Here's some good news from America. A Big Oil company - Chevron - is taking legal action against a group of environmentalists for fraud and extortion: aka greenmail. The sums involved are eyewatering: $19 billion (billion with a B).  Phelim McAleer has the details. It's fitting that Phelim McAleer should be reporting this story because, of course, he visited similar territory in his documentary FrackNation. Like Crude, Josh Fox's anti-fracking movie Gasland was feted at Sundance and lauded by the usual Hollywood suspects. The polite explanation for what's going on here is "noble cause corruption." You'll lie, you'll fiddle with the data, you'll bully, you'll smear, you'll abandon the scientific method -- not because you're a bad person (or so you persuade yourself) but because you're a person so good that you're even prepared to sacrifice even your personal integrity for the higher cause of saving the world from The Greatest Threat It Has Ever Known. Finally -- finally! -- business has begun fighting back.  And Chevron's case is really good.

Global warming has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those who are paid to insult anybody who departs from climate alarm that I have got it embarrassingly wrong, don't know what I am talking about, and so forth. At first, I thought this was just their usual bluster. But then I realized that they are genuinely unaware. Good news is no news, which is why the mainstream media largely ignores all studies showing net benefits of global warming. And academics have not exactly been keen to push such analysis forward. So here follows an entire article on the net benefits of global warming.

The International Monetary Fund has thrown in the towel on emerging markets. After years of talking up the BRICS club of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, it now admits that these countries have either exhausted their catch-up growth models, or run into the time-honored problems of supply bottlenecks and bad government. Yes, China too. The Fund has cut its forecast for the developing economies by 0.5% to 4.5% this year in its latest World Economic Outlook, and by 0.4% to 5.1% next year. The 2013 estimates have been slashed by 1.8% for India, for Mexico by 1.7%, and 1% in Russia, compared to forecasts made in April. Similar damage is expected for Turkey, Indonesia, Ukraine, and others with big trade deficits as details are fleshed out. In what amounts to a mea culpa, the IMF hinted that it had for long been blind to festering problems in the BRICS and mini-BRICs. It said the economies of Brazil, China, and India will be 8% to 14% smaller in 2016 than had been assumed just two years ago, a revision that calls into question some of the giddiest claims that the newcomers will soon surge past the decaying West. But the West, especially Europe's eurozone, is rapidly decaying just the same.

The Republican Party of John McCain and Mitt Romney lost two presidential elections, the second to a weak candidate in a weak economy. Left to its own devices, it will lose the next presidential election and all the following ones. By picking a fight on Obama's least popular position, namely health care, the conservative wing of the party led by Ted Cruz galvanized the party base and forced the House leadership into a fight. In a recent poll, the Gallup organization found that just 22% of Americans expected Obamacare to improve their family's health situation, while 47% expected it to make it worse. As my old partner Jude Wanniski used to say, the electorate is like a diamond, waiting to be cut at exactly the right spot. Ted Cruz pointed the chisel correctly. It well may be true that shutting down the government hurts the Republicans in the short run. That is immaterial; there is no way to get from here to there except by making a stand against Obamacare. There is no downside, for the Republican Party as presently configured already is a guaranteed loser. A reinvigorated conservative leadership has a chance of leading the party to victory.

Most everyone has seen the nature documentaries of Sir David Attenborough and is familiar with his name. Publicizing his imminent new series about the evolution of animals, Sir David said in an interview last week that he thought a reduction in human population during this century is impossible and "we're lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse." People will look back in another 100 years "at a world that was less crowded, full of natural wonders, and healthier." His is a common view. He longs for people to enjoy the open spaces and abundant herds of game that he has been fortunate enough to see. To that end he thinks it vital that there should be fewer of us. I would now passionately disagree with the two premises of his argument. It's actually quite likely, rather than impossible, that population will be falling by the end of this century and it is also quite likely that the people alive then will have lots more wilderness to explore and wildlife to admire than today. The facts that show this and disprove Sir David are fascinating.

If any business were to submit a prospectus as patently false and deliberately dishonest as the ones used to advance the cause of the global warming industry, its directors would all be in prison by now. One candidate for prison would be whoever tweets under the name @BarackObama. When he Tweeted: "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous" he was promulgating a demonstrable untruth. No one has ever doubted that climate changes. Pretty much everyone - probably more than 97 per cent, even - agrees that there is a degree of anthropogenic input, even it's just the barely measurable contribution of beef cattle farts or the heat produced by cities. But the dangerous bit? No one has come even close to demonstrating it, there is no reliable evidence for it, and very few scientists - certainly far, far fewer than 97 per cent of them - would ever stake their reputations on such a tendentious claim. So how do the eco-swine go on getting away with it? Jamie Whyte provides a fascinating, erudite and original answer in his new paper for the Institute of Economic Affairs: Quack Policy - Abusing Science in the Name of Paternalism. 

Contrary to what you may have heard, there is no "bee-pocalypse." There is lots of alarmist talk about "colony collapse disorder," people are blaming pesticides and talking about hundreds of billions of dollars at risk. But a closer look tells a very different story. Yes, honeybees are dying in above-average numbers, but the most likely cause is the varroa destructor mite and associated viruses. Moreover, if you look at the actual numbers, they undermine much of the catastrophic rhetoric. In the United States, where we have good data, beekeepers have adapted to CCD. Colony numbers were higher in 2010 than any year since 1999. The beekeepers are not passive victims. Yet, scare stories abound. We are being warned that "bee deaths may have reached a crisis point for crops," and some commentators go as far as invoking an impending "bee-pocalypse" or a "bee-mageddon." They fondly  employ a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years to live." The implication seems to be that if the smartest guy on the planet was alarmed, we should be too. However, the quote seems to have been made up, first appearing in 1994 in a pamphlet distributed by French beekeepers, protesting the high cost of sugar for feeding bees and opposing a proposed reduction of tariffs on imported honey.

Emerging markets are now big enough to drag down the global economy. As Indonesia, India, Ukraine, Brazil, Turkey, Venezuela, South Africa, Russia, Thailand and Kazakhstan try to shore up their currencies, the effect is ricocheting back into the advanced world in higher borrowing costs. Even China felt compelled to sell $20 billion of US Treasuries in July. "They are running down reserves by selling US and European bonds, leading to a self-reinforcing feedback loop," said Simon Derrick from BNY Mellon. We are told that emerging markets are more resilient than in past crises because they have $9 trillion of reserves. But any use of that treasure to defend the exchange rate entails monetary tightening, and therefore inflicts a contractionary shock on countries already in trouble. We are also told that they borrow in their own currencies these days, immune to the sort of dollar squeeze that caused such havoc in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s. This is true, but double-edged. India, Brazil and others will surely be tempted to stop fighting markets, let their currencies slide and inflict the pain on foreigners - that is to say, on your pension fund.

You might as well try to teach a snake to juggle as hope the Obama administration will think strategically. The "peace president" is about to embark on his third military adventure, this time in Syria, without having learned the lessons of his botched efforts in Afghanistan and Libya. He hasn't even learned from the Bush administration's mistakes - which he mocked with such delight. Before launching a single cruise missile toward Syria, Team Obama needs to be sure it has a good answer to the question, "What comes next?" If Obama does a Clinton and churns up some sand with do-nothing cruise-missile strikes, it will only encourage the Assad regime. But if our president hits Assad hard and precipitates regime change, then what?

You thought Atlas Shrugged was fiction? Look at this description of Detroit from the London Guardian:

What isn't dumped is stolen. Factories and homes have largely been stripped of anything of value, so thieves now target cars' catalytic converters. Illiteracy runs at around 47%; half the adults in some areas are unemployed. In many neighborhoods, the only sign of activity is a slow trudge to the liquor store.

It was US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who once said: "You are entitled to your opinions, but not to your own facts." In the debate over shale gas - I refuse to call it the fracking debate since fracking has been happening in Britain for 50 years - the opponents do seem to be astonishingly cavalier with the facts. Here are five things they keep saying which are just not true: First, that shale gas production has polluted aquifers in the United States. Second, that it releases more methane than other forms of gas production. Third, that it uses a worryingly large amount of water. Fourth, that it uses hundreds of toxic chemicals. Fifth, that it causes damaging earthquakes. Here are the facts for each:

What do we want the future Egypt to look like? A flawed, hybrid democracy, or a Sunni Muslim version of Iran? Based on his bluster yesterday (8/14) about events on the Nile, Secretary of State John Kerry prefers the latter. And Kerry's remarks must have had White House approval. In full outrage mode, America's most famous windsurfer castigated the Egyptian authorities, insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood had a right to "peaceful protests." Apparently, "peaceful" means armed with Kalashnikovs, killing policemen, kidnapping and torturing opponents, turning mosques into prisons, attacking Christians and burning Coptic churches. The Brotherhood protesters rejected all offers of compromise and all demands to disperse. The interim government's response was heavy-handed, but the Muslim Brothers chose violent resistance - using women and children as shields (a tactic typical of Islamist terrorists). Do we really need to have sympathy for the devil?

It was over harlequin ducks that we bonded. Ten years ago, at a meeting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA in Monterey, California, I bumped into the German biologist Ingo Potrykus watching harlequin ducks in the harbor before breakfast. Shared enthusiasm for bird watching broke the ice. I knew of him, of course. He had been on the cover of Time magazine for potentially solving one of the world's great humanitarian challenges. Four years before, with his colleague Peter Beyer, he had added three genes to the 30,000 in rice to help to prevent Vitamin A Deficiency or VAD, one of the most preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in poor countries with rice-dominated diets. Had Ingo or I known that ten years later this rice would still not be available to the poor, that a systematic campaign of denigration against it by the behemoths of the environmental movement, especially Greenpeace, would be consuming lawyers' fees while perhaps 20 million children had died in the meantime through vitamin A deficiency, he and I would have felt sick with horror that morning. Here's the awful story, and why the leaders of Greenpeace should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity like war criminals.

New evidence coming to light in the British National Archives and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University may soon change our entire view of the Anglo-American slave trade, and the roots of institutional plantation slavery in the Americas. With luck it will help to vindicate the fathers of "classical liberal" government and the free market in the 17th and 18th centuries, falsely accused until now of abetting - or promoting - the great crime of race-based African slavery. For academic orthodoxy holds that John Locke (1632-1704) and the great Whig thinkers of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 helped to design and foster the economic system of hereditary slavery that shaped Atlantic capitalism for a century and a half. From that it is but a step to dismiss the moral claims of classical liberalism as so much humbug, to write off all the talk of justice, natural rights, inviolable contracts and government by consent as the self-interested catechism of oppressors. As Samuel Johnson said acidly: "How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" Except that this established version of events is not true. It is a near complete inversion of what happened, and this matters in all kinds of ways since the debate over slavery refuses to subside.