Watch Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) get chastised for trying to pit the NAACP and another black-led business group against the National Black Chamber of Commerce in a racially-charged Senate hearing on climate.
Sen. Boxer’s seems to insist that the view of the NBCoC is offset by the NAACP’s view simply because both are black groups.
Need to disabuse someone of the notion that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a viable strategy?
University of Houston energy expert Michael Economides says in this recent study that CCS for just Kyoto Protocol-type CO2 cuts in the U.S. would require the drilling of 161,429 injection wells by 2030 at a cost of 1.61 trillion dollars — and there’s no guarantee that the CO2 would stay sequestered, much less accomplish anything for the climate.
That price tag doesn’t include the cost of capturing the CO2 at the point of generation, purchasing rights of way for pipelines, pipeline installation costs, liability insurance etc. Economides says the total cost may be as high as $1 trillion annually.
Waxman-Markey-type CO2 limits, which are much more Draconian than the Kyoto Protocol, would obviously be even more expensive.
It’s quite a price to pay for something that may not work and, even if it did, would accomplish nothing.
The Sierra Club and other green groups petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to stop the construction of a second reactor at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Plant in Tennessee.
WBIR TV (Knoxville) reported,
“TVA keeps pushing for more nuclear reactors in spite of massive cost overruns they always have when they build them,” said Bill Reynolds, a member of the Tennessee chapter of the Sierra Club, in a written statement.
The group also raises concerns about the safety of the reactor design.
Northeast Utilities is applying for $100-150 million in Obama stimulus funds to install so-called “smart meters” for 200,000 customers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, reports Smart Grid Today.
One if by land, two if by sea… and three if through your home’s electrical hook-up?
Shark attack victims testified on Capitol Hill yesterday in favor of a nationwide ban on shark-finning — the practice of cutting-off a shark’s dorsal fin and throwing back the rest, reports Energy & Environment Daily.
Recruited to testify by the Pew Environment Group, Al Brennika was attacked in 1976 while surfing by a 7-foot lemon shark. He testified that,
“I was limbed. They get finned. It gives me … empathy for their situation.”
Brennika was one of several shark-attack victims at the hearing apparently suffering from Jaws-version of Stockholm syndrome.
That’s today’s insight into the mind of an environmentalist and the nutty way environmental policy is made in Washington, DC.
An amendment to the 2010 Financial Services bill (H.R. 3170) offered by Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) would prohibit the payment of salaries to Obama climate czar Carol Browner, her deputy and anyone on the Council on Environmental Quality, according to Energy & Environment Daily. The vote is expected today.
A Broun spokesman told E&E that,
“These federal agencies do answer to Congress, but the people that oversee them in the White House do not. This is not right. … If the administration feels that there needs to be an overarching person or agency to facilitate the flow of information between the numerous federal agencies beneath them, then that’s fine, but this person, or people, need to be confirmed by the Senate and be subjected to congressional oversight.”
Browner probably doesn’t need/want the money anyway since:
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the “the grandfather among Republicans on climate change,” may be changing sides at least with respect to the Waxman-Markey bill, according to Energy & Environment Daily.
According to the report,
Asked about the Senate debate [on Waxman-Markey], McCain said only, “I hope it’s vastly different than the House bill.”
McCain also rationalizes that his criticism does not conflict with his earlier efforts. “It says I’ve had good bills, and this is a lousy one,” he said.
But the Republican’s stance has launched a guessing game of which McCain will take part in this year’s debate…
Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) also expects McCain to get more involved when the legislation ripens. But when he does, Voinovich expects McCain to have a different take than many expect. “I think he probably has a much better appreciation of the impact all this has on various sections of the country because he ran a presidential campaign. Up until that, I don’t think there were a lot of things he was aware of.”
This would indeed be a good time for McCain to redeem his embarrassing performance during last fall’s campaign.
… according to E&E News. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) reportedly hopes to have a Republican co-sponsor. Developing…
North Carolina state representative Pricey Harrison has apparently visited Al Gore’s web site one too many times.
Rep. Harrison pushed a bill through the North Carolina House that would have prohibited local governments from banning clotheslines. Harrison claims,
“It’s been a real problem for folks who feel pretty adamantly they want to use clotheslines. It’s their small step that they can take toward global warming issue.”
Drying your clothes outdoors as way to slow the much-dreaded global warming is, of course, the brainchild of Al Gore and is recommended on the web site for An Inconvenient Truth.
Sadly for Pricey, the State Senate clotheslined her bill, the News-Record (Greensboro, NC) reported.
GE brings good schemes to life. Consider its recently announced “net-zero energy home” initiative.
The program calls for the installation in homes of networked appliances powered by home-based solar panels and wind turbines. So what’s not to like about homes that are energy self-sufficient?
Even accepting the GE fantasy that homes can be net-zero users of energy, that sadly does not mean that the cost of that energy is zero.
The system will add about 10 percent to the cost of a home, according to GE — a price that likely would take more than a decade to pay for itself.
GE’s net-zero-energy plan amounts to little more than a shift in check-writing.
Instead of writing monthly checks to your local utility for the energy you actually use, you’ll just write one big check to GE (or your contractor) upfront — a payment that might or might not cover a decade or more of home energy use and that probably does not include any maintenance costs for your system. Additionally, since most people borrow to purchase their homes, you’d essentially wind up financing you electric bill over the life of your mortgage, further adding to the cost of the system.
If your home turns out not to be net-zero-energy, you’ll still wind up writing those monthly checks to your local utility while GE and your contractor bask in the unearned glow of the original upfront payment.
Beware: green or clean energy — whatever you want to call it — is the new snake oil. It’s sad that the only sort of energy innovation occurring today is based more on financial shenanigans (cost-shifting, subsidies and worse) than technologies to produce more energy at less cost.
If you need a new or, perhaps, a first reason to detest Wal-Mart, consider this.
Wal-Mart will require its suppliers to calculate the environmental impact of their products, according to a report in Greenwire (July 15).
According to the report,
“I envision the day that you look at a piece of apparel, you flip a tag over, and learn about how sustainable it really is,” said John Fleming, Wal-Mart’s chief merchandising officer. The tags would work similarly to nutritional labeling today, though some standardization needs to take place, he said.
Interesting… since the greens don’t think that modern agriculture (cotton and wool) or the chemical and petroleum industries (synthetic fibers) are sustainable, what exactly will Wal-Mart apparel be made of?
Last year, former Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott told a Wall Street Journal conference audience that the company didn’t have any scientists and didn’t know anything about science — yet Wal-Mart will now start harassing suppliers over, and deceiving customers with the dubious concept of “sustainability.”
Attention Wal-Mart shoppers — go to Target.
Some deluded military veterans are lobbying for Waxman-Markey, apparently trying to convince politicians and voters that climate change represents some sort of national security issue.
Iraq/Afghanistan vet Rep. John Boccieri (R-OH), former Virgina Republican Sen. John Warner, VoteVets.org and the Truman National Security Project reportedly are trying to put national security at the “center of the climate change debate,” according to ClimateWire.
This effort is absurd for at least three main reasons.
First, Waxman-Markey will have no impact on global climate — even alarmist-in-chief James Hansen admits that. So whatever national security issues may be presented at some far-off time by droughts, rising sea-levels, etc., they will not be avoided by this bill.
Next, it’s hard to see how making energy more expensive and weakening our economy will make us more economically or militarily secure. Military spending is a tremendous drain on the economy — remember the Soviet Union? — and only a wealthy nation can have both guns and butter.
Finally, for those worried about our dependence on foreign oil, it’s not clear how enacting an anti-coal bill will solve that problem. It would seem that if you want us to move away from gasoline-powered cars and toward electric cars, for example, we’re going to need to burn coal to get there. Coal can also be converted into liquid fuel.
Beyond these reasons, why would vets decide to team up with the greens who, for the most part, tend to be military-hating left-wingers? How many U.S. soldiers were killed and wounded thanks to the Left’s Vietnam and Iraq war protests that only encouraged our enemies?