Inherit The Wind
In the last chapter, I questioned the science behind man made global warming and revealed that the real world data does not support the hypothesis. Not only that, but the science behind Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) cannot even withstand even a cursory scrutiny under the scientific method. As a result, the Crooks and Thieves, realizing that the science cannot stand on its own, have decided to take the debate out of the realm of academe and bring it into the world of politics.
As they always do, the left has framed this issue by trying to seize the moral high ground. By making the debate over AGW about the good of all humanity versus the good of one country or one individual, it allows progressives to make the moral case for a massive takeover of an immense portion of the economy. This will give these statists near total power to regulate innumerable aspects of your life. They try to persuade you that this issue is about more than your job, the American economy or any of your other trivial concerns. Global warming is about the whole earth, don't you know? This is about our survival as a species! Therefore, to be against their agenda is to be a self-centered, ignorant boor who hates Mother Nature, the planet and all who live on it.
There is no question that this would be a powerful and convincing argument if it were true. After all, if aliens were to invade the planet tomorrow, we'd all be willing to make huge sacrifices in order to defend mother earth. Unfortunately, whatever your opinions are about the merit of the scientific case for CO2 as a warming agent, there is virtually no evidence whatsoever that warming poses a clear and present danger to humans or the planet now or in the foreseeable future. Change, perhaps. Catastrophe, no.
However, in order to persuade the population to cede to government enormous power over the economy and their lives, the tone of the leftist's argument is hysterical and overblown. If you disagree with their science, you are a denier. Your opinions no more valid than someone who believes that the Holocaust was a myth. That isn't science. That's politics. The left is not proposing having a calm and reasonable national discussion about what the science points to and what we can do to remedy those findings. They are using apocalyptic rhetoric to scare the nation into allowing them to embark on the most naked power grab in American history. If you thought Obamacare was a huge move in a socialist statist direction, the war over CO2 is the whole ballgame.
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To anyone who pays any attention to the partisan conflict between progressives and conservatives over the what the extent and power of the state should be, it is absolutely clear why the left has invested so much energy (pun intended) into the push for their global warming agenda. All of the solutions they propose to fix the apocalyptic nightmare they ascribe to AGW, dovetail nicely with their other aims of having the government in control of as much of the economy as possible. When you control energy, you control the fuel that runs the economy, manufacturing and transportation. As a result, the potential for political advantage and the kind of crony capitalist future that Ayn Rand once envisioned in Atlas Shrugged is finally within their grasp.
Now, I am willing to accept that many well intentioned people actually believe that the earth has a fever and that man is the virus that is causing it. However, it is the quest for sheer naked power (and the money that comes with it) that is the major driver behind the massive politicization of the AGW movement. As I demonstrated in the last chapter, there are a lot of players in this game who stand to profit from this racket immensely. From the ideologues who are looking for the ultimate leftist world government utopia, to the environmentalist luddites who hate industry and capitalism, to the politicians here and at the UN hungering for power, to the corporations who stand to make huge profits, to the greedheads from Wall Street who stand to skim off billions and to all scientists, lobbyists and all the other hangers on looking for their own slice of the AGW pie, there are a lot of people with skin in this game.
I made mention of how the Club of Rome, the UN and the Environmental NGO’s see the climate change movement as an opportunity for the leftist world government they lust after. I’d love to examine that further, but then I’d have to write another book. However, what is happening right here in the United States is all the evidence you need to get an idea of why this whole climate change racket is so important to the Crooks and Thieves that they are willing to risk the entire US economy to enact it.
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There has never been any doubt in my mind that AGW was yet another means by which leftists hoped to achieve their statist ends. It did not escape my attention that when the Cold War ended and communism was fully debunked that all of the lefties that were involved in communist front organizations became part of the "green" movement. However, I did not realize how truly insidious the corruption of this movement was and how mainstream it had become in the Democrat party and the highest echelons of power in our government until I saw Glenn Beck's discussion of it while he was still with Fox News. For those of you who consider Mr. Beck to be some kind of conspiracy nut or have otherwise been led to believe that he is not to be trusted, I want to say that I personally verified everything he talked about. What his investigation reveals about why the AGW movement is so important to the Crooks and Thieves is scary indeed.
In fact, when I was doing my research into why the IPCC seemed so willing to manipulate the science on AGW and then looked into John Holdren’s role in the debate, it became more and more obvious that Glenn Beck has only scratched the surface of what can only be described as Crooks and Thieves gone wild:
As they always do, the left has framed this issue by trying to seize the moral high ground. By making the debate over AGW about the good of all humanity versus the good of one country or one individual, it allows progressives to make the moral case for a massive takeover of an immense portion of the economy. This will give these statists near total power to regulate innumerable aspects of your life. They try to persuade you that this issue is about more than your job, the American economy or any of your other trivial concerns. Global warming is about the whole earth, don't you know? This is about our survival as a species! Therefore, to be against their agenda is to be a self-centered, ignorant boor who hates Mother Nature, the planet and all who live on it.
There is no question that this would be a powerful and convincing argument if it were true. After all, if aliens were to invade the planet tomorrow, we'd all be willing to make huge sacrifices in order to defend mother earth. Unfortunately, whatever your opinions are about the merit of the scientific case for CO2 as a warming agent, there is virtually no evidence whatsoever that warming poses a clear and present danger to humans or the planet now or in the foreseeable future. Change, perhaps. Catastrophe, no.
However, in order to persuade the population to cede to government enormous power over the economy and their lives, the tone of the leftist's argument is hysterical and overblown. If you disagree with their science, you are a denier. Your opinions no more valid than someone who believes that the Holocaust was a myth. That isn't science. That's politics. The left is not proposing having a calm and reasonable national discussion about what the science points to and what we can do to remedy those findings. They are using apocalyptic rhetoric to scare the nation into allowing them to embark on the most naked power grab in American history. If you thought Obamacare was a huge move in a socialist statist direction, the war over CO2 is the whole ballgame.
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To anyone who pays any attention to the partisan conflict between progressives and conservatives over the what the extent and power of the state should be, it is absolutely clear why the left has invested so much energy (pun intended) into the push for their global warming agenda. All of the solutions they propose to fix the apocalyptic nightmare they ascribe to AGW, dovetail nicely with their other aims of having the government in control of as much of the economy as possible. When you control energy, you control the fuel that runs the economy, manufacturing and transportation. As a result, the potential for political advantage and the kind of crony capitalist future that Ayn Rand once envisioned in Atlas Shrugged is finally within their grasp.
Now, I am willing to accept that many well intentioned people actually believe that the earth has a fever and that man is the virus that is causing it. However, it is the quest for sheer naked power (and the money that comes with it) that is the major driver behind the massive politicization of the AGW movement. As I demonstrated in the last chapter, there are a lot of players in this game who stand to profit from this racket immensely. From the ideologues who are looking for the ultimate leftist world government utopia, to the environmentalist luddites who hate industry and capitalism, to the politicians here and at the UN hungering for power, to the corporations who stand to make huge profits, to the greedheads from Wall Street who stand to skim off billions and to all scientists, lobbyists and all the other hangers on looking for their own slice of the AGW pie, there are a lot of people with skin in this game.
I made mention of how the Club of Rome, the UN and the Environmental NGO’s see the climate change movement as an opportunity for the leftist world government they lust after. I’d love to examine that further, but then I’d have to write another book. However, what is happening right here in the United States is all the evidence you need to get an idea of why this whole climate change racket is so important to the Crooks and Thieves that they are willing to risk the entire US economy to enact it.
3=====================================================================================================
There has never been any doubt in my mind that AGW was yet another means by which leftists hoped to achieve their statist ends. It did not escape my attention that when the Cold War ended and communism was fully debunked that all of the lefties that were involved in communist front organizations became part of the "green" movement. However, I did not realize how truly insidious the corruption of this movement was and how mainstream it had become in the Democrat party and the highest echelons of power in our government until I saw Glenn Beck's discussion of it while he was still with Fox News. For those of you who consider Mr. Beck to be some kind of conspiracy nut or have otherwise been led to believe that he is not to be trusted, I want to say that I personally verified everything he talked about. What his investigation reveals about why the AGW movement is so important to the Crooks and Thieves is scary indeed.
In fact, when I was doing my research into why the IPCC seemed so willing to manipulate the science on AGW and then looked into John Holdren’s role in the debate, it became more and more obvious that Glenn Beck has only scratched the surface of what can only be described as Crooks and Thieves gone wild:
Interested in finding out even more about how corrupt the power game behind AGW is? Click here, here, here and here.
Fortunately, while the Cap and Trade bill passed the house, it could not pass the Senate and the nation has been spared that particular assault on its freedoms and its sovereignty. The massive tax windfall that President Obama and his progressive allies were expecting to have to pay for their social justice dreams has vanished. However, that does not mean that the Crooks and Thieves have given up. Oh, no. Perhaps the dreams and schemes of the Wall Street greedheads have been crushed, but for the rest of the AGW supporters, while the "trade" part of Cap and trade may have been vanquished, but the carbon "caps" idea is still very much alive.
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If you are puzzled by why, during a time a massive unemployment, the EPA is so hell bent on enacting anti-coal regulations despite the massive cost to an already ailing economy, the answer is simple. The number one enemy of the environmental movement are the coal plants that belch out massive amounts of the CO2 these alarmists believe is responsible for climate change. Make no mistake about it, the left has declared war on coal and every other fossil fuel. According to those people who believe the "inconvenient truth" of the supposed ecological disaster to come if we don't change our carbon spewing ways, there will be an apocalypse on earth. Therefore, every method they can utilize to eliminate the burning of hydrocarbons will be found and employed in order that we may save the planet. Any price the nation must pay to implement their green agenda, it will pay. We all must sacrifice for the greater good. The future of humanity is at stake! At least, that's the media-Matrix propaganda spin of it
If you think that is all just a bit hysterical and overblown, I agree with you. Unfortunately, in 2008, the nation elected a man who drinks this global warming Kool Aid. Whether it is because he actually believes the science, lusts after the power controlling the energy, transportation and manufacturing sectors of the economy will give him, is enthralled with the idea of leftist global world governance, is looking to hook up his friends and allies with tons of free climate cash or a combination of some or all of these things, Barack Hussein Obama will stop at nothing to make sure that we transition to a "clean" energy future.
As long as this man sits in the Oval Office, the days of abundant and inexpensive supplies of fossil fuels is over. This should come as a surprise to no one. Barack Obama himself told the nation that he was going to make it impossible for you to drive your big SUV and he said he'd put the coal industry out of business once and for all:
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If you are puzzled by why, during a time a massive unemployment, the EPA is so hell bent on enacting anti-coal regulations despite the massive cost to an already ailing economy, the answer is simple. The number one enemy of the environmental movement are the coal plants that belch out massive amounts of the CO2 these alarmists believe is responsible for climate change. Make no mistake about it, the left has declared war on coal and every other fossil fuel. According to those people who believe the "inconvenient truth" of the supposed ecological disaster to come if we don't change our carbon spewing ways, there will be an apocalypse on earth. Therefore, every method they can utilize to eliminate the burning of hydrocarbons will be found and employed in order that we may save the planet. Any price the nation must pay to implement their green agenda, it will pay. We all must sacrifice for the greater good. The future of humanity is at stake! At least, that's the media-Matrix propaganda spin of it
If you think that is all just a bit hysterical and overblown, I agree with you. Unfortunately, in 2008, the nation elected a man who drinks this global warming Kool Aid. Whether it is because he actually believes the science, lusts after the power controlling the energy, transportation and manufacturing sectors of the economy will give him, is enthralled with the idea of leftist global world governance, is looking to hook up his friends and allies with tons of free climate cash or a combination of some or all of these things, Barack Hussein Obama will stop at nothing to make sure that we transition to a "clean" energy future.
As long as this man sits in the Oval Office, the days of abundant and inexpensive supplies of fossil fuels is over. This should come as a surprise to no one. Barack Obama himself told the nation that he was going to make it impossible for you to drive your big SUV and he said he'd put the coal industry out of business once and for all:
Bankrupting the coal industry and all the jobs that go with it as a stated government objective!?! Could the agenda not be more clear? Forget, for a moment, that the “science” behind
CO2 caused global warming is far from settled. As far as Obama is concerned, it
is as if God himself had come down from Mt. Sinai and told him that mankind must end its
reliance on fossil fuels. Or else! All administration policy concerning energy must be seen in this light. Your job? You don't need no stinking job. The earth has a fever! What's more important? Your piddly little life or the very future of the entire planet? Don't be so selfish!
As I will explain later in this chapter, the left's whole approach to combating warming and CO2 is so logically flawed from a "saving the planet" perspective that there can be no doubt that this issue is being used as a ploy by the left to realize their socialist dreams. Barack Obama and his allies are leading the nation towards a policy that will very likely destroy the US economy for very little gain in terms of affecting the climate. From this, we must conclude that either they are utterly naive about the consequences of their proposals or their lust for power has blinded them to reality.
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There are times when good science and well thought out solutions can combine to make constructive policy, but that requires a level of pragmatism that transcends ideological and partisan desires. Sadly, for the country, the ideologues that the President has put in charge of fulfilling his vision of a transition to a "green" future are far from dispassionate, level headed strategists able to forge creative and effective policy. From, Lisa Jackson to Steven Chu to Ken Salazar to Van Jones, Obama has staffed his administration with extremists who accept as dogma the concept that fossil fuels are the ultimate enemy of mankind or who are using the AGW issue as a means to another end entirely.
Worse, they all apparently believe in the nonsense economics of Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff. If you saw this video in Annienomics and read about the connections between Ms. Leonard, George Soros, The Center For American Progress, the President and many members of his administration, you know that this video unintentionally provides some of the clearest evidence of what these extremists really believe. Watching Annie's video on Cap and Trade will tell you more than you want to know about the utter cluelessness of Barry and his enviro-nut allies. I'll not subject you to another twenty minutes of Annie's blather, so here is Lee Doren's much more palatable critique of the left's views on CO2 and how to handle it:
As I will explain later in this chapter, the left's whole approach to combating warming and CO2 is so logically flawed from a "saving the planet" perspective that there can be no doubt that this issue is being used as a ploy by the left to realize their socialist dreams. Barack Obama and his allies are leading the nation towards a policy that will very likely destroy the US economy for very little gain in terms of affecting the climate. From this, we must conclude that either they are utterly naive about the consequences of their proposals or their lust for power has blinded them to reality.
4=====================================================================================================
There are times when good science and well thought out solutions can combine to make constructive policy, but that requires a level of pragmatism that transcends ideological and partisan desires. Sadly, for the country, the ideologues that the President has put in charge of fulfilling his vision of a transition to a "green" future are far from dispassionate, level headed strategists able to forge creative and effective policy. From, Lisa Jackson to Steven Chu to Ken Salazar to Van Jones, Obama has staffed his administration with extremists who accept as dogma the concept that fossil fuels are the ultimate enemy of mankind or who are using the AGW issue as a means to another end entirely.
Worse, they all apparently believe in the nonsense economics of Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff. If you saw this video in Annienomics and read about the connections between Ms. Leonard, George Soros, The Center For American Progress, the President and many members of his administration, you know that this video unintentionally provides some of the clearest evidence of what these extremists really believe. Watching Annie's video on Cap and Trade will tell you more than you want to know about the utter cluelessness of Barry and his enviro-nut allies. I'll not subject you to another twenty minutes of Annie's blather, so here is Lee Doren's much more palatable critique of the left's views on CO2 and how to handle it:
I will give my friend Annie credit. She is smart enough to realize how the "trade" part of Cap and Trade was a total scam to enrich Wall Street greedheads in exchange for their financial support of the movement. However, other than that one fine insight, the rest of Annie's video is utter nonsense. But, hey, it is one thing for Ms. Leonard to be producing this claptrap. After all, I'd be willing to fight and die to defend her right as an American to express her opinion however misguided I think it is. It's another thing for teachers to be indoctrinating our kids into their green agenda with these exercises in environmental and economic ignorance. But, does the Obama administration really agree with this? Is this really the basis for our economic and energy policy? Again, as I pointed out in Annienomics, the ties between the Soros backed Tides foundation which funds Annie's nonsense and Barack Obama and his minions is extensive. Do you want even more evidence of that connection? Well, remove all the sharp objects from your reach, and check this out:
_This absolute drivel is being paid for with your tax dollars by our own government. It's a disgrace and an outrage that PBS not only approves and sponsors this intellectual garbage. But, given the rest of the leftist rotgut they fund, is it any surprise? No. I thought not. However, it is incredibly revealing that the other government sponsor is the EPA. Imagine that! And guess what? Once the Cap and Trade bill that Annie hates so much went down to ignominious defeat in the Senate, President Obama directed EPA boss Lisa Jackson to follow Annie's plan to the tee and declare CO2 a pollutant and regulate its emissions with carbon caps. Looks like Lisa Jackson and Annie are totally simpatico, doesn't it? Think about that for a few moments. If that doesn't send a chill down your spine, I don't know what will. Once you realize that Annie's children's videos are expressing but a simplification of the very concepts and beliefs energizing the Obama leftist agenda, you will fully grasp all you need to know about the President's radical energy and environmental policies.
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That said, we are undergoing a period of extreme economic turmoil. The vast, vast majority of Americans are far more concerned about jobs than they are about the possibility of catastrophic warming that may or may not happen at some unspecified date. According to this poll by Pew Research:
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That said, we are undergoing a period of extreme economic turmoil. The vast, vast majority of Americans are far more concerned about jobs than they are about the possibility of catastrophic warming that may or may not happen at some unspecified date. According to this poll by Pew Research:
_Fully 83% of Americans rate the economy as the most important priority facing America and an equally stratospheric 81% think that jobs should be the paramount issue for the President to address. Significantly, 49% think that energy (meaning high gas prices)is a critical priority while only a paltry 28% think that global warming should be high on our list of things to be concerned with. That places it dead last on a list of twenty one issues. I can guarantee you that, if gasoline hits over four bucks a gallon again, the number of folk who demand action on energy will skyrocket while global warming will remain an afterthought for most of the population.
For a President who constantly reiterates that jobs are his number one priority:
For a President who constantly reiterates that jobs are his number one priority:
One would think that Obama's priorities would mirror those of the public he has sworn to serve and that his deeds would match his words. But, in fact, the opposite is true. In the Obama administration, pushing the AGW agenda always take precedence over the creation of jobs. If you think otherwise, then you don't understand Barry at all. As far as President Obama is concerned, if his environmental policies mean that we are paying a lot more for our gasoline and electricity, well that is the sacrifice we must all make. America will just have to weather the storm. In the magical fantasy world envisioned by the One, Americans will just bend over and take it. His wonderful green policies will pay off in the long term and after a little bit of shared sacrifice we will all have a better society that is fully in tune with our planet. Therefore, the higher energy prices we will inevitably and justly face will not merely be caused by the fluctuations of a free market, they will be the result of the stated and manipulated outcome of the Obamessiah's grand strategy.
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Now, some have argued that, since history shows conclusively that high energy prices are bad for the economy, that this means that President Obama is purposely trying to destroy the economy towards some nefarious aim. While this is not an illogical conclusion, it is not the one I share. It seems to me that the evidence shows that Obama (like Annie) is truly ignorant when it comes to basic economics and the effect that regulations and high energy prices have on the economy as a whole. As we discussed in previous sections, many on the left really don't see the connection between regulation and economic growth. Recently, even the people over at AP's Fact Check were scratching their heads over this whopper from the Bamster:
Obama: "The answer we're getting right now is: Well, we're going to roll back all these Obama regulations. … Does anybody really think that that is going to create jobs right now and meet the challenges of a global economy?"
The facts: Well, yes, some think it will. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce last month submitted a jobs proposal to Obama that included a call to ease regulations on businesses. It specifically called for streamlining environmental reviews on major construction projects and to delay the issuance of some potentially burdensome regulations until the economy and employment have improved. In the letter, Chamber President Thomas Donohue also called on Congress to pass legislation that would require congressional approval of major regulations. The chamber did not indicate how many jobs such regulatory changes could create, but it said: "Immediate regulatory relief is required in order to begin moving $1 trillion-$2 trillion in accumulated private capital off of the sidelines and into business expansion."
So, as you can see, Obama seems to have absolutely no clue why some of his policies have done so much damage to the economy. In more cynical moments, when the need to blame something, anything, for our stagnant economy, sometimes Barry stumbles on the truth and recognizes that factors like the price of oil have a major impact on jobs and the economy. Recently, he stated:
“The changes that have taken place in the Middle East sent oil prices up, and that gave a shock to the world economy.”
Now, one might forgive the President for the things he doesn't mention in that statement. Like the fact that it was his invasion of Libya that helped to spike prices or that it was his excessive spending and massive runup of debt that has forced the Federal Reserve to devalue the dollar. The impact of which was that the Fed monetization of the debt and two rounds of quantitative easing had the predictable result of driving up the prices of all commodities (including oil).
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Now, some have argued that, since history shows conclusively that high energy prices are bad for the economy, that this means that President Obama is purposely trying to destroy the economy towards some nefarious aim. While this is not an illogical conclusion, it is not the one I share. It seems to me that the evidence shows that Obama (like Annie) is truly ignorant when it comes to basic economics and the effect that regulations and high energy prices have on the economy as a whole. As we discussed in previous sections, many on the left really don't see the connection between regulation and economic growth. Recently, even the people over at AP's Fact Check were scratching their heads over this whopper from the Bamster:
Obama: "The answer we're getting right now is: Well, we're going to roll back all these Obama regulations. … Does anybody really think that that is going to create jobs right now and meet the challenges of a global economy?"
The facts: Well, yes, some think it will. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce last month submitted a jobs proposal to Obama that included a call to ease regulations on businesses. It specifically called for streamlining environmental reviews on major construction projects and to delay the issuance of some potentially burdensome regulations until the economy and employment have improved. In the letter, Chamber President Thomas Donohue also called on Congress to pass legislation that would require congressional approval of major regulations. The chamber did not indicate how many jobs such regulatory changes could create, but it said: "Immediate regulatory relief is required in order to begin moving $1 trillion-$2 trillion in accumulated private capital off of the sidelines and into business expansion."
So, as you can see, Obama seems to have absolutely no clue why some of his policies have done so much damage to the economy. In more cynical moments, when the need to blame something, anything, for our stagnant economy, sometimes Barry stumbles on the truth and recognizes that factors like the price of oil have a major impact on jobs and the economy. Recently, he stated:
“The changes that have taken place in the Middle East sent oil prices up, and that gave a shock to the world economy.”
Now, one might forgive the President for the things he doesn't mention in that statement. Like the fact that it was his invasion of Libya that helped to spike prices or that it was his excessive spending and massive runup of debt that has forced the Federal Reserve to devalue the dollar. The impact of which was that the Fed monetization of the debt and two rounds of quantitative easing had the predictable result of driving up the prices of all commodities (including oil).
Nor does Obama mention the impact of his moratorium on Gulf oil drilling in wreaking havoc with the supply/demand quotient. Or, how restricting drilling in other parts of the country helps to keep oil prices higher than they need be. As you saw from the Rick Santelli piece, Obama and his allies don't even think that more drilling would lower prices because the laws of supply/demand have suddenly been suspended because oil is sold on the "world market" and besides "drilling" is bad for the environment and shouldn't be done. To this ridiculous statement, Newt Gingrich responded:
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Despite Speaker Gingrich's and Rick Santelli's salient point about how the laws of supply and demand really work, Obama's defenders in the media-Matrix are quick to poo-poo the idea and make the more important point:
Despite Speaker Gingrich's and Rick Santelli's salient point about how the laws of supply and demand really work, Obama's defenders in the media-Matrix are quick to poo-poo the idea and make the more important point:
No matter how much we drill it isn't going to affect energy prices? Increasing the supply of something doesn't affect the price? Is Politico's Evan Thomas an economic ignoramus? No, he is just a shill for the AGW agenda. He let's the cat out of the bag when he says that energy prices should go up so that we can pursue alternative sources of energy. But, the American people don't want the price to go up Evan. Only you, Barry, and the AGW cabal do.
However, in order to disguise an energy policy based on high gasoline prices, one must come up with other excuses and faulty economic premises for why it's happening. Thus, the One never mentions that he has anything to do with causing the price of oil to go up. After all, his policies are always perfect and just. Why, he's the fourth greatest President ever:
However, in order to disguise an energy policy based on high gasoline prices, one must come up with other excuses and faulty economic premises for why it's happening. Thus, the One never mentions that he has anything to do with causing the price of oil to go up. After all, his policies are always perfect and just. Why, he's the fourth greatest President ever:
Don't you mere mortals understand that it is always outside factors beyond his control by evil forces like the Arab Spring, the Japanese Tsunami and the European Debt Crisis that are to be blamed if things are going less than swimmingly?
Whether you believe that Obama is being "Alibi Ike" and merely using the high price of oil as an excuse for why the economy sucks or that he actually does understand that more expensive energy has negative economic consequences and doesn't care, there is no question that his policies have contributed mightily to how costly it is. Therefore, it is clear that the One just thinks that stopping the rise of the oceans is more important than more trivial things. Like your job!
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President Obama believes that his anti-fossil fuel policy in necessary despite the fact that history has shown that it has been oil price spikes that have been the forerunners of many recessions. Consider this:
- The 1974-1975 US and global recession was triggered by the tripling of the price of oil following the Yom Kippur war and the following oil embargo.
- The 1980-1981 US and global recession was triggered by a spike in the price of oil following the Iranian revolution in 1979.
- The 1990-1991 US recession was partly caused by the spike in the price of oil following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990.
- The 2001 US and global recession was partly caused by the sharp increase in the price of oil in 2000 following the California energy crisis and the tensions in the Middle East (the beginning of the second intifada). But other factors were more important: the bust of the internet bubble, the collapse of real investment and, in smaller measure, the Fed tightening between 1999 and 2000.
In addition to this historical record, there can be no doubt that the oil price spike of 2007-8 which saw prices go as high as $5 a gallon in some places was a critical factor in triggering the recession. The foreclosures resulting from that economic dip was instrumental in causing the housing market to implode destroying the rest of the economy along with it. Take a look at how oil rising to almost $150/barrel coincides with the economic downturn that causes the first of the sub-prime foreclosures that hasten the collapse:
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President Obama believes that his anti-fossil fuel policy in necessary despite the fact that history has shown that it has been oil price spikes that have been the forerunners of many recessions. Consider this:
- The 1974-1975 US and global recession was triggered by the tripling of the price of oil following the Yom Kippur war and the following oil embargo.
- The 1980-1981 US and global recession was triggered by a spike in the price of oil following the Iranian revolution in 1979.
- The 1990-1991 US recession was partly caused by the spike in the price of oil following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990.
- The 2001 US and global recession was partly caused by the sharp increase in the price of oil in 2000 following the California energy crisis and the tensions in the Middle East (the beginning of the second intifada). But other factors were more important: the bust of the internet bubble, the collapse of real investment and, in smaller measure, the Fed tightening between 1999 and 2000.
In addition to this historical record, there can be no doubt that the oil price spike of 2007-8 which saw prices go as high as $5 a gallon in some places was a critical factor in triggering the recession. The foreclosures resulting from that economic dip was instrumental in causing the housing market to implode destroying the rest of the economy along with it. Take a look at how oil rising to almost $150/barrel coincides with the economic downturn that causes the first of the sub-prime foreclosures that hasten the collapse:
_As you can see, there is a clear and direct correlation between the massive spike in oil prices starting in the first quarter of 2008 and the start of the recession in the second quarter. You would think that having won the Presidency in large measure because of the collapse of the stock market and the financial sector, Obama would be keenly aware of this connection.
Therefore, all things being equal, one would think that President Obama would be doing everything in his power to facilitate an increase in domestic drilling in order to create jobs, increase economic output and increase federal tax revenues at a time when all are essential priorities for the American people. In addition, the more we can drill in the USA the less dependent we would be on what happens in the Middle East and Libya. However, if you thought that this simple and logical solution to several of our major domestic and national security priorities would be Obama's policy, then once again you don't know our Barry. Because all things are definitely not equal. It would seem that saving the planet trumps everything else.
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Now perhaps I have been overestimating the President's capacity for applied intelligence. I have assumed that he does see a direct correlation between high gas prices and economic performance, but has decided that Mother Nature is more important. I am also supposing that he is aware of the historical evidence that positive economic performance is directly tied in to cheap and reliable sources of oil. However, the more I study what the President has said and done over the past four years, the more I become convinced that his delusion that regulations only minimally impact the economy and jobs are also at play when it comes to the cost of a barrel of oil. It would seem that the same factors that make Obama underestimate the negative economic impact of his regulatory policy when it comes to things like health care also make him underestimate the negative impact of high energy prices as well.
It would appear that Obama thinks the economy can run just fine on $4 a gallon gas. Perhaps not as well as it could if oil were cheaper, but just peachy nonetheless. Therefore, in his mind, the tradeoff of slightly lower growth is worth the benefits of curing the earth of its fever. So, why let minor details like decades of historical evidence get in the way of his dreams? His reading of economics (or should I say Annienomics) says it won't be so bad. Trust him. He knows. Sure, he went to Harvard Law School not Harvard Business School. Sure, he's never held a real job in the private sector. But, he's the smartest man to ever be President.
Here's Senator Obama on the campaign trail in 2008 showing his mastery of the private sector and the efficacy of four dollar a gallon gasoline for our economy and the environment:
Therefore, all things being equal, one would think that President Obama would be doing everything in his power to facilitate an increase in domestic drilling in order to create jobs, increase economic output and increase federal tax revenues at a time when all are essential priorities for the American people. In addition, the more we can drill in the USA the less dependent we would be on what happens in the Middle East and Libya. However, if you thought that this simple and logical solution to several of our major domestic and national security priorities would be Obama's policy, then once again you don't know our Barry. Because all things are definitely not equal. It would seem that saving the planet trumps everything else.
9=====================================================================================================
Now perhaps I have been overestimating the President's capacity for applied intelligence. I have assumed that he does see a direct correlation between high gas prices and economic performance, but has decided that Mother Nature is more important. I am also supposing that he is aware of the historical evidence that positive economic performance is directly tied in to cheap and reliable sources of oil. However, the more I study what the President has said and done over the past four years, the more I become convinced that his delusion that regulations only minimally impact the economy and jobs are also at play when it comes to the cost of a barrel of oil. It would seem that the same factors that make Obama underestimate the negative economic impact of his regulatory policy when it comes to things like health care also make him underestimate the negative impact of high energy prices as well.
It would appear that Obama thinks the economy can run just fine on $4 a gallon gas. Perhaps not as well as it could if oil were cheaper, but just peachy nonetheless. Therefore, in his mind, the tradeoff of slightly lower growth is worth the benefits of curing the earth of its fever. So, why let minor details like decades of historical evidence get in the way of his dreams? His reading of economics (or should I say Annienomics) says it won't be so bad. Trust him. He knows. Sure, he went to Harvard Law School not Harvard Business School. Sure, he's never held a real job in the private sector. But, he's the smartest man to ever be President.
Here's Senator Obama on the campaign trail in 2008 showing his mastery of the private sector and the efficacy of four dollar a gallon gasoline for our economy and the environment:
_So, there you have it. Four dollar a gallon gas is optimal in order to achieve his environmental agenda, but he'd just prefer that the price to rise gradually as so as not to be such a shock to the people and the economy. However, from this clip, it is clear that Obama believes that $4 or higher gas must become the reality no matter what. Therefore, the common sense idea that it would be logical to drill for more oil domestically so as to increase the supply of energy and thus lower the price can never be allowed to gain acceptance among the American people. While that might be good for the economy, it would be ruinous to his green agenda which requires high prices to have even a prayer of working.
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Thus, a way must be found to poison the American people's support for the idea of increasing drilling. In pure Alinsky fashion, Obama chooses to ridicule the idea of drilling as unsophisticated and attempts to claim that he has a much smarter" approach to the problem. During the 2008 Presidential campaign in response to what he constantly categorized as the simplistic "drill baby drill" solution the McCain/Palin campaign supported, Obama proposed a more intelligent, complex and nuanced solution:
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Thus, a way must be found to poison the American people's support for the idea of increasing drilling. In pure Alinsky fashion, Obama chooses to ridicule the idea of drilling as unsophisticated and attempts to claim that he has a much smarter" approach to the problem. During the 2008 Presidential campaign in response to what he constantly categorized as the simplistic "drill baby drill" solution the McCain/Palin campaign supported, Obama proposed a more intelligent, complex and nuanced solution:
The "experts" say that properly inflating tires can save three to four percent of US oil consumption? And that's the answer to high energy prices and superior to the kinds of domestic and offshore drilling proposed by McCain/Palin? Really? Uh, no:
So, let's see, the GAO, also known in DC circles as the "experts", say that the savings would amount to less than one percent of oil consumption. In other words, peanuts! So who is taking pride in being ignorant now Barack? Who needs to go and do their homework, talk to some real experts and maybe apologize to that dummy, Governor Palin, hmmm?
While this whole tire inflation nonsense was always just a rhetorical dodge that Obama used to change the subject away from an issue he could not win in an open and honest debate, now that they've dodged the drilling issue and won the election, four dollar a gallon gas or higher can become a reality.
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I know that it is hard to imagine that a political party could survive in this country promoting higher prices for gasoline, but that's how good the media-Matrix complex is as making sure Democrats control the narrative. For example, once gasoline prices doubled since the beginning of his Presidency, Obama was under much pressure from an angry public to do something about it. Of course, the only answer to high prices is to increase supply and that means drilling for more oil. Since high prices are what Obama needs for his "green" agenda, that option must be taken off the table in the public's mind. So he tries to foist lies like this on a largely ignorant public:
While this whole tire inflation nonsense was always just a rhetorical dodge that Obama used to change the subject away from an issue he could not win in an open and honest debate, now that they've dodged the drilling issue and won the election, four dollar a gallon gas or higher can become a reality.
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I know that it is hard to imagine that a political party could survive in this country promoting higher prices for gasoline, but that's how good the media-Matrix complex is as making sure Democrats control the narrative. For example, once gasoline prices doubled since the beginning of his Presidency, Obama was under much pressure from an angry public to do something about it. Of course, the only answer to high prices is to increase supply and that means drilling for more oil. Since high prices are what Obama needs for his "green" agenda, that option must be taken off the table in the public's mind. So he tries to foist lies like this on a largely ignorant public:
Actually, Obama is mistaken. We don't produce 2% of the world's oil, we produce 10%. What the President was really referring to was that we supposedly only have 2% of the world's oil reserves, but we use 20% of the word's oil. Even so, what he is saying is extremely misleading:
Note, that the enviro-weenie doesn't dispute that we have enough fossil fuel reserves here in the US to be energy self-sufficient, he just rejects the idea because "the planet can't handle any more carbon". What total BS! But, in dismissing fossil fuels in favor of "alternatives", this idiot is revealing the real reason why Obama doesn't want to drill.
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In fact, if we did drill for oil everywhere in our country as the President sarcastically suggests, we could be energy independent. You'd think that the President shouldn't be able to get away with attempting to mislead the American public about such a vital issue, but that's why the left's control over the media-Matrix is so vital. As long as the willing stenographers of the media allow Obama to blatantly lie to the American people about how much oil exists in the US, he will. Fox News may call him out on his lies, but they are the only ones.
The truth is that had Democrats not opposed virtually every attempt to drill for oil in places like ANWR or off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts for the past thirty years, prices would be a lot lower today. But that was then and this is now. Back then, Democrats opposed drilling because of local environmental concerns. Now they oppose it because their green dreams depend on high prices. Unfortunately for them, recent discoveries of vast oil deposits like the Bakken field in North Dakota and new drilling and extraction techniques have now vaulted the US into the front of the pack when it comes to total recoverable fossil fuel reserves:
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In fact, if we did drill for oil everywhere in our country as the President sarcastically suggests, we could be energy independent. You'd think that the President shouldn't be able to get away with attempting to mislead the American public about such a vital issue, but that's why the left's control over the media-Matrix is so vital. As long as the willing stenographers of the media allow Obama to blatantly lie to the American people about how much oil exists in the US, he will. Fox News may call him out on his lies, but they are the only ones.
The truth is that had Democrats not opposed virtually every attempt to drill for oil in places like ANWR or off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts for the past thirty years, prices would be a lot lower today. But that was then and this is now. Back then, Democrats opposed drilling because of local environmental concerns. Now they oppose it because their green dreams depend on high prices. Unfortunately for them, recent discoveries of vast oil deposits like the Bakken field in North Dakota and new drilling and extraction techniques have now vaulted the US into the front of the pack when it comes to total recoverable fossil fuel reserves:
Great news, eh? Want some even better news? We also have billions of barrels of recoverable oil which could enable us to be oil independent for the next fifty years:
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While you and I might think that this is great news. The left hates it! Ye Gads! All that domestic energy is going to make the price of oil go down not up. People won't stop driving their SUV's. The green agenda will be in serious trouble:
While you and I might think that this is great news. The left hates it! Ye Gads! All that domestic energy is going to make the price of oil go down not up. People won't stop driving their SUV's. The green agenda will be in serious trouble:
_With all that energy available, there can only be one question for the left. How can we reverse this trend? Well, as you would expect, they are doing everything in their power. Unfortunately, as you have just seen, a huge percentage of that oil resides on Federal lands and waters:
And that means that the decisions about whether to drill or not are made by Barry and his bureaucrats. As you would expect, despite all of this available oil and the direct economic and national security benefits that can be derived from drilling for it, Obama and his environmental allies are doing everything in their power to prevent this from happening. For instance, when it comes to drilling offshore, the Obama administration claims it is too dangerous. This objection to offshore drilling may no longer be the primary impetus behind the Obama energy policy, but it is still a major factor behind why his party and a significant percentage of the public are opposed to further drilling in Federal waters. Considering the environmental damage caused in the Gulf during the BP Oil spill, it is not surprising that many American's have reassessed their position. After all, who can forget the nonstop media drumbeat about the greatest man-made environmental catastrophe in history right?
Well... maybe. When one considers how many years and through how many hurricanes we've been successfully extracting oil from the Gulf of Mexico without major accidents until the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the accident rate of offshore drilling is astonishingly low. In fact, eight of the top ten oil spills in history were either tanker or pipeline accidents. That said, it cannot be denied that it would appear that there are inherent and potentially enormous hazards in continuing to drill for oil offshore.
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However, when analyzing what exactly happened with the Deepwater Horizon spill, it becomes apparent that much of the ecological disaster was the result of a failure of government. Had our government responded more quickly with more of what was needed, the extent of the disaster would have been far less. For all the billions of dollars in tax revenue that was taken in by the treasury in the form of royalties from oil obtained in the Gulf of Mexico, the government utterly failed to follow and fund it's own recommendations on how to prevent just such a disaster:
Well... maybe. When one considers how many years and through how many hurricanes we've been successfully extracting oil from the Gulf of Mexico without major accidents until the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the accident rate of offshore drilling is astonishingly low. In fact, eight of the top ten oil spills in history were either tanker or pipeline accidents. That said, it cannot be denied that it would appear that there are inherent and potentially enormous hazards in continuing to drill for oil offshore.
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However, when analyzing what exactly happened with the Deepwater Horizon spill, it becomes apparent that much of the ecological disaster was the result of a failure of government. Had our government responded more quickly with more of what was needed, the extent of the disaster would have been far less. For all the billions of dollars in tax revenue that was taken in by the treasury in the form of royalties from oil obtained in the Gulf of Mexico, the government utterly failed to follow and fund it's own recommendations on how to prevent just such a disaster:
Fascinating, eh? It's possible that the spill could have been contained by burnoffs had Bill Clinton followed his own Administration's disaster plan and funded the booms, had George W. Bush done so in his eight years or had Barack Obama during his term. Apparently, this was a bi-partisan failure. However, the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion could still have been greatly ameliorated had President Obama acted more quickly and decisively and been less worried about the fortunes of his union cronies:
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Granted, the ending of the above video is a bit hyper-partisan and over the top, but the facts of Obama's mishandling of the crisis in the Gulf cannot be denied. Now some people who are conspiratorially inclined might look at this and say that this accident was an excuse for a deliberate attempt by a liberal media to hype this spill into a catastrophe far, far more horrific than it actually was. They might point out that Obama showed he cared more about his Union buddies than the environment of the Gulf because of his refusal to grant a waiver of the Jones act and allow foreign ships to come in to help us contain the spill. And all these black helicopter nuts might also argue that the administration's slow handling of the crisis was purposeful. According to these theories, the media and the administration did everything they could to make the situation appear and become much worse in order that the offshore oil drilling that they all hate so much would lose public support and could be ended once and for all:
Granted, the ending of the above video is a bit hyper-partisan and over the top, but the facts of Obama's mishandling of the crisis in the Gulf cannot be denied. Now some people who are conspiratorially inclined might look at this and say that this accident was an excuse for a deliberate attempt by a liberal media to hype this spill into a catastrophe far, far more horrific than it actually was. They might point out that Obama showed he cared more about his Union buddies than the environment of the Gulf because of his refusal to grant a waiver of the Jones act and allow foreign ships to come in to help us contain the spill. And all these black helicopter nuts might also argue that the administration's slow handling of the crisis was purposeful. According to these theories, the media and the administration did everything they could to make the situation appear and become much worse in order that the offshore oil drilling that they all hate so much would lose public support and could be ended once and for all:
I, for one, am willing to be a little more charitable. I do think that the media was hyping the story. Partly for the ideological reasons I just described and partly because in a 24/7 news culture, hyping a story is great for ratings. However, I don't think that Obama and his administration botched their handling of the spill for political or ideological reasons. I think that they were just totally and completely incompetent and Obama's inexperience and lack of managerial skills left him unable to lead effectively.
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That said, never let it be thought that this Administration is one that would let a good crisis go to waste. Naturally, shortly after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the Obama administration ordered a moratorium on drilling in the gulf:
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That said, never let it be thought that this Administration is one that would let a good crisis go to waste. Naturally, shortly after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the Obama administration ordered a moratorium on drilling in the gulf:
Could it be any more obvious what Obama and his administration are up to? Disregard the advice of the very experts you brought in to assist you on this issue, but then lie and claim that they peer reviewed and approved your moratorium. Disregard the Federal Court injunction against the moratorium and disregard the inconvenient evidence which suggests that the better choice for the environment is to continue drilling. After all, what does the advice of the "experts" matter when weighed against the chance to score a victory for the planet, right?
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Long after the danger had passed and virtually every expert was suggesting it was safe to drill again, the Obama administration continued to milk every last possible drop of their ideological triumph. They imposed a seven year moratorium on drilling on either coast and slowed drilling in the Gulf to a trickle:
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Long after the danger had passed and virtually every expert was suggesting it was safe to drill again, the Obama administration continued to milk every last possible drop of their ideological triumph. They imposed a seven year moratorium on drilling on either coast and slowed drilling in the Gulf to a trickle:
As a result, the price of oil spiked up and future supplies from the Gulf of Mexico will be curtailed dramatically. Mission accomplished! Yet this policy came at a price. Jobs. Despite the fact that Obama claims that the last thought in his head every night and the first when he wakes up is how to create jobs, his administration is purposely killing them with their green agenda:
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As you can see Obama's policy worked beautifully. It's outcome was entirely predictable:
As you can see Obama's policy worked beautifully. It's outcome was entirely predictable:
As a consequence of the Obama administration's decisions, domestic energy production has decreased and reliance on foreign energy has increased. We've lost thousands of jobs, lost billions in revenue, worsened our balance of trade and made ourselves more vulnerable to oil shocks from the unstable middle east. However, we have saved the environment from ecological catastrophe, right? It would be nice to believe that. It would be wonderful if that were true and the sacrifice in ruined lives was worth it. It would be fantastic if we could believe that the One is able to stop the rise of the oceans and save the world from environmental disaster. Unfortunately, this is all just another Obama fantasy. Kinda like all that hopey changey drivel.
You see, while President Obama has mandated his moratorium and permitorium on drilling in our waters because he claims it's unsafe, he has been actively encouraging other countries to drill even deeper by lending them billions of taxpayer dollars to do it. Say it ain't so Joe! Sorry, it's so:
You see, while President Obama has mandated his moratorium and permitorium on drilling in our waters because he claims it's unsafe, he has been actively encouraging other countries to drill even deeper by lending them billions of taxpayer dollars to do it. Say it ain't so Joe! Sorry, it's so:
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But, hey, what's a billion when you can lend two? Sure it's too dangerous for us to drill at 5000 feet, but it's totally cool for an "advanced" technological power and known environmental (ahem) "paragon" like Brazil to drill at 8000 feet, right? Crazy, I know. But not to Obama:
But, hey, what's a billion when you can lend two? Sure it's too dangerous for us to drill at 5000 feet, but it's totally cool for an "advanced" technological power and known environmental (ahem) "paragon" like Brazil to drill at 8000 feet, right? Crazy, I know. But not to Obama:
Surely, it must be a coincidence that the oil moratorium in the Gulf has sent some our best oil rigs to Brazil and that the President himself went to that country and promised them two billion of our tax dollars to drill for oil deeper than Deepwater Horizon and then told them he wanted us to be their best customer and that the head of that country is a former communist and that the biggest beneficiary of all this is Petrobras and one of the largest stockholders of that company is none other than the spooky dude himself: George Soros. Hmmm. Maybe these conspiracy guys are onto something!
Is there any question that it is beyond hypocritical and illogical to say that we can't drill for oil here in America because it isn't safe, but then turn around and say it's okay to drill even deeper overseas? What really takes the cake is that while Obama and his enviro buddies are fiddling while the country burns, the Communists in Cuba are stealing our oil right from underneath us:
Is there any question that it is beyond hypocritical and illogical to say that we can't drill for oil here in America because it isn't safe, but then turn around and say it's okay to drill even deeper overseas? What really takes the cake is that while Obama and his enviro buddies are fiddling while the country burns, the Communists in Cuba are stealing our oil right from underneath us:
__
Let's see if I get that. The communist Cubans are going to oversee and regulate a Spanish oil company using a communist Chinese drilling platform to drill for oil deep in the Gulf. And these guys will do a much better job than global oil giant BP with US regulators overseeing them? If offshore drilling is really as bad as Obama and his allies say it is, this idea seems kind of problematic, doesn't it? But, not to worry Floridians, all will be well. The One, the man who spearheaded Deepwater Horizon accident crisis management effort, is going to personally inspect the rig to make sure its safe. What could possibly go wrong?
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When it comes to drilling offshore, I have no problem accepting that a solid intellectual argument can be made that the theoretical possibility of an environmental catastrophe outweighs the benefits of drilling. I certainly don't agree with it and would argue that the incredible record of offshore drilling safety in deep, deep water like the North Sea and the outer Gulf is still superior to the accident record of transporting that oil from the Middle East via Supertanker. Neither is perfect, mind you. But, offshore drilling has shown itself to be safer for the environment in my view. Especially after we examine the evidence of what happened during the BP spill and how preventable most of the ecological damage was.
Even after the incredibly horrible accident in the Gulf and the Obama administration's total bungling of the containment and leak plugging operations, the damage to the ecosystem of the Gulf was nowhere near as bad as was predicted by a hysterical media:
Let's see if I get that. The communist Cubans are going to oversee and regulate a Spanish oil company using a communist Chinese drilling platform to drill for oil deep in the Gulf. And these guys will do a much better job than global oil giant BP with US regulators overseeing them? If offshore drilling is really as bad as Obama and his allies say it is, this idea seems kind of problematic, doesn't it? But, not to worry Floridians, all will be well. The One, the man who spearheaded Deepwater Horizon accident crisis management effort, is going to personally inspect the rig to make sure its safe. What could possibly go wrong?
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When it comes to drilling offshore, I have no problem accepting that a solid intellectual argument can be made that the theoretical possibility of an environmental catastrophe outweighs the benefits of drilling. I certainly don't agree with it and would argue that the incredible record of offshore drilling safety in deep, deep water like the North Sea and the outer Gulf is still superior to the accident record of transporting that oil from the Middle East via Supertanker. Neither is perfect, mind you. But, offshore drilling has shown itself to be safer for the environment in my view. Especially after we examine the evidence of what happened during the BP spill and how preventable most of the ecological damage was.
Even after the incredibly horrible accident in the Gulf and the Obama administration's total bungling of the containment and leak plugging operations, the damage to the ecosystem of the Gulf was nowhere near as bad as was predicted by a hysterical media:
While it is heartening to know that the "health" score of the Gulf has only fallen three points from 71 to 68 as a result of the BP disaster, it is not difficult to understand why many people oppose offshore drilling. However, to call oneself an environmentalist and use that reasoning to purposely slow down the permitting of drilling in the Gulf forcing many oil platforms elsewhere while, at the same time, actively supporting, with US tax dollars no less, other, less environmentally conscious nations to drill in even deeper water kind of invalidates that whole argument. I thought we were all "citizens of the world" and that the environment knows no borders. Why is it totally ok to have the Brazilians and Mexicans destroy their own waters, but not us? This kind of fallacious reasoning is such a paradox that it defies any logical argument to support it. That is, unless the conspiracy theorists are right and Barry is just helping out his buddy George Soros. Just Saying...
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Nevertheless, perhaps Obama has made a pragmatic determination that offshore drilling is just too dangerous to continue here in the good ol' USA and he's decided that it's better to let other lesser nations pollute their own waters. That's fine. I never took our Barack to be that cynical given his lofty rhetoric about saving the world, but you never know. So, it would appear that Obama is either an environmental nationalist, a corrupt politician in league with George Soros or operating in a world of make believe where using logic to determine policy has no place. A better answer, I think, is that his plan for saving the planet requires expensive oil. Therefore, anything he can do to keep the price high is worth doing no matter how illogical or hypocritical it looks. In any case, he seems determined to choke off domestic offshore oil drilling. But, hey, that's ok. There's plenty of oil available on land. Unfortunately, Barry doesn't like that approach much either. Imagine that!
Take drilling in ANWR for instance. The Democrats have blocked drilling in this area for twenty five years claiming it would destroy a "pristine" and beautiful area and harm local wildlife. Of course, in the past they said that the building of the Alaskan Oil Pipeline would destroy the Caribou herds and that proved to be totally wrong:
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Nevertheless, perhaps Obama has made a pragmatic determination that offshore drilling is just too dangerous to continue here in the good ol' USA and he's decided that it's better to let other lesser nations pollute their own waters. That's fine. I never took our Barack to be that cynical given his lofty rhetoric about saving the world, but you never know. So, it would appear that Obama is either an environmental nationalist, a corrupt politician in league with George Soros or operating in a world of make believe where using logic to determine policy has no place. A better answer, I think, is that his plan for saving the planet requires expensive oil. Therefore, anything he can do to keep the price high is worth doing no matter how illogical or hypocritical it looks. In any case, he seems determined to choke off domestic offshore oil drilling. But, hey, that's ok. There's plenty of oil available on land. Unfortunately, Barry doesn't like that approach much either. Imagine that!
Take drilling in ANWR for instance. The Democrats have blocked drilling in this area for twenty five years claiming it would destroy a "pristine" and beautiful area and harm local wildlife. Of course, in the past they said that the building of the Alaskan Oil Pipeline would destroy the Caribou herds and that proved to be totally wrong:
Hmmm, let's see. Lots of jobs, lots of oil, lots of tax revenues and increased numbers of caribou. You'd think that this kind of information would have led to a reassessment by reasonable politicians about the benefits of drilling in ANWR. While that might be true of intelligent and logical people, it is totally irrelevant to Democrats and their environmental puppet masters. They continue to put out the false meme that ANWR is some beautiful pristine place and is a national treasure. Like dutiful stenographers, the media parrots their propaganda and only shows the beautiful images of the parts of ANWR where drilling is not going to occur. They absolutely refuse to show images of the barren wasteland that drilling will actually happen. Therefore, even at a time when jobs, oil and tax revenue are at a premium and the cost to the government is zero and economic benefits are high, Obama adamantly refuses to even consider it:
This then is the Obama oil drilling policy. When doing a cost/benefit analysis they determine: infinitesimal and unprovable impact on global warming combined with potential harm to barren wasteland, Caribou and mosquitoes outweighs significant economic benefits and jobs!
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Okay, we can't drill in ANWR, but what about in Colorado where the amount of Shale oil available is staggering? Uh, no again:
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Okay, we can't drill in ANWR, but what about in Colorado where the amount of Shale oil available is staggering? Uh, no again:
Are you beginning to see a pattern here? We can't drill in the Gulf, we can't drill offshore on either coast, we can't drill in ANWR and we can't drill in Colorado because of the tired and fictitious excuse that doing so would endanger our environment. Yet, the President still has the audacity to claim that jobs are his number one priority! Yeah, right. It's more like the audacity of nope!
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Therefore, absent permission to drill in the US, we are going to have to continue to import oil from foreign countries for the foreseeable future. But, what if another country was willing to sell us the oil we need via pipeline as opposed to dangerous oil tankers? Supposing that oil were to come from a close ally, economic trading partner and an environmentally sensitive nation with a proven track record? What if buying this oil from our close friend would allow us to rely less on oil from countries that don't have our best interests at heart like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia? Supposing that the construction of said pipeline would create thousands of jobs immediately and long term and result in billions in tax revenues for zero cost in public expenditure? What's more, supposing the US State Department under the direction of Hillbillary Clinton did a three year environmental assessment and gave it the go ahead? A slam dunk right? A completely logical and sensible policy and an absolute no brainer, right? Surely, the Bamster can't object to even this? Hey, this is Barry we are talking about:
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Therefore, absent permission to drill in the US, we are going to have to continue to import oil from foreign countries for the foreseeable future. But, what if another country was willing to sell us the oil we need via pipeline as opposed to dangerous oil tankers? Supposing that oil were to come from a close ally, economic trading partner and an environmentally sensitive nation with a proven track record? What if buying this oil from our close friend would allow us to rely less on oil from countries that don't have our best interests at heart like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia? Supposing that the construction of said pipeline would create thousands of jobs immediately and long term and result in billions in tax revenues for zero cost in public expenditure? What's more, supposing the US State Department under the direction of Hillbillary Clinton did a three year environmental assessment and gave it the go ahead? A slam dunk right? A completely logical and sensible policy and an absolute no brainer, right? Surely, the Bamster can't object to even this? Hey, this is Barry we are talking about:
The Keystone Pipeline may make a lot of sense for economic, environmental and national security reasons, but Obama's environmentalist friends and backers are not happy campers:
As you can see, environmentalist activists believe that Tar Sands from Canada are the absolute worst form of oil there is and believe that Americans using it rather than the Chinese will somehow speed up global warming which will kill everyone. With such reasoning, it is safe to assume that they are not very logical or well informed:
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Now, I have a hard time figuring these people out. Here you have the loathsome Rachel Maddow of MSNBC talking about how we should "lean forward" and build things like the Hoover Dam (even though the enviro-nuts she's aligned with have blocked any new dams from ever being built ever again):
Now, I have a hard time figuring these people out. Here you have the loathsome Rachel Maddow of MSNBC talking about how we should "lean forward" and build things like the Hoover Dam (even though the enviro-nuts she's aligned with have blocked any new dams from ever being built ever again):
And yet, when a massive infrastructure project comes along exactly like the one Ms. Maddow is referring to in this video... She and her left-wing allies reject it:
Even these idiots and ideologues must know that for long time into the foreseeable future we are going to need oil. And there is no doubt that a pipeline has been proven to be the safest way to transport crude oil. There is also no doubt that when you compare the environmental record of Canada to say Venezuela or Nigeria, it isn't even close. To argue that the difference between extracting oil from Tar Sands and then pipelining it into the US is going to be more dangerous to the environment than supertanking an equivalent amount of oil to the US is ridiculous.
Currently, there are over 55,000 miles of oil pipelines in operation in the US:
Currently, there are over 55,000 miles of oil pipelines in operation in the US:
_Considering how many miles of pipeline we already have in operation, adding another2147 miles (or 4%) more seems like an afterthought as far as the likelihood of an accident is concerned. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made it abundantly clear to
President Obama that if we don't want to build the pipeline here and buy
their oil, they are perfectly happy to build a pipeline to Vancouver and
sell it to the Chinese. Therefore, no matter what the US decides, a pipeline is going to be built that
"threatens" the environment. If the Tar Sands oil is sold to the
Chinese, it will need to be shipped for thousands of miles. During
that journey the possibility of an accidental spill is further increased
and the energy it takes ships to reach port in China will mean the oil
will have an even bigger carbon footprint than if it stayed in North
America .
25====================================================================================================
By rejecting the Keystone XL environmentalists are causing total oil shipments to double. How can that be? Well, all of the Canadian oil is going to be shipped to China and all the oil that we would have bought from Canada now has to be shipped to the US from other countries. Thus, double the potential trouble. How can that possibly be a better choice for the environment than a pipeline? Well, if you know your typical "know nothing" enviro-nut, safety is not their primary concern. As you saw in the above videos, their chief objection is that this oil is particularly "dirty" and has a high carbon footprint because of the large amount of energy needed to extract it. That may be true, but how does that compare to the carbon footprint of shipping oil into the US and out of Canada? Is the difference of that equation so great that it is a threat to the planet? Only a fool or an ignoramus would think so. Besides, whether we buy it or the Chinese buy it, the oil is going to be extracted and used. Instead of being refined and used here in the USA, it will go to China. As if we aren't already shipping enough jobs and wealth to them.
Even from a strict environmental perspective, building the pipeline here is better for the planet. The idea that our approving the Keystone XL will will in any way speed up global warming is ludicrous on its face. Yet, as you can see, despite all of the evidence, these illogical wackjobs are vehemently opposed to what seems to be a slam dunk winner for the US in terms of jobs, oil independence and, yes, the environment.
So opposed is the environmental movement to the Keystone XL that some of Obama's biggest backers are threatening to stop fundraising for him if he approves this deal:
"This is not just about LCV (League of Conservation Voters), which spent nearly $1 million to help elect Obama in 2008, or any other group that engages in electoral politics in the upcoming election," said Tiernan Sittenfeld, the league's senior vice president for government affairs, in a not-so-veiled threat.
"It's about people out there who care deeply about the environment, how much they volunteer, how many doors they knock on, how much they contribute directly," Sittenfeld added. "We have LCV supporters who maxed out in the Obama campaign in 2008 who have told us they are not going to give this time around if the president approves this pipeline."
Now, you and I might say that issues of fundraising and get out the vote efforts should pale in comparison to our country's national security, our relations with our closest ally and neighbor, and all the jobs that would be created for Obama's union buddies at a time of high unemployment. But caught between his environmentalist allies on the one hand and his union buddies on the other, our great leader did what he always does when decisions are tough. He voted "present" and delayed the choice till after the election:
25====================================================================================================
By rejecting the Keystone XL environmentalists are causing total oil shipments to double. How can that be? Well, all of the Canadian oil is going to be shipped to China and all the oil that we would have bought from Canada now has to be shipped to the US from other countries. Thus, double the potential trouble. How can that possibly be a better choice for the environment than a pipeline? Well, if you know your typical "know nothing" enviro-nut, safety is not their primary concern. As you saw in the above videos, their chief objection is that this oil is particularly "dirty" and has a high carbon footprint because of the large amount of energy needed to extract it. That may be true, but how does that compare to the carbon footprint of shipping oil into the US and out of Canada? Is the difference of that equation so great that it is a threat to the planet? Only a fool or an ignoramus would think so. Besides, whether we buy it or the Chinese buy it, the oil is going to be extracted and used. Instead of being refined and used here in the USA, it will go to China. As if we aren't already shipping enough jobs and wealth to them.
Even from a strict environmental perspective, building the pipeline here is better for the planet. The idea that our approving the Keystone XL will will in any way speed up global warming is ludicrous on its face. Yet, as you can see, despite all of the evidence, these illogical wackjobs are vehemently opposed to what seems to be a slam dunk winner for the US in terms of jobs, oil independence and, yes, the environment.
So opposed is the environmental movement to the Keystone XL that some of Obama's biggest backers are threatening to stop fundraising for him if he approves this deal:
"This is not just about LCV (League of Conservation Voters), which spent nearly $1 million to help elect Obama in 2008, or any other group that engages in electoral politics in the upcoming election," said Tiernan Sittenfeld, the league's senior vice president for government affairs, in a not-so-veiled threat.
"It's about people out there who care deeply about the environment, how much they volunteer, how many doors they knock on, how much they contribute directly," Sittenfeld added. "We have LCV supporters who maxed out in the Obama campaign in 2008 who have told us they are not going to give this time around if the president approves this pipeline."
Now, you and I might say that issues of fundraising and get out the vote efforts should pale in comparison to our country's national security, our relations with our closest ally and neighbor, and all the jobs that would be created for Obama's union buddies at a time of high unemployment. But caught between his environmentalist allies on the one hand and his union buddies on the other, our great leader did what he always does when decisions are tough. He voted "present" and delayed the choice till after the election:
_Yup, Jim Angle has that right. The Democrats don't want any major new oil projects. How hypocritical to have a President who says he is "focused like a laser beam" on jobs and the economy, yet kills jobs in the Gulf because he doesn't like offshore drilling, kills jobs in Alaska and Colorado to preserve the "pristine" environment there and who risks offending an ally and losing hundreds of millions of barrels of oil over similar nonexistent ecological "concerns". Welcome the Obama administration energy policy follies!
26====================================================================================================
Now, as I've said before, no matter what we do in terms of a "green" energy future, we are going to need oil in the meantime. You'd think it would make perfect sense to reap the economic and national security windfall by acquiring as much of it as we can from our own supplies and those of our neighbors. But doing things that make economic sense and creates jobs is not the Obama way. The Obama agenda is to go green. Thus, his Energy Secretary, Ken Salazar responds to the sensible ideas of the drill baby drill proponents by saying this:
26====================================================================================================
Now, as I've said before, no matter what we do in terms of a "green" energy future, we are going to need oil in the meantime. You'd think it would make perfect sense to reap the economic and national security windfall by acquiring as much of it as we can from our own supplies and those of our neighbors. But doing things that make economic sense and creates jobs is not the Obama way. The Obama agenda is to go green. Thus, his Energy Secretary, Ken Salazar responds to the sensible ideas of the drill baby drill proponents by saying this:
So, there you have it. Exploiting our own oil, reaping the incredible economic benefits and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs are irrelevant to the Secretary of the Interior. That this drivel comes out of the mouth of this man is no surprise. When he was a Senator, he and his party rejected opening up the outer continental shelf for drilling even if oil prices hit $10/gallon:
No need to drill anymore. This whole drill baby drill stuff is too simplistic and old fashioned, right Ken?
27====================================================================================================
What we really need to talk about, according to Ken Salazar, is how "we move forward with energy legislation that moves us into this new energy future". What this enviro-nut is actually saying is that oil has no place in that future, so why drill for it? And what might replace oil? President Obama has offered his suggestion:
27====================================================================================================
What we really need to talk about, according to Ken Salazar, is how "we move forward with energy legislation that moves us into this new energy future". What this enviro-nut is actually saying is that oil has no place in that future, so why drill for it? And what might replace oil? President Obama has offered his suggestion:
Algae, Mr. President? Really? In like what? Twenty years? Thirty? How is that worth mentioning as a solution to the high price of oil today? Ridiculous, no?
Well, if algae as a means of powering our cars is twenty to fifty years off, what does the smartest man ever to be President suggest we do in the meantime? Something totally unrealistic of course:
Listening to the snarkiness and sarcasm of a guy from Chicago who never had to commute fifty miles to go to work and is driven around by the Secret Service in a car that gets that same eight miles to a gallon suggest that those of us who own big SUV's are the problem is maddening. That Obama suggests that this guy with a family of ten get a "hybrid van" when no such thing exists, shows his total ignorance of the US car market and has become known as his Marie Antoinette moment. It's no longer let them eat cake... It's let them buy a hybrid van.
28====================================================================================================
Now to be charitable to the President, he truly knows nothing about the car market even though he owns a car company, so in this unscripted moment where the teleprompter isn't there to save him, he spouts utter nonsense about their being a hybrid vehicle for a man with ten kids. That said, Barack Obama does believe that the way to transition into his "green" future is to buy a hybrid, or better yet, a Chevy Volt which the government is subsidizing at a quarter of a million bucks per car:
28====================================================================================================
Now to be charitable to the President, he truly knows nothing about the car market even though he owns a car company, so in this unscripted moment where the teleprompter isn't there to save him, he spouts utter nonsense about their being a hybrid vehicle for a man with ten kids. That said, Barack Obama does believe that the way to transition into his "green" future is to buy a hybrid, or better yet, a Chevy Volt which the government is subsidizing at a quarter of a million bucks per car:
Let's face it, the Obama administration's policies when it comes to oil are designed solely to drive the price up so that we can, as Secretary Salazar suggests, transition to "alternative" forms of energy like the useless Chevy Volt and algae: the super fuel of tomorrow:
For those of you who still have trouble accepting that $4+/gallon gasoline is the President's oil policy, here is his Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu to make it abundantly clear:
And there it is... Secretary Chu and the Obama administration is "sorry" that people are suffering from high gas prices, but the policy of the President is not to lower prices, but to get everyone to conserve energy, buy electric cars and transition to algae. If the economy suffers, if unemployment remains high and if families struggle to make ends meet because of high gas prices, that is just the price everyone will have to pay to save the planet. The Obama administration is "sorry" this has to happen, but we all need to take our medicine so that the "planet can start to heal".
29====================================================================================================
Well, that's the Obama policy on oil and gasoline. What about his policy on electricity generation? Well, as you would expect, the policy is exactly the same. Fossil fuel based generation will be made prohibitively expensive so that we can transition to alternative sources of electricity. The high prices you will be forced to pay for electricity to promote this transition are necessary because renewables like wind and solar will never be able to compete against fossil fuels on an even playing field. Thus, the higher price we will all be paying will go to the massive subsidies that will be necessary:
29====================================================================================================
Well, that's the Obama policy on oil and gasoline. What about his policy on electricity generation? Well, as you would expect, the policy is exactly the same. Fossil fuel based generation will be made prohibitively expensive so that we can transition to alternative sources of electricity. The high prices you will be forced to pay for electricity to promote this transition are necessary because renewables like wind and solar will never be able to compete against fossil fuels on an even playing field. Thus, the higher price we will all be paying will go to the massive subsidies that will be necessary:
Unfortunately, the subsidies needed to make solar and wind even remotely sustainable are in themselves unsustainable:
When one looks at a chart of where we currently generate our electricity:
It becomes abundantly clear that since President Obama's environmentalist allies hate nuclear energy and hydroelectric dams, it will require a massive undertaking to ever reach his stated goal of 80% renewables by 2035. This is, of course, assuming that America's rising population and increasing demand for energy remains at 2010 levels which is as unlikely as us ever reaching Obama's lofty "green" targets. That is, unless something drastically changes.
30===================================================================================================
If one accepts that Barack Obama is not just dispensing political pablum to his environmental base and is serious about his plan for achieving his renewable energy dreams, then it is easy to see that when he promised to "transform" America, he wasn't kidding. Because the only way that his dreams of a"clean" energy future can be realized is to completely rig the rules of the game against fossil fuels. Free markets? Who need's the stinkin' free markets. Let's regulate oil drilling and carbon spewing utilities to the point that fossil fuels are priced to the level where "green" energy can begin compete with it. That is the whole Obama "green" strategy in a nutshell.
Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, in an interview let it slip that was the direction that we are headed when he said:
"Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,"
The price of gasoline in Europe at the time was $10 a gallon. Obama, himself, emphasized that this was indeed going to be his overall energy strategy. He is on record as saying it is necessary to both lower our overall energy consumption through conservation and, at the same time, make "green" energy price competitive:
30===================================================================================================
If one accepts that Barack Obama is not just dispensing political pablum to his environmental base and is serious about his plan for achieving his renewable energy dreams, then it is easy to see that when he promised to "transform" America, he wasn't kidding. Because the only way that his dreams of a"clean" energy future can be realized is to completely rig the rules of the game against fossil fuels. Free markets? Who need's the stinkin' free markets. Let's regulate oil drilling and carbon spewing utilities to the point that fossil fuels are priced to the level where "green" energy can begin compete with it. That is the whole Obama "green" strategy in a nutshell.
Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, in an interview let it slip that was the direction that we are headed when he said:
"Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,"
The price of gasoline in Europe at the time was $10 a gallon. Obama, himself, emphasized that this was indeed going to be his overall energy strategy. He is on record as saying it is necessary to both lower our overall energy consumption through conservation and, at the same time, make "green" energy price competitive:
True to his words in the campaign, in every area in which Obama's administration has control when it comes to fossil fuels, a deliberate attempt is being made to boost prices and send "price signals" so that everyone will ditch their SUV's and stop living so well. In other words, Obama is telling the middle class: the heck with your job, the economy, your nice big house and your Chevy Suburban, we have a planet to save! If you follow what Barack was saying in the above video, you'd think that he wants prices to go up in order that we begin to conserve energy. It sounds absolutely sensible if you are worried about climate change, doesn't it? After all a Honda Fit uses far less gasoline than a big old SUV even if it is far less safe. But what's a few extra traffic deaths when we are talking about healing mother earth, right?
However, as we have seen, conservation is just a small part of why Energy Secretary Chu wants gas prices to be ten bucks a gallon. The plan is to keep prices for energy artificially high so that the Solyndra's of the world won't go bankrupt. Then the world will be saved because Barry will have stopped the rise of the oceans. Can I hear a Hallelujah!?
31====================================================================================================
If one accepts that fossil fuels cause warming which will destroy life as we know it, then the Obama green energy strategy would seem to be just what the doctor ordered. Except for one salient point. Like just about everything else that Obama proposes, it sounds great in theory, but once it is analyzed in the real world it is exposed for the ivory tower fantasy that it is. Even Whoopi Goldberg understands that sometimes reality has a way of biting you in the ass:
However, as we have seen, conservation is just a small part of why Energy Secretary Chu wants gas prices to be ten bucks a gallon. The plan is to keep prices for energy artificially high so that the Solyndra's of the world won't go bankrupt. Then the world will be saved because Barry will have stopped the rise of the oceans. Can I hear a Hallelujah!?
31====================================================================================================
If one accepts that fossil fuels cause warming which will destroy life as we know it, then the Obama green energy strategy would seem to be just what the doctor ordered. Except for one salient point. Like just about everything else that Obama proposes, it sounds great in theory, but once it is analyzed in the real world it is exposed for the ivory tower fantasy that it is. Even Whoopi Goldberg understands that sometimes reality has a way of biting you in the ass:
_Now, while I hardly agree with Whoopi that communism sounds great on paper, I do agree that once you try to implement huge and comprehensive plans in the real world of human beings, it doesn't usually end well. In the case of communism, it ended in the extermination of about one hundred million people. Military strategists who have the most experience with this concept, always say that even the most well thought out battle plan rarely survives the first moments of combat. You see, in the real world everything has its price and has unintended consequences that no one can predict. Paper is static. Reality is constantly in motion. That is a huge difference that most of the pointy headed intellectuals on the left like our Barry have never grasped.
In the real world of energy, fossil fuels are relatively cheap, but that comes at the cost of oil spills and the CO2 emissions the left is so paranoid about. Green Energy is expensive, but "clean". However it also has its own hidden costs:
Renewable energy sounds so much more natural and believable than a perpetual-motion machine, but there's one big problem: Unless you're planning to live without electricity and motorized transportation, you need more than just wind, water, sunlight, and plants for energy. You need raw materials, real estate, and other things that will run out one day. You need stuff that has to be mined, drilled, transported, and bulldozed -- not simply harvested or farmed. You need non-renewable resources:
• Solar power. While sunlight is renewable -- for at least another four billion years -- photovoltaic panels are not. Nor is desert groundwater, used in steam turbines at some solar-thermal installations. Even after being redesigned to use air-cooled condensers that will reduce its water consumption by 90 percent, California's Blythe Solar Power Project, which will be the world's largest when it opens in 2013, will require an estimated 600 acre-feet of groundwater annually for washing mirrors, replenishing feedwater, and cooling auxiliary equipment.
• Geothermal power. These projects also depend on groundwater -- replenished by rain, yes, but not as quickly as it boils off in turbines. At the world's largest geothermal power plant, the Geysers in California, for example, production peaked in the late 1980s and then the project literally began running out of steam.
• Wind power. According to the American Wind Energy Association, the 5,700 turbines installed in the United States in 2009 required approximately 36,000 miles of steel rebar and 1.7 million cubic yards of concrete (enough to pave a four-foot-wide, 7,630-mile-long sidewalk). The gearbox of a two-megawatt wind turbine contains about 800 pounds of neodymium and 130 pounds of dysprosium -- rare earth metals that are rare because they're found in scattered deposits, rather than in concentrated ores, and are difficult to extract.
• Biomass. In developed countries, biomass is envisioned as a win-win way to produce energy while thinning wildfire-prone forests or anchoring soil with perennial switchgrass plantings. But expanding energy crops will mean less land for food production, recreation, and wildlife habitat. In many parts of the world where biomass is already used extensively to heat homes and cook meals, this renewable energy is responsible for severe deforestation and air pollution.
• Hydropower. Using currents, waves, and tidal energy to produce electricity is still experimental, but hydroelectric power from dams is a proved technology. It already supplies about 16 percent of the world's electricity, far more than all other renewable sources combined. Maybe that's why some states with renewable portfolio standards don't count hydropower as a renewable energy source; it's so common now, it just doesn't fit the category formerly known as "alternative" energy. Still, that's not to say that hydropower is more renewable than solar or wind power. The amount of concrete and steel in a wind-tower foundation is nothing compared with Grand Coulee or Three Gorges, and dams have an unfortunate habit of hoarding sediment and making fish, well, non-renewable.
All of these technologies also require electricity transmission from rural areas to population centers. Wilderness is not renewable once roads and power-line corridors fragment it. And while proponents would have you believe that a renewable energy project churns out free electricity forever, the life expectancy of a solar panel or wind turbine is actually shorter than that of a conventional power plant. Even dams are typically designed to last only about 50 years. So what, exactly, makes renewable energy different from coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power?
32====================================================================================================
Okay, so we are going to need lots of water and rare earth metals which are going to be increasingly in shorter supply should the whole planet decide to go "green". More importantly, we are going to need a lot of space to deploy the new technologies. How much? More land and sea area than is realistically feasible. Of course, this doesn't deter Obama and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar from repeating flights of the imagination like this:
According to our report there is over 1,000 gigawatts of power, that's a million megawatts of power, that are developable off the Atlantic coast. You think about that, put it in the context of what it means, with respect to an analogy to, or a comparison to coal-fired power plants, it's the equivalent of the amount of energy that would be produced from about 3,000 medium-sized coal-fired power plants. That's a tremendous amount of energy that's out there in the Atlantic...
The idea that wind energy has the potential to replace most of our coal-burning power today is a very real possibility. ... It is not technology that is pie-in-the sky; it is here and now.
AP, to their credit decided to do a little fact check on our boy Kenny's bold assertion:
In the real world of energy, fossil fuels are relatively cheap, but that comes at the cost of oil spills and the CO2 emissions the left is so paranoid about. Green Energy is expensive, but "clean". However it also has its own hidden costs:
Renewable energy sounds so much more natural and believable than a perpetual-motion machine, but there's one big problem: Unless you're planning to live without electricity and motorized transportation, you need more than just wind, water, sunlight, and plants for energy. You need raw materials, real estate, and other things that will run out one day. You need stuff that has to be mined, drilled, transported, and bulldozed -- not simply harvested or farmed. You need non-renewable resources:
• Solar power. While sunlight is renewable -- for at least another four billion years -- photovoltaic panels are not. Nor is desert groundwater, used in steam turbines at some solar-thermal installations. Even after being redesigned to use air-cooled condensers that will reduce its water consumption by 90 percent, California's Blythe Solar Power Project, which will be the world's largest when it opens in 2013, will require an estimated 600 acre-feet of groundwater annually for washing mirrors, replenishing feedwater, and cooling auxiliary equipment.
• Geothermal power. These projects also depend on groundwater -- replenished by rain, yes, but not as quickly as it boils off in turbines. At the world's largest geothermal power plant, the Geysers in California, for example, production peaked in the late 1980s and then the project literally began running out of steam.
• Wind power. According to the American Wind Energy Association, the 5,700 turbines installed in the United States in 2009 required approximately 36,000 miles of steel rebar and 1.7 million cubic yards of concrete (enough to pave a four-foot-wide, 7,630-mile-long sidewalk). The gearbox of a two-megawatt wind turbine contains about 800 pounds of neodymium and 130 pounds of dysprosium -- rare earth metals that are rare because they're found in scattered deposits, rather than in concentrated ores, and are difficult to extract.
• Biomass. In developed countries, biomass is envisioned as a win-win way to produce energy while thinning wildfire-prone forests or anchoring soil with perennial switchgrass plantings. But expanding energy crops will mean less land for food production, recreation, and wildlife habitat. In many parts of the world where biomass is already used extensively to heat homes and cook meals, this renewable energy is responsible for severe deforestation and air pollution.
• Hydropower. Using currents, waves, and tidal energy to produce electricity is still experimental, but hydroelectric power from dams is a proved technology. It already supplies about 16 percent of the world's electricity, far more than all other renewable sources combined. Maybe that's why some states with renewable portfolio standards don't count hydropower as a renewable energy source; it's so common now, it just doesn't fit the category formerly known as "alternative" energy. Still, that's not to say that hydropower is more renewable than solar or wind power. The amount of concrete and steel in a wind-tower foundation is nothing compared with Grand Coulee or Three Gorges, and dams have an unfortunate habit of hoarding sediment and making fish, well, non-renewable.
All of these technologies also require electricity transmission from rural areas to population centers. Wilderness is not renewable once roads and power-line corridors fragment it. And while proponents would have you believe that a renewable energy project churns out free electricity forever, the life expectancy of a solar panel or wind turbine is actually shorter than that of a conventional power plant. Even dams are typically designed to last only about 50 years. So what, exactly, makes renewable energy different from coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power?
32====================================================================================================
Okay, so we are going to need lots of water and rare earth metals which are going to be increasingly in shorter supply should the whole planet decide to go "green". More importantly, we are going to need a lot of space to deploy the new technologies. How much? More land and sea area than is realistically feasible. Of course, this doesn't deter Obama and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar from repeating flights of the imagination like this:
According to our report there is over 1,000 gigawatts of power, that's a million megawatts of power, that are developable off the Atlantic coast. You think about that, put it in the context of what it means, with respect to an analogy to, or a comparison to coal-fired power plants, it's the equivalent of the amount of energy that would be produced from about 3,000 medium-sized coal-fired power plants. That's a tremendous amount of energy that's out there in the Atlantic...
The idea that wind energy has the potential to replace most of our coal-burning power today is a very real possibility. ... It is not technology that is pie-in-the sky; it is here and now.
AP, to their credit decided to do a little fact check on our boy Kenny's bold assertion:
For a moment, let's forget about the NIMBY (Not in my backyard) issues that building this many wind turbines would produce. After all, it was Teddy Kennedy himself who led the opposition to wind farms near his family's famous compound at Hyannisport. And if noted lefty and friend of the environment Teddy didn't want an ugly and noisy wind turbine spoiling his view, then it isn't likely the rest of us will either:
Let's also forget, how many millions of land and sea birds would be killed by wind farms of this magnitude. Let's also ignore the fact that the wind doesn't blow all the time and thus, reliable backup power plants running on fossil fuels will still be needed.
In fact, let's just accept that all of the aesthetic, legal, environmental, bird, permitting and noise issues can be addressed (they can't, but let's be kind to an environmentalist today). Think of the cost! There is no way that the United States, much less the rest of the world, is going to be able to afford to do this. Windmills are far from cheap. Particularly, the kinds of ocean wind farms that Ken Salazar are proposing. Just to maintain them is prohibitively expensive. And this is just the cost of using wind to generate twenty percent of our current energy needs. There is absolutely no way America can afford to do this. Especially given our current economic situation. Secretary Salazar, with all due respect, the technology isn't here and now. It is absolutely one hundred percent pie in the sky fantasy!
33====================================================================================================
But, what about solar? Surely with all the billions that Obama has wasted on companies with "no viable business model" like Solyndra and Evergreen Solar, we are on the cusp of a sun powered future? Not even close. You see, many of the same problems that afflict wind power make solar energy a questionable proposition. The production of solar panels is also dependent on the mining of scarce resources. Like wind, solar energy is dependent on the weather. When the sun isn't shining, energy isn't produced. Therefore, you need to have backup power plants to pick up the slack. Solar energy also uses massive amounts of water and areas where the sun shines often are places where that water is hard to come by. In addition, solar energy tends to be very land intensive and that raises it's own environmental concerns in terms of the destruction of "pristine" desert habitats which will be ecologically transformed in the same way that drilling in ANWR supposedly would. Remember that little lizard in Cute and Cuddly that threatened to halt oil drilling in West Texas? Well, you can bet your bottom dollar that there are similar lizards where they want to build these solar plants too. And then there's the fact that solar energy is only viable in a small percentage of areas in the US:
In fact, let's just accept that all of the aesthetic, legal, environmental, bird, permitting and noise issues can be addressed (they can't, but let's be kind to an environmentalist today). Think of the cost! There is no way that the United States, much less the rest of the world, is going to be able to afford to do this. Windmills are far from cheap. Particularly, the kinds of ocean wind farms that Ken Salazar are proposing. Just to maintain them is prohibitively expensive. And this is just the cost of using wind to generate twenty percent of our current energy needs. There is absolutely no way America can afford to do this. Especially given our current economic situation. Secretary Salazar, with all due respect, the technology isn't here and now. It is absolutely one hundred percent pie in the sky fantasy!
33====================================================================================================
But, what about solar? Surely with all the billions that Obama has wasted on companies with "no viable business model" like Solyndra and Evergreen Solar, we are on the cusp of a sun powered future? Not even close. You see, many of the same problems that afflict wind power make solar energy a questionable proposition. The production of solar panels is also dependent on the mining of scarce resources. Like wind, solar energy is dependent on the weather. When the sun isn't shining, energy isn't produced. Therefore, you need to have backup power plants to pick up the slack. Solar energy also uses massive amounts of water and areas where the sun shines often are places where that water is hard to come by. In addition, solar energy tends to be very land intensive and that raises it's own environmental concerns in terms of the destruction of "pristine" desert habitats which will be ecologically transformed in the same way that drilling in ANWR supposedly would. Remember that little lizard in Cute and Cuddly that threatened to halt oil drilling in West Texas? Well, you can bet your bottom dollar that there are similar lizards where they want to build these solar plants too. And then there's the fact that solar energy is only viable in a small percentage of areas in the US:
As you can see, only in the Southwest of the United States is solar energy generation currently a viable alternative. Therefore, forgetting small things like, oh say, the incredible cost factor, let's project that we could power the Southwest with solar plants yet to be built and convince Americans to put expensive panels on their roofs throughout the south and southwest. Maybe in some theoretically possible but improbable world, we could power about another 20 percent of our needs with solar. But, again, at what cost?
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Ah, but we aren't just producing renewable energy and cutting down on our CO2 emissions, we are creating "green" jobs. And that is a good thing, right? If only the fantasies of the left about wind and solar were true:
34====================================================================================================
Ah, but we aren't just producing renewable energy and cutting down on our CO2 emissions, we are creating "green" jobs. And that is a good thing, right? If only the fantasies of the left about wind and solar were true:
But, for the sake of argument, let's say that wind and solar were viable replacements for fossil fuel based electricity generation. Even under these most optimistic assumptions, solar and wind might provide up to 40 percent of our energy, but what about the rest? Surely, the ethanol debacle has convinced everyone that turning over productive farmland over to energy related crops would be a disaster for food prices as well as not being all that much better in terms of CO2 than fossil fuels are. Hydro? Don't make me laugh. Obama's eniviro buddies want us to destroy dams, not build them. Any new hydro plant proposed would be tied up in court for years and years. The days when we could just put up things like the Hoover dam are a distant memory. Nuclear? After Fukushima? Not gonna happen with Barry O in charge.
In fact, one of the biggest problems we face in our efforts to achieve more electricity generated from renewables is the fact that the Obama administration, in their rush to get something...anything...done, are embarking on their green energy program ass backwards. You see, the main problem with wind, solar and even electric cars is battery technology. Until battery technology improves in a meaningful way, the excess energy created during particularly windy days goes to waste. The government is even paying wind companies to shut down their turbines when it is too windy:
In fact, one of the biggest problems we face in our efforts to achieve more electricity generated from renewables is the fact that the Obama administration, in their rush to get something...anything...done, are embarking on their green energy program ass backwards. You see, the main problem with wind, solar and even electric cars is battery technology. Until battery technology improves in a meaningful way, the excess energy created during particularly windy days goes to waste. The government is even paying wind companies to shut down their turbines when it is too windy:
If we had batteries that could store and hold that excess energy for awhile, wind would become much more viable and might not need to have as many fossil fuel fired power plants to back them up on days when the wind isn't blowing. The same is true for solar. If the power of the sun could be saved and stored and then released at night and on days when the sun wasn't shining, it would make solar energy far more cost effective and not as reliant on fossil fuel powered backup generators. In addition, cornering the market on battery technology will actually create the "green" jobs that the left is always pushing for. The bottom line is this: until the problem of batteries is dealt with, wind, solar and electric cars will not be an economically sustainable alternative to anything else.
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Therefore, instead of wasting billions of dollars hooking up their cronies at Solyndra and Evergreen Solar, the Obama administration would have been far better off spending that money on federal research and development projects related to the battery issue. But, that would make logical sense and it would be a rational way of creating a viable path to renewables. Not only that, but it would allow the US to corner the battery market, which is a far more lucrative proposition than solar panels will ever be. But, that wasn't the path they chose was it?
So, how does the One try to sell his unworkable and unaffordable renewable energy program? Does he make a scientific and economic case for wind and solar to replace fossil fuel electric generation? Of course not! He can't win that argument. Therefore, he does what the left always does and attack his critics. If you have the temerity to question the viability of Obama's "green" energy programs, he resorts to ridicule and sarcasm and claims that you are anti-science:
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Therefore, instead of wasting billions of dollars hooking up their cronies at Solyndra and Evergreen Solar, the Obama administration would have been far better off spending that money on federal research and development projects related to the battery issue. But, that would make logical sense and it would be a rational way of creating a viable path to renewables. Not only that, but it would allow the US to corner the battery market, which is a far more lucrative proposition than solar panels will ever be. But, that wasn't the path they chose was it?
So, how does the One try to sell his unworkable and unaffordable renewable energy program? Does he make a scientific and economic case for wind and solar to replace fossil fuel electric generation? Of course not! He can't win that argument. Therefore, he does what the left always does and attack his critics. If you have the temerity to question the viability of Obama's "green" energy programs, he resorts to ridicule and sarcasm and claims that you are anti-science:
Sadly, common sense and real world solutions to the challenges facing our country are not Barry's strong suit. No. His plan is to fulfill his green agenda by making fossil fuels so expensive that it would send price signals to force the nation into compliance with his vision. In other words, once gas hits ten bucks a gallon,we will have no choice but to buy tiny econoboxes and Government Motors Volts. How high will the price have to be? Pretty damn high!
As you can see, the American people are not going to be happy with this new reality that Barack Obama has in mind for them. But, he'll do what every Democrat does and mask the role that his policies had in causing prices to go up by accusing the oil companies of gouging consumers. Why, not? It works every time it's tried.
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Unfortunately for President Obama, deliberately causing higher energy prices simply won't be enough. Sure, the price of gas will rise and the new CAFE standards will mandate that we ride in smaller and more fuel efficient vehicles, but that won't even make a dent in the CO2 emissions that are supposedly making mother nature sweat. That's why a huge part of the Obama plan isn't just to cause us all to get squeezed at the pump, but also to be squeezed by skyrocketing electricity bills as well. How Obama and the left believe that the American economy can survive these kinds of price signals is beyond me. But then, these are the same folk who believe in "Annienomics" and think that regulations don't hurt the economy because greedy businesses are just awash with illicit cash and will absorb it as they always have. If you love the idea of seeing your electric bills go up twelve to twenty four percent with his newest carbon cap regulations, well Barry wants you to know you ain't seen nothing yet!
So intent is Barack Obama in his desire to eliminate coal fired electrical plants and every other CO2 emitting devil in his Ahab's quest to "stop the rise of the oceans", he plans to skirt the democratic process and use any means at his disposal to enforce his will on the American people. Despite the fact that Congress voted down the President's ridiculously flawed Cap and Trade bill, Lisa Jackson and the EPA plan to bypass the legislative branch and enact caps on "greenhouse" gasses under authority she and President Obama claim under the Clean Air Act. This legislation was originally passed over forty years ago in 1970. Does anyone actually believe that those who voted for the bill then intended it to be used as a way to bypass the will of the American people to address an issue that wasn't even on the radar at the time? Sadly, this is what happens when we surrender the people's right to legislate and debate major policy to unelected bureaucrats and ideologically driven administrations.
How much is this going to cost each and every one of us? Well, if the object is to make wind and solar competitive, it sure won't be cheap! Unfortunately, since we don't yet know the exact details of the EPA plan on reducing greenhouse emissions yet, it is difficult to measure. However, if the Obama administration's rules are even remotely close to the Waxman/Markey Cap and Trade bill that was defeated by the US Senate, the Heritage Foundation predicted that by 2035:
Obviously, this is a conservative group and their estimates will tend to portray the EPA greenhouse cap in the worst possible light. However, even President Obama agrees that his plan is going to be very expensive and costly to the country and the economy. According to Barry O:
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Unfortunately for President Obama, deliberately causing higher energy prices simply won't be enough. Sure, the price of gas will rise and the new CAFE standards will mandate that we ride in smaller and more fuel efficient vehicles, but that won't even make a dent in the CO2 emissions that are supposedly making mother nature sweat. That's why a huge part of the Obama plan isn't just to cause us all to get squeezed at the pump, but also to be squeezed by skyrocketing electricity bills as well. How Obama and the left believe that the American economy can survive these kinds of price signals is beyond me. But then, these are the same folk who believe in "Annienomics" and think that regulations don't hurt the economy because greedy businesses are just awash with illicit cash and will absorb it as they always have. If you love the idea of seeing your electric bills go up twelve to twenty four percent with his newest carbon cap regulations, well Barry wants you to know you ain't seen nothing yet!
So intent is Barack Obama in his desire to eliminate coal fired electrical plants and every other CO2 emitting devil in his Ahab's quest to "stop the rise of the oceans", he plans to skirt the democratic process and use any means at his disposal to enforce his will on the American people. Despite the fact that Congress voted down the President's ridiculously flawed Cap and Trade bill, Lisa Jackson and the EPA plan to bypass the legislative branch and enact caps on "greenhouse" gasses under authority she and President Obama claim under the Clean Air Act. This legislation was originally passed over forty years ago in 1970. Does anyone actually believe that those who voted for the bill then intended it to be used as a way to bypass the will of the American people to address an issue that wasn't even on the radar at the time? Sadly, this is what happens when we surrender the people's right to legislate and debate major policy to unelected bureaucrats and ideologically driven administrations.
How much is this going to cost each and every one of us? Well, if the object is to make wind and solar competitive, it sure won't be cheap! Unfortunately, since we don't yet know the exact details of the EPA plan on reducing greenhouse emissions yet, it is difficult to measure. However, if the Obama administration's rules are even remotely close to the Waxman/Markey Cap and Trade bill that was defeated by the US Senate, the Heritage Foundation predicted that by 2035:
- Gasoline prices will rise 58 percent (or $1.38);
- Natural gas prices will rise 55 percent;
- Heating oil prices will rise 56 percent;
- Electricity prices will rise 90 percent;
- A family of four can expect its per-year energy costs to rise by $1,241;
- Including taxes, a family of four will pay an additional $4,609 per year;
- A family of four will reduce its consumption of goods and services by up to $3,000 per year, as its income and savings fall;
- Aggregate GDP losses will be $9.4 trillion;
- Aggregate cap-and-trade energy taxes will be $5.7 trillion;
- Job losses will be nearly 2.5 million; and
- The national debt will rise an additional $12,803 per person ($51,212 per family of four).
Obviously, this is a conservative group and their estimates will tend to portray the EPA greenhouse cap in the worst possible light. However, even President Obama agrees that his plan is going to be very expensive and costly to the country and the economy. According to Barry O:
Now that we all agree that this is going to be expensive in terms of higher electric bills and costly to the economy in terms of GDP and jobs, what about the benefits? Surely, something that is this costly is going to have significant benefits towards lowering global temperatures, right? Uh, not so much. In fact, according to Chip Knappenberger a highly respected pro-energy blogger:
Getting a good handle on the future climate impact of the proposed Waxman-Markey legislation is not that difficult. In fact, there are several ways to get at it. But perhaps the most versatile is the aptly named MAGICC: Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change. MAGICC is sort of a climate model simulator that you can run from your desktop (available here). It was developed by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (primarily by Dr. Tom Wigley) under funding by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other organizations. MAGICC is itself a collection of simple gas-cycle, climate, and ice-melt models that is designed to produce an output that emulates the output one gets from much more complex climate models. MAGICC can produce in seconds, on your own computer, results that complex climate models take weeks to produce running on the world’s fastest supercomputers. Of course, MAGICC doesn’t provide the same level of detail, but it does produce projections for the things that we most often hear about and care about—for instance, the global average temperature change.
Using the same computer programs that the IPCC uses to create their own models, Knappenberg predicts that the original cap and trade bill would have changed temperatures.....drum roll please... in the year 2050 with a 83% emissions reduction (the aspirational goal of Waxman-Markey), the temperature reduction is nine hundredths of one degree Fahrenheit, or two years of avoided warming by 2050:
Getting a good handle on the future climate impact of the proposed Waxman-Markey legislation is not that difficult. In fact, there are several ways to get at it. But perhaps the most versatile is the aptly named MAGICC: Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change. MAGICC is sort of a climate model simulator that you can run from your desktop (available here). It was developed by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (primarily by Dr. Tom Wigley) under funding by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other organizations. MAGICC is itself a collection of simple gas-cycle, climate, and ice-melt models that is designed to produce an output that emulates the output one gets from much more complex climate models. MAGICC can produce in seconds, on your own computer, results that complex climate models take weeks to produce running on the world’s fastest supercomputers. Of course, MAGICC doesn’t provide the same level of detail, but it does produce projections for the things that we most often hear about and care about—for instance, the global average temperature change.
Using the same computer programs that the IPCC uses to create their own models, Knappenberg predicts that the original cap and trade bill would have changed temperatures.....drum roll please... in the year 2050 with a 83% emissions reduction (the aspirational goal of Waxman-Markey), the temperature reduction is nine hundredths of one degree Fahrenheit, or two years of avoided warming by 2050:
Lest you think that I cherry picked a number from some global warming "denier" or corporate shill, I researched long and hard to find information on the effect on global temperatures of H .R.2454 - American Clean Energy And Security Act of 2009. Perhaps someone more skilled with Google, Bing and Thomas (the search engine for Congress) could come up with temperature numbers submitted by the supporters of the bill. However, I researched long and hard and wasn't able to find either a quote or a chart from a single Democrat that addresses the bills impact on temperature.
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Isn't it curious that those who were arguing in support of a bill that was supposed to be the first step in saving the planet chose not to mention the great improvement in global temperatures that would cause "the oceans to stop rising"? You'd think that if the evidence showed a major shift in global temperatures as a result of the enactment of this law that every Democrat would be shouting it loud and clear from the mountaintop. Instead, I found plenty of generalizations on how Waxman/Markey was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but nary a useful number that could be used to analyze how effective Cap and Trade would be in stopping actual warming. Since those numbers are nowhere to be seen in the bill itself or in Democrat talking points in support of it, searching for a credible number from someone in favor of the bill was exceedingly difficult. Finally, I found a couple of green bloggers named Bill Chameides and Prasad Kasibhatla who came up with this:
A recent paper in Nature by H. Damon Matthews of Concordia University and colleagues provides a useful metric for converting CO2 emissions into temperature changes. They estimate that for every billion tons of CO2 emissions, global temperatures increase by about 0.0004 degrees Celsius. Factoring that metric in, we get that Waxman-Markey's adoption would decrease the net global warming by about:
This is right on par with the Knappenberg analysis. The authors stress that we can't look at the effects of the Waxman/Markey bill in isolation. We have to take into account what would happen if the whole world were to enact similar CO2 curbs. If you accept the premise that CO2 is causing warming (which I don't) then this might be true. However, what are the chances that India, China and the rest of the developing world are going to give up their ambitions towards first world status for their billions upon billions of people on the basis of current climate science? Do we even have the moral right to ask them or any other nation to subject their people to continued lives of poverty because we "think" CO2 causes warming and that the resulting climate change will be more detrimental to their lives than continued economic deprivation? After all, why should they be willing to gamble their longed for prosperity on a field of science that is in its infancy?
Think about what would have happened to world wide prosperity if the nations of the globe had listened to the scientists like President Obama's Science Czar John Holdren who during the Seventies were telling us we were about to enter another ice age, but now tell us we are experiencing man made warming:
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Isn't it curious that those who were arguing in support of a bill that was supposed to be the first step in saving the planet chose not to mention the great improvement in global temperatures that would cause "the oceans to stop rising"? You'd think that if the evidence showed a major shift in global temperatures as a result of the enactment of this law that every Democrat would be shouting it loud and clear from the mountaintop. Instead, I found plenty of generalizations on how Waxman/Markey was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but nary a useful number that could be used to analyze how effective Cap and Trade would be in stopping actual warming. Since those numbers are nowhere to be seen in the bill itself or in Democrat talking points in support of it, searching for a credible number from someone in favor of the bill was exceedingly difficult. Finally, I found a couple of green bloggers named Bill Chameides and Prasad Kasibhatla who came up with this:
A recent paper in Nature by H. Damon Matthews of Concordia University and colleagues provides a useful metric for converting CO2 emissions into temperature changes. They estimate that for every billion tons of CO2 emissions, global temperatures increase by about 0.0004 degrees Celsius. Factoring that metric in, we get that Waxman-Markey's adoption would decrease the net global warming by about:
- 0.06 Celsius by 2050 and
- 0.2 Celsius by 2100.
This is right on par with the Knappenberg analysis. The authors stress that we can't look at the effects of the Waxman/Markey bill in isolation. We have to take into account what would happen if the whole world were to enact similar CO2 curbs. If you accept the premise that CO2 is causing warming (which I don't) then this might be true. However, what are the chances that India, China and the rest of the developing world are going to give up their ambitions towards first world status for their billions upon billions of people on the basis of current climate science? Do we even have the moral right to ask them or any other nation to subject their people to continued lives of poverty because we "think" CO2 causes warming and that the resulting climate change will be more detrimental to their lives than continued economic deprivation? After all, why should they be willing to gamble their longed for prosperity on a field of science that is in its infancy?
Think about what would have happened to world wide prosperity if the nations of the globe had listened to the scientists like President Obama's Science Czar John Holdren who during the Seventies were telling us we were about to enter another ice age, but now tell us we are experiencing man made warming:
It is not my intention to make the case as to whether there were a consensus of scientists who believed in global cooling in the Seventies. I only want to point out that many of the same scientists who were hysterical about cooling then are hysterical about warming now. My point is that scientific assessments change as more data is collected and improvements in scientific technique are made. Climate science is a relatively brand new field and has yet to provide any accurate forecasting of global temperatures. They've produced lots of models, but none of them have proven the test of time. Considering how badly the Copenhagen and Durban rounds of global climate talks went, can there be any doubt that China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and every other country in the world that wants a shot at the wealth we take for granted is going to give up their dreams on the basis of current science? Aliens attacking, maybe. Global Warming? Not likely.
In addition, if the US decides to shoot itself in the head by enacting these carbon caps, it will further hamper our economic competitiveness. Does anyone think for a single moment that the Red Chinese won't take full advantage of that? What about the rest of the Second and Third world nations? Nope, the only nations that will be joining us in our economic suicide pact are the nations of Europe. In other words, our allies in the carbon caps fight will be the only advanced nations less competitive than we are. You can just see the Chinese, Brazilians, Russians and Indians just salivating at that thought.
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Therefore, we must face the fact that whatever the EPA is planning in order to cap greenhouse emissions, it will be a unilateral move by the United States and must be judged on that basis alone. In other words, we are forced to consider the impact of the proposed regulations on carbon in isolation. Seen in that light, there can be no doubt that the EPA carbon cap plan will result in a miniscule impact on temperatures at an extraordinary cost.
Here are some charts to show you the price we will all have to pay for reducing the global temperature by a mere few hundredths of one degree over a period of twenty five years :
In addition, if the US decides to shoot itself in the head by enacting these carbon caps, it will further hamper our economic competitiveness. Does anyone think for a single moment that the Red Chinese won't take full advantage of that? What about the rest of the Second and Third world nations? Nope, the only nations that will be joining us in our economic suicide pact are the nations of Europe. In other words, our allies in the carbon caps fight will be the only advanced nations less competitive than we are. You can just see the Chinese, Brazilians, Russians and Indians just salivating at that thought.
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Therefore, we must face the fact that whatever the EPA is planning in order to cap greenhouse emissions, it will be a unilateral move by the United States and must be judged on that basis alone. In other words, we are forced to consider the impact of the proposed regulations on carbon in isolation. Seen in that light, there can be no doubt that the EPA carbon cap plan will result in a miniscule impact on temperatures at an extraordinary cost.
Here are some charts to show you the price we will all have to pay for reducing the global temperature by a mere few hundredths of one degree over a period of twenty five years :
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These numbers don't even mention the cost of regulating all of that carbon. It isn't going to be cheap either:
These numbers don't even mention the cost of regulating all of that carbon. It isn't going to be cheap either:
And if you don't think that the Lisa Jackson and her EPA bureaucracy aren't salivating over dramatically increasing the size of their agency and the scope of their power, well then I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to show you. I know one thing for sure. the unions will be mighty pleased with Barry if they get to expand dues paying membership by that order of magnitude. I am sure that a nice percentage of those dues will come back to his party in the form of campaign cash. That is, after all, how the game is played, isn't it? Crooks and Thieves!
But that's not all. Oh, no! A government regulatory assault of this magnitude under the One would not be complete without a little Chicago style sleaze politics thrown in. According to the Washington Times:
EPA admits it would be “absurd or impossible to administer” the rules all at once, but “that does not mean that the agency is not moving toward the statutory thresholds.”
Limiting the number of industries that have to comply right away means the paperwork won’t become much of a burden on lazy public servants uninterested in being at their desks one minute past 5 p.m. So a “tailoring rule” grants the bureaucracy the authority to decide which companies are punished and which get a free pass. “Indeed, administering a large regulatory program in steps, rather than all at once on the program’s effective date, is fairly typical for agencies,” EPA explained. Not surprisingly, the first targets are the boogeymen of the left: power plants and refineries.
So once again waivers will be granted and favored industries will be rewarded and those who aren't with the program will be punished. Donate to Democrats and play nice and we won't hurt you as badly or as quickly as those who won't play ball. Mayor Daley is smiling down in hell watching Barry take his political operation of pay to play to its ultimate conclusion. Of course, none of this is being done for purposes of crass partisan power politics, right? That the Democrat party, Barack Obama, Lisa Jackson and the EPA and their many minions are so gung-ho to go forward with enacting carbon caps by hook or by crook despite the massive cost to our struggling economy is all the indication you'll ever need to see how biased they are in favor of their rigid ideologies and their desire for naked political power.
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But that's not all. Oh, no! A government regulatory assault of this magnitude under the One would not be complete without a little Chicago style sleaze politics thrown in. According to the Washington Times:
EPA admits it would be “absurd or impossible to administer” the rules all at once, but “that does not mean that the agency is not moving toward the statutory thresholds.”
Limiting the number of industries that have to comply right away means the paperwork won’t become much of a burden on lazy public servants uninterested in being at their desks one minute past 5 p.m. So a “tailoring rule” grants the bureaucracy the authority to decide which companies are punished and which get a free pass. “Indeed, administering a large regulatory program in steps, rather than all at once on the program’s effective date, is fairly typical for agencies,” EPA explained. Not surprisingly, the first targets are the boogeymen of the left: power plants and refineries.
So once again waivers will be granted and favored industries will be rewarded and those who aren't with the program will be punished. Donate to Democrats and play nice and we won't hurt you as badly or as quickly as those who won't play ball. Mayor Daley is smiling down in hell watching Barry take his political operation of pay to play to its ultimate conclusion. Of course, none of this is being done for purposes of crass partisan power politics, right? That the Democrat party, Barack Obama, Lisa Jackson and the EPA and their many minions are so gung-ho to go forward with enacting carbon caps by hook or by crook despite the massive cost to our struggling economy is all the indication you'll ever need to see how biased they are in favor of their rigid ideologies and their desire for naked political power.
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Two tenths of one degree Celsius by 2100 in exchange for all of that economic damage? Clearly, logic suggests that the benefit to the climate, even if one accepts that CO2 causes warming, is negligible and the cost to the economy is staggering. Yet, according to President Obama, carbon caps are so essential in healing the earth that his administration must impose them on the country because of the unquestionable validity of the science. So convinced does he claim to be by the scientific evidence that he is willing to make by executive fiat what is arguably the most crucial decision a President has ever made concerning the future of our nation.
If this is the case, surely the decision was based on a rigorous scientific review and a thorough cost benefit analysis, right?. Uh, not exactly:
If this is the case, surely the decision was based on a rigorous scientific review and a thorough cost benefit analysis, right?. Uh, not exactly:
So, in the most momentous regulatory decision in the history of the EPA, nay, in the history of our country, the agency decided to cut corners on the science? Really? Of course! Why let inconvenient truths get in the way of what they "know" to be right? This isn't the first time that they've cherry picked data they liked and squelched the data they didn't either:
As you see in the video, it turns out that the EPA didn't even want to hear about, much less let anyone else see, any data that went against their chosen agenda. As both EPA Senior Operations Research Analyst Alan Carlin and the Inspector General found, the EPA is much more interested in basing their findings on the United Nations IPCC report than doing their own proper peer review analysis. This is the same IPCC report that was exposed as deeply flawed by the release of the Climategate e-mails and the debunking of Kevin Mann's Hockey Stick Chart. It is the same IPCC that made the outrageous claim that the Himmalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Yep, it's that IPCC!
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This is the science that the EPA is willing to risk our entire economy on? The question we must ask isn't' whether the totality of the IPCC report is credible (I don't think it is), but that given the numerous and serious errors it contained and what is clearly an agenda driven and scientifically incurious director, surely the EPA should do its own rigorous and nonpartisan analysis. That would be proper science and proper public policy. Unfortunately, that would not be good for partisan gain and for the "green" agenda. Instead, Al McGartland, Office Director of EPA’s National Center forEnvironmental Economics the guy supposedly leading up the economic analysis team, attempts to shut up any and all dissent from "the cause":
The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. …. I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.
In another e-mail, McGartland clamped the vise shut even further with this whopper:
"I decided not to forward your comments... I can see only one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office. Please do not have any direct communication with anyone outside of (our group) on endangerment. There should be no meetings, e-mails, written statements, phone calls, etc."
Sounds like they've already made up their minds doesn't it? Looks, like they don't give a fig about the science or have any desire to hear alternative points of view. I find it ironic that the very people who claim that W and Cheney cherry picked the intelligence reports for information that helped make the case to invade Iraq and then asserted that Bush lied, people died are doing exactly that kind of thing when it comes to another major national decision. I think our country deserves better than to have a self serving administration and agenda driven bureaucrats decide our country's future based upon greed for power and ideology.
While it is perfectly understandable that those who are tasked with protecting our environment would tend to side with environmental interests over the financial and economic interests of business and/or the people, they are supposed to be impartial by law. It is their job as public servants to do a cost/benefit analysis that deals with actual facts and fully peer reviewed science, not a whitewash that reflects their own preconceived notions. Yet, this EPA still has the audacity to propose a carbon emissions cap even when the their own climate models predict it will only have a miniscule impact on warming. In the midst of one of the deepest economic downturn since the great depression, this verges on insanity. This is a decision that is totally about the symbolism of setting an example on climate change over the substance of the science itself. It is just another example of the obliviousness of Barack Obama and the left to real world practicalities.
Thus, as one would expect, President Obama's plan is exactly the opposite of a common sense approach to the CO2 problem. Instead of an energy policy based on a realistic assessment of current technologies, current economic conditions and currently available sources of funding, Obama's plan reads more like the kind of Marxist garbage he learned at Columbia and Harvard. In truth, it completely mystifies me how anyone who claims to believe that CO2 from burning fossil fuels is going drastically alter the climate can buy into the Obama "green" strategy.
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If you take a step back from the hysteria and realize that current technologies like wind and solar are not yet ready for prime time, it becomes immediately apparent that implementing a transition to a "clean" energy future using these uncompetitive technologies is going to be completely unaffordable. Regardless of whether the President funds his "green" vision by directly taxing Americans through carbon levies or by indirectly taxing them through regulations on business, the drain of capital from the private sector is going to be enormous with equally gigantic negative consequences on economic growth and job creation. Worse, by deliberately mandating high energy prices as well, our nation will be take a massive economic hit here at home and become ever more uncompetitive in the global market place. As Ross Perot used to day, the sound you'll be hearing is that giant sucking sound of businesses leaving the United States for cheaper and more friendly locales. If you think our manufacturing base has been depleted now, just wait till Obama gets done with his grand energy master plan!
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This is the science that the EPA is willing to risk our entire economy on? The question we must ask isn't' whether the totality of the IPCC report is credible (I don't think it is), but that given the numerous and serious errors it contained and what is clearly an agenda driven and scientifically incurious director, surely the EPA should do its own rigorous and nonpartisan analysis. That would be proper science and proper public policy. Unfortunately, that would not be good for partisan gain and for the "green" agenda. Instead, Al McGartland, Office Director of EPA’s National Center forEnvironmental Economics the guy supposedly leading up the economic analysis team, attempts to shut up any and all dissent from "the cause":
The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. …. I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.
In another e-mail, McGartland clamped the vise shut even further with this whopper:
"I decided not to forward your comments... I can see only one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office. Please do not have any direct communication with anyone outside of (our group) on endangerment. There should be no meetings, e-mails, written statements, phone calls, etc."
Sounds like they've already made up their minds doesn't it? Looks, like they don't give a fig about the science or have any desire to hear alternative points of view. I find it ironic that the very people who claim that W and Cheney cherry picked the intelligence reports for information that helped make the case to invade Iraq and then asserted that Bush lied, people died are doing exactly that kind of thing when it comes to another major national decision. I think our country deserves better than to have a self serving administration and agenda driven bureaucrats decide our country's future based upon greed for power and ideology.
While it is perfectly understandable that those who are tasked with protecting our environment would tend to side with environmental interests over the financial and economic interests of business and/or the people, they are supposed to be impartial by law. It is their job as public servants to do a cost/benefit analysis that deals with actual facts and fully peer reviewed science, not a whitewash that reflects their own preconceived notions. Yet, this EPA still has the audacity to propose a carbon emissions cap even when the their own climate models predict it will only have a miniscule impact on warming. In the midst of one of the deepest economic downturn since the great depression, this verges on insanity. This is a decision that is totally about the symbolism of setting an example on climate change over the substance of the science itself. It is just another example of the obliviousness of Barack Obama and the left to real world practicalities.
Thus, as one would expect, President Obama's plan is exactly the opposite of a common sense approach to the CO2 problem. Instead of an energy policy based on a realistic assessment of current technologies, current economic conditions and currently available sources of funding, Obama's plan reads more like the kind of Marxist garbage he learned at Columbia and Harvard. In truth, it completely mystifies me how anyone who claims to believe that CO2 from burning fossil fuels is going drastically alter the climate can buy into the Obama "green" strategy.
43====================================================================================================
If you take a step back from the hysteria and realize that current technologies like wind and solar are not yet ready for prime time, it becomes immediately apparent that implementing a transition to a "clean" energy future using these uncompetitive technologies is going to be completely unaffordable. Regardless of whether the President funds his "green" vision by directly taxing Americans through carbon levies or by indirectly taxing them through regulations on business, the drain of capital from the private sector is going to be enormous with equally gigantic negative consequences on economic growth and job creation. Worse, by deliberately mandating high energy prices as well, our nation will be take a massive economic hit here at home and become ever more uncompetitive in the global market place. As Ross Perot used to day, the sound you'll be hearing is that giant sucking sound of businesses leaving the United States for cheaper and more friendly locales. If you think our manufacturing base has been depleted now, just wait till Obama gets done with his grand energy master plan!
Cue this video to the 2:28 mark
And what about the deficit? If the basic thrust of Obama's plan to curb CO2, is to make energy clean, but expensive, how are we ever going to get out of debt, much less pay trillions more for inefficient wind farms and solar plants? Where is the money going to come from when Obama's policy of high energy prices has already had the predictable effect of lowering economic growth:
44====================================================================================================
As you can see, the evidence clearly indicates that increases in gas prices are detrimental to the economy. According to Professor Hamilton, Obama's energy policies have cost us a 20% hit on GDP growth already. Recently, USA TODAY published an article that claims that even before the enactment of Obama's new carbon cap regulations, electricity prices in the US have already started to skyrocket:
As you can see, the evidence clearly indicates that increases in gas prices are detrimental to the economy. According to Professor Hamilton, Obama's energy policies have cost us a 20% hit on GDP growth already. Recently, USA TODAY published an article that claims that even before the enactment of Obama's new carbon cap regulations, electricity prices in the US have already started to skyrocket:
Now, imagine if you will what is going to happen to the price of electricity once the new carbon cap rules are actually enforced. Looks to me like Obama hit this nail right on the head: electricity bills will rise skyward! Therefore, what do you think is going to be the impact on our economy when consumers are feeling the bite from higher gas prices, higher electric bills and American businesses operating costs go up dramatically compared to their overseas competition? If you listen to Obama, these higher prices will be no big deal and somehow it will produce new "green" jobs that will vault us into the economy of the future. Sure, you can believe that if you ignore all the real world evidence to the contrary and live in a pointy head academic, enviro-nut, crunchy granola dream world.
45====================================================================================================
In the world the rest of us live in, there is no way that deliberately harming economic growth at a time of stagnation and high deficits is ever going to produce the wealth necessary to create a "clean" energy future based on immature wind and solar technologies without totally bankrupting the country. Forcing utilities to transition to technologies that are inefficient and uncompetitive is going to be far worse than anyone imagines. The term skyrocket is going to take on a whole new meaning. The real world economic realities that must be faced and overcome in addressing the issue of CO2 cannot be denied or wished away. So, all you folk out there who think my SUV is destroying the planet, wake up and realize that your emperor has no clothes. If your goal is to have a "green" tomorrow, Barack Obama's numbers don't add up and that means that there is no way that the One's plan is ever going to create a future where the "rise of the oceans begins to slow and the planet begins to heal".
This I think is the most critical factor of the whole AGW debate. If man is the virus causing Mother Nature to have a fever, what is actually the best way to cure her? While, I am not at all convinced that actual science indicates that reducing the CO2 produced by man is going to cause any meaningful effect on the planet, I am not so arrogant to say that this is definitely not the case. Anyone who says that they are certain that this is or is not the case is full of it. There is no scientific way to know the truth at the present time. That said, there are arguments to be made for and against this idea. I might be persuaded that the possibility that there might be a long term problem with emitting too much CO2 means that we should research and investigate the matter and come up with some reasonable solutions that solve the problem. I look at this like an "insurance" policy. I don't drive around thinking that I am going to get into an accident, but it's nice to know that I have insurance in case I do.
I bring this up because I can easily carry over that line of thinking to the subject of Global Warming. If the premium is reasonable, then surely we can take out an "insurance policy" just to be sure. The question then becomes a cost/benefit analysis: what should be done about it and at what price. I find the proposals of Algore, Barack Obama and the UN to be totally beyond the realm of reason if solving the problem of potential AGW is the goal. What they propose is analogous to paying $10,000 a year for an auto insurance policy for a beat up old clunker.
The much-heralded Kyoto accords that they all advocated were supposed to be the first step in fixing the planet and they would have only changed the projected rise in temperature by about 0.14 degrees Celsius over an entire century. That means projected man-made greenhouse warming that might have been 3 degrees C by 2100 according to the alarmists would instead be 2.86 degrees C. And this, at the cost of trillions and trillions of dollars that could be spent elsewhere. Even enviro-wacko Peter Roderick of Friends of the Earth International says this about Kyoto:
"It's tiny, it's tiny, tiny, it's tiny, It is woefully inadequate, woefully. We need huge cuts to protect the planet from climate change."
In other words, Kyoto was symbolism over substance!
46===================================================================================================
The US Senate had voted 95-0 before Algore even had gone to the conference to reject the treaty outright and any similar treaty that imposed huge costs on our economy but exempted China and India. Therefore, Bill Clinton never even bothered to send it to the Senate for ratification. A decade ago, George W. Bush was slammed world wide for not signing onto this symbolic boondoggle. Maybe he wasn't as "dumb" as all the lefties said, eh?
Yet, the very countries and leaders who were most critical of W turned out to be living in glass houses themselves. Most of the European nations who have signed Kyoto haven't even come close to complying with their emissions targets. Even that utopia of liberal wack-jobs, The People's Republic of Boulder, CO can't even begin to get close to meeting compliance. According to the global warming clock, the Kyoto signatory countries had spent half a trillion dollars by 2008 to shave .005 degrees Celsius off projected temperatures. Had those signatories, instead, spent that money to provide clean water to the impoverished nations of the world, as greenie Bjorn Lomborg has suggested, we might actually have done some real good!
Yet, despite the fact that no one seems to be able to meet these relatively minor and, unfortunately, totally insignificant and symbolic goals, Barack Obama is calling for 60-80% reductions by 2035! If you think that the backlash against Obamacare has been bad, wait till you get a gander at how angry Americans will be at how high the price of gasoline and just about anything made or transported with fossil fuels becomes once that plan is enacted. I find the idea that we can save the planet by taxing ourselves to death and destroying our economy to be both delusional and economically suicidal. That’s why the real world evidence is that nobody seems to be able to do it
The problem with these kinds of solutions, I think, is that the debate over Anthropogenic global warming is basically driven by liberal and leftist hysteria. They are the ones who are most ready to believe and proselytize this theory and, thus, their solutions are predictable. For them, Global Warming is just a gift that keeps on giving! More government, more taxes, more control over peoples lives by those who are smarter and more pure in thought and intellect. These elitist Crooks and Thieve believe that man must be made to suffer for his sins. The greedy, decadent, SUV driving, McMansion living, meat eating Americans must be humbled and introduced to the joys of tiny cars with lawn mower engines and a diet of nice healthy and locally grown and processed tofu. This is not a scientific or economic problem. This is a religion to these people! This is a holy war! Doubt me? Just spend time on any enviro-wacko blog-site or chat-room. Better yet, watch one of Annie's videos!
47====================================================================================================
Now, how did my little rant about how absolutely joyous lefties are with the prospect of conning the world with their little hoax about global warming shed any light on the subject? Well, it basically shows that either they are unaware that their basic mindset about economics and human nature is fundamentally flawed or they just don't give a damn what happens to ordinary people as long as the earth is saved.
For example, let's look at the Markey/Waxman Cap and Trade bill and Obama's proposed carbon caps. As we have seen, these attempts to regulate CO2 end up imposing a massive economic cost for an incredibly insignificant result in terms of environmental impact. It is as if we were to liken CO2 emissions and their impact on the environment to a cigarette smoker's impact upon his lungs. The Democrat's CO2 proposals are like going from a 50 cigarettes a day to 49. There is clearly a symbolic statement made by the addict to deny himself that one cigarette, but the net effect on his health is virtually nil. Obviously this approach is just window dressing to make the lefties feel good about themselves. It isn't something that even has a prayer of actually working. It isn't a reasonable approach to solve the problem.
The fundamental flaw in Democrat CO2 proposals is that their proposal kills the patient long before he quits smoking. They reason that, by taxing each cigarette so much that the smoker has no choice but to cut down heavily, the smoker will be forced to find other alternatives to replace the role that cigarettes play in his sense of well-being. While this solution may actually bring the number of cigarettes smoked down, addictions are addictions (and we are clearly addicted to living well with all the energy we want whenever we want it) so perhaps he’ll still continue to smoke at a higher rate than is healthy and end up becoming bankrupted in the process. This, of course, might leave him susceptible to all kinds of other problems that may be worse than the possibility of lung cancer. That famous law of unintended consequences, you see. This approach stands little chance of succeeding because the habit is always going to be the same. We cannot transition to a new way a feeding our energy habit, if we have even less money to spend to do it. It is just simple mathematics.
Also, one would think that the only viable solution to reducing CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels down to all but the necessary is one that accomplishes this goal without causing so much economic hardship on the population of the earth that, out of pique, they don't just scrub the whole operation entirely. Look at how pissed off people are now at $4 gas. You think they'll be happy with the kind of taxation and unemployment that will be necessary to achieve 70% reductions through the sharing of scarcity? I think not!
48====================================================================================================
One would also think that the first step that our Kool Aid drinkers would advocate would be to favor the use the one technology that we currently have that produces massive amounts of energy and releases no CO2. If we were to use this technology, we could go from a 50 cigarette a day habit down to maybe three or four. And what is this miracle cure? That would be none other than our old friend: nuclear energy. But does the "green" movement like nuclear? No. China Syndrome! Fukushima! Three Mile Island! Chernobyl!!! Nuclear is bad bad bad!!! Lefties HATE nuclear energy. Even the saintly Obama hates Nuclear energy! They'd much rather tax carbon then go nuclear. You have to admit, it takes a particular mind to get all worked up about the global warming hysteria and, at the same time, be so filled with fear at how horrible nuclear energy is, that it is rejected outright despite the fact that it is just about the only proven technology that we have that might even come close to fixing the problem.
But what about their favorite alternative: solar? Again, I love the idea and would obviously be ecstatic if it worked, but as I have pointed out it just isn't quite there yet. Wind? I just don't see it ever being the answer either. Using the current of the ocean? A fantastic idea, but it's a long shot. Fusion? Maybe one day it will truly be the answer, but like all these other technologies it just isn't going to replace fossil fuels any time soon. The answer is clearly one or a combination of these technologies or something we haven't even thought of yet. But the way to turn the dream of these technologies into a reality isn't to bankrupt the economies of the countries that are trying to create them! Instead, a way must be found to finance a huge project to take us to a world of cheap, clean energy for all mankind. What we need is something equivalent to the Apollo space program of the sixties. We need to go to the alternative energy moon!
I believe that we that we are witnessing a moment where many of the major forces in our world are converging to give us an historic opportunity to come up with a solution that is a win-win for everybody. Lefties who really just want to save the planet will be happy and conservatives, who want to save freedom, as we know it, will be happy.
Let us say that we propose to be completely fossil fuel free by 2050. That means that whatever oil we currently have in the ground in the United States will be worthless after that date. So, let's drill. Drill everywhere in the US. Drill till we are blue in the face. Raise the government’s royalties on that oil to a degree that will enable us to finance our "national project". This way we won't need to import our oil from the Saudis, the Iranians, the Russkis or Hugo Chavez ever again. No more sending our enemies the money they can use to stick their thumbs in our eyes. By the time 2050 comes along, we'll be sitting pretty with our newfound energy sources and they'll be out of luck. What a major boon that would be for our economy, national security and the war on terror!
In the meantime, oil will be relatively cheap and plentiful allowing economic growth to flourish and we'll have financed our move into clean energy without having to raise taxes, without reorganizing society, and without screwing every third world nation out of their chance to enter the economic mainstream. Think of all the money that will stay here in the good old USA that would otherwise have gone to our enemies. Almost makes a chill go down your spine doesn’t it?
49====================================================================================================
I’d like to take the full credit for this idea, but I am clearly not the only one that has thought of this. This is an idea whose time has come! But, this is something that the left just won’t ever propose or allow. They will gripe and moan about the dangers of nuclear. They'll scare us all they can about the horrors of drilling and oil spills. They'll be fit to be tied. Because, as I said, the ugly truth is that while they say that they care so much, have only the bestest of intentions and they really, really do want to save the planet, the only way they’ll actually do something about it is if they get to do it their way with someone else’s money. The only AGW fighting plan that they are willing to endorse is one that leads to more government control and a path to global governance.
As a result, President Obama's plan is predictably the opposite of the one I just suggested. My plan is based on a realistic assessment of current technologies, current economic conditions and currently available sources of funding. Mine reads more like a business plan. Obama's reads more like the kind of Marxist garbage he learned at Columbia and Harvard. In truth, it completely mystifies me how anyone who claims to believe that CO2 from burning fossil fuels is going drastically alter the climate can buy into the Obama plan.
Because, I'll tell you what I really believe deep down. This whole global warming business is a sham and a hoax for all of the scientific reasons I have outlined so far. There just isn’t nearly enough evidence to bet the farm on. All the hype, all the hysteria and brow beating is just an excuse for Crooks and Thieves on the left to seize as much power over other people's lives as they can so they can mold us all into perfect politically correct robots. Global Warming is their vehicle to create the ultimate leftist utopia. The proof of this is that none of their proposed solutions solve the problem or are even financially doable. Instead, every proposal they make hurts capitalism, promotes the idea of the sharing of scarcity and fosters the creation of world governance.
Look at the results so far, Barry, Nancy and Harry spent billions and billions on their political benefactors in crony capitalist endeavors with companies like Solyndra, Evergreen, Fisker, Sunpower, Government Motors and GE. Did we get any shiny new windmill farms or solar plants as a result? No, but we did get a whole bunch of bankrupt companies who wined and dined on taxpayer dollars till the jig was up. Did you have your home weatherized? Do you know of anyone who did? Well hundreds of millions of your dollars went down the tubes for that too. Do you own an electric car, want one or know someone who has one? Of course not, nor will you. Yet, we are subsidizing the Chevy Volt to the tune of 250k per car and we sent a half a billion dollars to Fisker in Finland and they have yet to produce one. So far, the results of the Democrat energy and "green jobs" initiatives are higher gasoline prices, higher electricity prices, a diminished GDP and a bunch of bankrupt companies and useless electric cars.
But that's just phase one of Barry's excellent adventure. Get ready for the Bamster and his colorful sidekick Lisa at the EPA to go with phase two. Prepare yourself for Obama's carbon caps and watch the glorious trajectory of your electric bill as it suddenly skyrockets. Watch us repeat the experience of Spain as our economy tanks, unemployment reaches twenty percent and we need the IMF to bail us out of our debt crisis. Honestly, do you really think this is a viable way to create a "clean" energy future? Face it, unless we stop Barry from continuing to promote an energy policy based on myths, fictions and the same kind of Annienomics that brought you his stimulus, we won't have a future filled with clean solar plants and windmills. Instead of curing the planet of its fever, we will bankrupt our country and inherit the wind
45====================================================================================================
In the world the rest of us live in, there is no way that deliberately harming economic growth at a time of stagnation and high deficits is ever going to produce the wealth necessary to create a "clean" energy future based on immature wind and solar technologies without totally bankrupting the country. Forcing utilities to transition to technologies that are inefficient and uncompetitive is going to be far worse than anyone imagines. The term skyrocket is going to take on a whole new meaning. The real world economic realities that must be faced and overcome in addressing the issue of CO2 cannot be denied or wished away. So, all you folk out there who think my SUV is destroying the planet, wake up and realize that your emperor has no clothes. If your goal is to have a "green" tomorrow, Barack Obama's numbers don't add up and that means that there is no way that the One's plan is ever going to create a future where the "rise of the oceans begins to slow and the planet begins to heal".
This I think is the most critical factor of the whole AGW debate. If man is the virus causing Mother Nature to have a fever, what is actually the best way to cure her? While, I am not at all convinced that actual science indicates that reducing the CO2 produced by man is going to cause any meaningful effect on the planet, I am not so arrogant to say that this is definitely not the case. Anyone who says that they are certain that this is or is not the case is full of it. There is no scientific way to know the truth at the present time. That said, there are arguments to be made for and against this idea. I might be persuaded that the possibility that there might be a long term problem with emitting too much CO2 means that we should research and investigate the matter and come up with some reasonable solutions that solve the problem. I look at this like an "insurance" policy. I don't drive around thinking that I am going to get into an accident, but it's nice to know that I have insurance in case I do.
I bring this up because I can easily carry over that line of thinking to the subject of Global Warming. If the premium is reasonable, then surely we can take out an "insurance policy" just to be sure. The question then becomes a cost/benefit analysis: what should be done about it and at what price. I find the proposals of Algore, Barack Obama and the UN to be totally beyond the realm of reason if solving the problem of potential AGW is the goal. What they propose is analogous to paying $10,000 a year for an auto insurance policy for a beat up old clunker.
The much-heralded Kyoto accords that they all advocated were supposed to be the first step in fixing the planet and they would have only changed the projected rise in temperature by about 0.14 degrees Celsius over an entire century. That means projected man-made greenhouse warming that might have been 3 degrees C by 2100 according to the alarmists would instead be 2.86 degrees C. And this, at the cost of trillions and trillions of dollars that could be spent elsewhere. Even enviro-wacko Peter Roderick of Friends of the Earth International says this about Kyoto:
"It's tiny, it's tiny, tiny, it's tiny, It is woefully inadequate, woefully. We need huge cuts to protect the planet from climate change."
In other words, Kyoto was symbolism over substance!
46===================================================================================================
The US Senate had voted 95-0 before Algore even had gone to the conference to reject the treaty outright and any similar treaty that imposed huge costs on our economy but exempted China and India. Therefore, Bill Clinton never even bothered to send it to the Senate for ratification. A decade ago, George W. Bush was slammed world wide for not signing onto this symbolic boondoggle. Maybe he wasn't as "dumb" as all the lefties said, eh?
Yet, the very countries and leaders who were most critical of W turned out to be living in glass houses themselves. Most of the European nations who have signed Kyoto haven't even come close to complying with their emissions targets. Even that utopia of liberal wack-jobs, The People's Republic of Boulder, CO can't even begin to get close to meeting compliance. According to the global warming clock, the Kyoto signatory countries had spent half a trillion dollars by 2008 to shave .005 degrees Celsius off projected temperatures. Had those signatories, instead, spent that money to provide clean water to the impoverished nations of the world, as greenie Bjorn Lomborg has suggested, we might actually have done some real good!
Yet, despite the fact that no one seems to be able to meet these relatively minor and, unfortunately, totally insignificant and symbolic goals, Barack Obama is calling for 60-80% reductions by 2035! If you think that the backlash against Obamacare has been bad, wait till you get a gander at how angry Americans will be at how high the price of gasoline and just about anything made or transported with fossil fuels becomes once that plan is enacted. I find the idea that we can save the planet by taxing ourselves to death and destroying our economy to be both delusional and economically suicidal. That’s why the real world evidence is that nobody seems to be able to do it
The problem with these kinds of solutions, I think, is that the debate over Anthropogenic global warming is basically driven by liberal and leftist hysteria. They are the ones who are most ready to believe and proselytize this theory and, thus, their solutions are predictable. For them, Global Warming is just a gift that keeps on giving! More government, more taxes, more control over peoples lives by those who are smarter and more pure in thought and intellect. These elitist Crooks and Thieve believe that man must be made to suffer for his sins. The greedy, decadent, SUV driving, McMansion living, meat eating Americans must be humbled and introduced to the joys of tiny cars with lawn mower engines and a diet of nice healthy and locally grown and processed tofu. This is not a scientific or economic problem. This is a religion to these people! This is a holy war! Doubt me? Just spend time on any enviro-wacko blog-site or chat-room. Better yet, watch one of Annie's videos!
47====================================================================================================
Now, how did my little rant about how absolutely joyous lefties are with the prospect of conning the world with their little hoax about global warming shed any light on the subject? Well, it basically shows that either they are unaware that their basic mindset about economics and human nature is fundamentally flawed or they just don't give a damn what happens to ordinary people as long as the earth is saved.
For example, let's look at the Markey/Waxman Cap and Trade bill and Obama's proposed carbon caps. As we have seen, these attempts to regulate CO2 end up imposing a massive economic cost for an incredibly insignificant result in terms of environmental impact. It is as if we were to liken CO2 emissions and their impact on the environment to a cigarette smoker's impact upon his lungs. The Democrat's CO2 proposals are like going from a 50 cigarettes a day to 49. There is clearly a symbolic statement made by the addict to deny himself that one cigarette, but the net effect on his health is virtually nil. Obviously this approach is just window dressing to make the lefties feel good about themselves. It isn't something that even has a prayer of actually working. It isn't a reasonable approach to solve the problem.
The fundamental flaw in Democrat CO2 proposals is that their proposal kills the patient long before he quits smoking. They reason that, by taxing each cigarette so much that the smoker has no choice but to cut down heavily, the smoker will be forced to find other alternatives to replace the role that cigarettes play in his sense of well-being. While this solution may actually bring the number of cigarettes smoked down, addictions are addictions (and we are clearly addicted to living well with all the energy we want whenever we want it) so perhaps he’ll still continue to smoke at a higher rate than is healthy and end up becoming bankrupted in the process. This, of course, might leave him susceptible to all kinds of other problems that may be worse than the possibility of lung cancer. That famous law of unintended consequences, you see. This approach stands little chance of succeeding because the habit is always going to be the same. We cannot transition to a new way a feeding our energy habit, if we have even less money to spend to do it. It is just simple mathematics.
Also, one would think that the only viable solution to reducing CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels down to all but the necessary is one that accomplishes this goal without causing so much economic hardship on the population of the earth that, out of pique, they don't just scrub the whole operation entirely. Look at how pissed off people are now at $4 gas. You think they'll be happy with the kind of taxation and unemployment that will be necessary to achieve 70% reductions through the sharing of scarcity? I think not!
48====================================================================================================
One would also think that the first step that our Kool Aid drinkers would advocate would be to favor the use the one technology that we currently have that produces massive amounts of energy and releases no CO2. If we were to use this technology, we could go from a 50 cigarette a day habit down to maybe three or four. And what is this miracle cure? That would be none other than our old friend: nuclear energy. But does the "green" movement like nuclear? No. China Syndrome! Fukushima! Three Mile Island! Chernobyl!!! Nuclear is bad bad bad!!! Lefties HATE nuclear energy. Even the saintly Obama hates Nuclear energy! They'd much rather tax carbon then go nuclear. You have to admit, it takes a particular mind to get all worked up about the global warming hysteria and, at the same time, be so filled with fear at how horrible nuclear energy is, that it is rejected outright despite the fact that it is just about the only proven technology that we have that might even come close to fixing the problem.
But what about their favorite alternative: solar? Again, I love the idea and would obviously be ecstatic if it worked, but as I have pointed out it just isn't quite there yet. Wind? I just don't see it ever being the answer either. Using the current of the ocean? A fantastic idea, but it's a long shot. Fusion? Maybe one day it will truly be the answer, but like all these other technologies it just isn't going to replace fossil fuels any time soon. The answer is clearly one or a combination of these technologies or something we haven't even thought of yet. But the way to turn the dream of these technologies into a reality isn't to bankrupt the economies of the countries that are trying to create them! Instead, a way must be found to finance a huge project to take us to a world of cheap, clean energy for all mankind. What we need is something equivalent to the Apollo space program of the sixties. We need to go to the alternative energy moon!
I believe that we that we are witnessing a moment where many of the major forces in our world are converging to give us an historic opportunity to come up with a solution that is a win-win for everybody. Lefties who really just want to save the planet will be happy and conservatives, who want to save freedom, as we know it, will be happy.
Let us say that we propose to be completely fossil fuel free by 2050. That means that whatever oil we currently have in the ground in the United States will be worthless after that date. So, let's drill. Drill everywhere in the US. Drill till we are blue in the face. Raise the government’s royalties on that oil to a degree that will enable us to finance our "national project". This way we won't need to import our oil from the Saudis, the Iranians, the Russkis or Hugo Chavez ever again. No more sending our enemies the money they can use to stick their thumbs in our eyes. By the time 2050 comes along, we'll be sitting pretty with our newfound energy sources and they'll be out of luck. What a major boon that would be for our economy, national security and the war on terror!
In the meantime, oil will be relatively cheap and plentiful allowing economic growth to flourish and we'll have financed our move into clean energy without having to raise taxes, without reorganizing society, and without screwing every third world nation out of their chance to enter the economic mainstream. Think of all the money that will stay here in the good old USA that would otherwise have gone to our enemies. Almost makes a chill go down your spine doesn’t it?
49====================================================================================================
I’d like to take the full credit for this idea, but I am clearly not the only one that has thought of this. This is an idea whose time has come! But, this is something that the left just won’t ever propose or allow. They will gripe and moan about the dangers of nuclear. They'll scare us all they can about the horrors of drilling and oil spills. They'll be fit to be tied. Because, as I said, the ugly truth is that while they say that they care so much, have only the bestest of intentions and they really, really do want to save the planet, the only way they’ll actually do something about it is if they get to do it their way with someone else’s money. The only AGW fighting plan that they are willing to endorse is one that leads to more government control and a path to global governance.
As a result, President Obama's plan is predictably the opposite of the one I just suggested. My plan is based on a realistic assessment of current technologies, current economic conditions and currently available sources of funding. Mine reads more like a business plan. Obama's reads more like the kind of Marxist garbage he learned at Columbia and Harvard. In truth, it completely mystifies me how anyone who claims to believe that CO2 from burning fossil fuels is going drastically alter the climate can buy into the Obama plan.
Because, I'll tell you what I really believe deep down. This whole global warming business is a sham and a hoax for all of the scientific reasons I have outlined so far. There just isn’t nearly enough evidence to bet the farm on. All the hype, all the hysteria and brow beating is just an excuse for Crooks and Thieves on the left to seize as much power over other people's lives as they can so they can mold us all into perfect politically correct robots. Global Warming is their vehicle to create the ultimate leftist utopia. The proof of this is that none of their proposed solutions solve the problem or are even financially doable. Instead, every proposal they make hurts capitalism, promotes the idea of the sharing of scarcity and fosters the creation of world governance.
Look at the results so far, Barry, Nancy and Harry spent billions and billions on their political benefactors in crony capitalist endeavors with companies like Solyndra, Evergreen, Fisker, Sunpower, Government Motors and GE. Did we get any shiny new windmill farms or solar plants as a result? No, but we did get a whole bunch of bankrupt companies who wined and dined on taxpayer dollars till the jig was up. Did you have your home weatherized? Do you know of anyone who did? Well hundreds of millions of your dollars went down the tubes for that too. Do you own an electric car, want one or know someone who has one? Of course not, nor will you. Yet, we are subsidizing the Chevy Volt to the tune of 250k per car and we sent a half a billion dollars to Fisker in Finland and they have yet to produce one. So far, the results of the Democrat energy and "green jobs" initiatives are higher gasoline prices, higher electricity prices, a diminished GDP and a bunch of bankrupt companies and useless electric cars.
But that's just phase one of Barry's excellent adventure. Get ready for the Bamster and his colorful sidekick Lisa at the EPA to go with phase two. Prepare yourself for Obama's carbon caps and watch the glorious trajectory of your electric bill as it suddenly skyrockets. Watch us repeat the experience of Spain as our economy tanks, unemployment reaches twenty percent and we need the IMF to bail us out of our debt crisis. Honestly, do you really think this is a viable way to create a "clean" energy future? Face it, unless we stop Barry from continuing to promote an energy policy based on myths, fictions and the same kind of Annienomics that brought you his stimulus, we won't have a future filled with clean solar plants and windmills. Instead of curing the planet of its fever, we will bankrupt our country and inherit the wind