second item): Anthony Marshall, 85, who was convicted of first-degree grand larceny for pocketing millions of dollars from his mother, Brooke Astor, has been sentenced to one-to-three years in prison, reports The New York Times:

The sentence was for the most serious of 14 counts on which Mr. Marshall was convicted: first-degree grand larceny, for giving himself a retroactive lump-sum raise of about $1 million for managing his mother’s finances. … Mr. Marshall [was also sentenced] to one year on each of the 13 other charges he was convicted of, to run at the same time as the longer sentence.

Marshall, whose cardiologist testified that his health is so poor he could die in prison, could be released in eight months on good behavior. 

Marshall’s co-defendant, Francis X. Morrissey, was also sentenced to one-to-three years imprisonment for his part in the scheme to coerce Astor, who had Alzheimer’s, to alter her will.

While prosecutors asked that both men be required to pay restitution -  Marshall, $12.3 million and Morrissey, $238,000 - the judge “rejected the request, saying issues relating to restitution are best left to resolution in the civil estate proceeding pending in Westchester Surrogate's Court,” reports New York Law Journal.

† Hasta La Vista, Hastert (second item): According to Politico, taxpayers are ponying up almost half a million dollars a year so that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) can maintain fully equipped office space and a staff, and can tool around in a leased SUV, while he works as a lobbyist who – among other things – aids and abets Turkey in its ongoing campaign of Armenian Genocide denial:

The payments are perfectly legal under a federal law that provides five years of benefits for former speakers - but only if Hastert never makes use of his government-funded perks in the course of his lobbying work.

Ethics experts say that sort of separation is hard to maintain. Hastert "has to be meticulous in his schedule to make sure there is no bleed from his publicly subsidized office into his private practice," said Kenneth Gross, a former Federal Election Commission general counsel and congressional ethics authority.

Steve Ellis, vice president of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, called the arrangement "really concerning."

"It is specifically prohibited - federal dollars can't be spent on lobbying operations," Ellis said. "We are paying for his staff (and) for a car, and we need to be very sure that he isn't spending a dime of that money on lobbying operations. That all needs to be above board, in the clear and transparent. And it's not." …

Hastert, who served in the House for almost 21 years, signed on with Dickstein Shapiro in 2008. He is now a registered foreign agent, representing in Washington the interests of the governments of Turkey and Luxembourg. He also lobbies on behalf of three U.S. corporations.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Prediction: Christians Will Be “Extinct” In The Holy Land Within 60 Years): Many pundits and politicians consider Iraq “stabilized” - by which they mean that the pace of Sunni-Shia killings has abated - but the surge as done little to prevent violence against Christians by Islamofascists. The New York Times reports that Christians in Iraq are cancelling holiday celebrations and attending Christmas Mass “under the protective watch of police officers and soldiers because of a spate of threats by extremist groups to bomb churches on Christmas Day”:

In Baghdad, Christians said they are as fearful as they have been since 2006, when the outbreak of sectarian warfare forced many to leave their neighborhoods for months at a time. …

There are no dependable figures on the number of Christians in Iraq, but the community had been estimated to number about 750,000 before the United States-led invasion in 2003.

Since then, they have become targets of killings and kidnappings, leading thousands to flee.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Why We Need Gitmo): The Obama administration has transferred four Gitmo detainees back to Afghanistan, six back to Yemen and two back to Somaliland, where they can easily pick up where they left off waging jihad and killing American soldiers. Noting that ‘[s]everal former Gitmo detainees from other countries have moved to Yemen to rejoin the global jihad,” The Wall Street Journal describes Yemen “emerging as one of the world's sanctuaries for al Qaeda …its government has essentially run a nonaggression pact with the terrorists,” Meanwhile, the Obama administration is protesting Cambodia’s deportation of 20 Muslim Uighurs back to China, where they are considered criminals if not terrorists.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?): Add Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes, both members of the Hoover Institution's Task Force on National Security and Law, to the growing chorus decrying President Barack Hussein Obama’s lack of leadership regarding detention policy for Gitmo detainees, after he promised to break with Bush administration policies during the presidential campaign in this Washington Post op-ed:

Since U.S. forces started taking alleged terrorists to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the task of crafting American detention policy has migrated decisively from the executive branch to federal judges. These judges, not experts in terrorism or national security and not politically accountable to the electorate, inherited this responsibility because of the Supreme Court's intervention in detention policy. Over time they maintained it because legislative and executive officials of both political parties refused to craft a comprehensive legislative approach to this novel set of problems that cries out for decisive lawmaking. …

Congress has avoided these issues for a number of reasons. Initially, it was a combination of the Bush administration's failure to seek congressional help and lawmakers' natural inclination to avoid taking responsibility for hard decisions for which they might later be held accountable. More recently, the Obama administration has been loath to spend any more political capital than necessary in cleaning up what it views as its predecessor's messes. Instead of dealing with detention policy proactively, it has largely adopted the Bush approach of grinding out detention policy in the courts. Ironically, the president's political base seems to prefer his adoption of the Bush approach - an approach liberals previously decried - to any effort to write detention rules and limitations into statutory law.

Goldsmith and Wittes also quote from a ruling by Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the U.S. District Court in Washington on Musa'ab Al-Madhwani’s habeas corpus suit “lamenting” that allowing the courts determine detention policy one ruling at time using different procedures and rules of evidence has resulted in "a difference in substantive law" and that the current state of affairs "highlights the need for a national legislative solution with the assistance of the Executive so that these matters are handled promptly and uniformly and fairly for all concerned."

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, The Part About “Illegal” Liberals Don’t Understand): The Obama administration will give states longer than the Congressionally mandated December 31^st to switch to secure driver's licenses, reports The Washington Post:

Delaying the requirement, which faces opposition from governors and Senate Republicans over how it should be implemented, jeopardizes an immigration and security measure adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But it also removes concerns that tens of thousands of holiday travelers could have been subjected to heightened airport security checks if they lacked the new licenses.

Under a controversial 2005 domestic security program passed by Congress and known as Real ID, states were required to issue more secure licenses by the end of 2009. Those would be the only licenses accepted by federal officials for such purposes as boarding commercial aircraft. Instead, states now have until May 11, 2011, to comply with Real ID.

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, Global Warming Is A Vegetarian Plot): New York Times science reporter Natalie Angier, an “arbitrary and inconsistent” vegetarian, has bad news for “committed vegetarians” and “strict ethical vegans”:

[P]lants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants - their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar - the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds. …

It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.

Editorial Note: Jains follow a restricted form of vegetarianism that strives to avoid the killing of plants, and the bugs and organisms that live symbiotically  on and around them.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, 10 Reasons Michelle Obama Should Be Proud – Really Proud – Of America): This latest installment in The Stiletto Blog’s ongoing series meant to help instill the necessary pride of country in Michelle Obama’s consciousness to enable her to serve as an unofficial ambassador focuses on Christopher Astle and Emily Yanich, who were teenagers back in September 1989 when they found an abandoned newborn and the young woman whose life they saved. The Washington Post

reports:

It was Sept. 6, 1989. They discovered the newborn wrapped in towels at the front door of a townhouse in their Fairfax County complex and took the infant to Emily's, where her stepfather called police.

The whole thing was over pretty quickly. The authorities took the baby girl, who was later adopted. Chris and Emily, both 15, went on with their lives, although Emily often cried when she told people the story, and the two called each other every Sept. 6.

Twenty years passed.

Then, on Dec. 2, a college student named Mia Fleming sent them both a message via Facebook: Might they be the same Chris and Emily who had once found a baby left at a stranger's door?

If so, she just wanted to say thanks.

After all these years, the little girl they had found had found them. …

Chris and Emily, both now 35, stayed close friends as they grew up, moved and married, bound by their rescue of the baby.

Mia, once she learned her story, never forgot them, and after numerous tries over several years managed at last, through the power of the Internet, to track them down. "I didn't know how they would feel," she said.

Emily said: "It's like a miracle. … My heart is filled now. There was always a little spot missing. "

Chris said, "It's the best Christmas present I have ever gotten."

A reunion is being planned so the three can see one another again. Mia, now 20, said she was excited. Chris said, "I just want to give her a hug."