Public support for tapping America’s oil reserves has been strong over the past several years, but it received its toughest test with the Deepwater Horizon spill. The verdict is now in – and it’s drill, baby, drill!

A clear majority continued to support drilling in American waters even during the height of the spill, when oil was gushing uncontrollably and dying birds headlined network newscasts. Pollsters at Rasmussen report that, “since the oil rig explosion that caused the massive oil leak, support for offshore drilling has ranged from 56 percent to 64 percent.”

That’s not far below the 72 percent who supported it before the spill, nor much different than the support back in the summer of 2008 when pump prices topped $4 a gallon. Now that the leak has been stopped, the percentage in favor should start rising again.…

“I am not afraid about the climate.”

– Judith Curry, quoted in Alexandre Mansur, “American Researcher Says That There Is Still a lot of Uncertainty About Global Warming, Época, May 1, 2010.

“Real Climate, I think they’ve damaged their brand. They started out doing something that people liked, but they’ve been too partisan in a scientific way.”

– Judith Curry, quoted in Eric Berger, “Judith Curry: On Antarctic sea ice, Climategate and skeptics.” August 18, 2010.

There is solid middle ground in the ever-contentious climate-change debate. And now is the time to welcome it, given that politics is not going to reverse in any detectable amount the human influence on climate.

And the shame of the post-Climategate era is that other scientists like Curry did not join her to right the wrongs of a profession that has become politicized, agendacized, and Malthusiancized.…

Ken Green at MasterResource published an influential post, The Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism Continues (June 2, 2010), that began with two quotations:

“We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

– James Hansen, “The Threat to the Planet,” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006.

“Desperation is setting in among climate alarmists who by their own math can see that the window is rapidly closing on ’saving the planet’.”

– Kenneth Green, ”A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism, Redux?” MasterResource, September 30, 2009.

And what was true in June is even more true today as the failure to price carbon dioxide (CO2) is leaving Europe as the sacrificial lambs on an altar of climate-change inconsequentiality.…

[Editor note: Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) removed a federal renewable mandate from the energy bill now under debate. However, Sen. Brownback of Kansas has indicated his intention to add an amendment to the bill resurrecting such a mandate.]

US Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) displays a national debt clock on his home page and is a proclaimed conservative. Yet he supports wasteful government spending on deployment of impotent technologies like wind energy.

I believe Sam and his kind are the root cause of a failure for industrial windpower opponents to gain the upper hand in Washington D.C. I further believe that in Brownback’s case, his faulty platform correlates to his committee membership, which shows his allegiance to the agriculture lobby, which represent the secondary financial beneficiaries of wind energy deployment.…