Category: Climate & Energy

House Democrats may have missed their golden opportunity to rid themselves of the pathologically narcissistic leader that has nearly destroyed them – just like the Soviets missed their best chance in late-June 1941.

After having purged his army generals via show trials in 1937 and after having utterly ignored numerous intelligence reports that the Nazis were going to invade the Soviet Union, Joe Stalin was terrified when the Nazis actually did invade on June 22, 1941.

But he wasn’t scared because the Germans were slaughtering his armies or gaining vast swaths of territory (largely because he refused to give orders to counterattack), he was scared because he reasonably believed that he was going to be deposed (and worse) for his disastrous miscalculation in trusting Hitler.

In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, Stalin vanished from Moscow, absconding to his dacha where he hid, trembling. When prime minister Vyacheslav Molotov finally got a hold of him after about a week or so, Stalin imagined that the Politburo was coming for him.

But shockingly, the Politburo wasn’t angry with Stalin. Instead, the sycophantic group was desperate for his leadership. The much-relieved Stalin got a grip on himself and resumed active leadership of the nation and its armies.

Thus, the Soviets thus lost the opportunity to rid themselves of a most destructive and vulnerable leader.

Fast forward to November 2, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blithely told the media on election day that she was confident of Democrats maintaining control over the House of Representatives — arrogantly ignoring every shred of information to the contrary.

Then in the immediate aftermath of the 60-seat wipeout — a destruction that was courtesy of her forcing House Democrats into becoming kamikazes for an extreme legislative agenda — Pelosi laid low for the next couple days, probably uncertain of what to do or say.

Later in the week, House Democrat survivor Heath Shuler (NC) indicated that he might challenge Pelosi. But other Democrats remained mostly silent. No chorus of Democrats called for Pelosi’s ouster.

Apparently sensing that House Democrats were too shell-shocked and too afraid to rightly direct their frustration at her, Pelosi relocated her cojones and announced on November 5 that she would seek to retain her House leadership role. Thus Democrats probably lost their opportunity to rid themselves of perhaps the worst political leader their party has ever had.

The self-resurrections of Stalin and Pelosi have two key elements in common – an absence of conscience (no guilt over the havoc they wrought) and the bully’s situational awareness for coward exploitation (”Wow, these pusillanimous wimps really don’t have the brains and/or courage to get rid of me, so I can still be queen bee.”)

Some may view these self-resurrections as heroic manifestations of courage and steadfastness. But in the context of the circumstances and other relevant facts, a more apt characterization of this behavior involves pathological narcissism.

Of course, it’s not too late for Democrats to save their party from a leader with harmful psychological issues. But they will have to realize that Nancy Pelosi is just another vain and power-crazed bully, not the winged goddess of victory-in-2012.

But like skeptics were most pleased that the greens selected the polarizing and truth-and-lifestyle-impaired Al Gore to be the face of global warming alarmism, House Republicans are no doubt licking their chops at the prospect of the nationally unpopular and publicly rebuked Nancy Pelosi being the face of House Democrats again.

While we shouldn’t expect our left-wing elitist of a President to understand last Tuesday’s electoral rejection of his “progressive” prescriptions for America, we should expect Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to get it.

But Sen. McConnell seems to have missed the message, at least when it comes to cap-and-trade — odd for a coal state politician. The day after the election, Sen. McConnell said:

“The president says he’s for nuclear power. Most of my members are for nuclear power. The president says he’s for clean coal technology. Most of my members are for clean coal technology. There are areas that we can make progress on for the country.”

Aside from the canard of President Obama sincerely supporting nuclear power and the fact that Republicans ought to avoid the loaded and already co-opted-by-the-left
word “progress,” so-called “clean coal” is a form of Obama-think — a discredited cap-and-trade concept that was more trap than sincere policy.

Some in the coal industry and some coal-burning electric utilities had been talked into supporting cap-and-trade, provided that taxpayers and ratepayers forked over billions (if not trillions) of dollars for so-called “carbon capture and sequestration” (CCS) — that is burying utility carbon dioxide emissions deep underground and hoping they stay there safely.

But to the extent that any so-called environmentalists paid any lip service to clean coal and CCS, it was only to lure coal and utility suckers into cap-and-trade. Does anyone really believe, after all, that the greens would allow utilities to inject underground billions of tons of highly pressurized carbon dioxide all over the nation? They fought tooth-and-nail, after all, to prevent the storage of a comparatively small number of sealed casks of spent nuclear fuel one mile underground in the Nevada desert.

But discussion of clean coal and CCS are academic since, as of January 3, 2011, cap-and-trade will be as dead as dead gets. This is because there is no cap-and-trade without CCS and you can bet that the 112th Congress — at least on the House side — will not appropriate the billions (trillions) of dollars necessary of for large-scale CCS. So clean coal is dead too — except in the minds of establishment zombies who slept through the election.

If all anyone is worried about with coal is carbon dioxide, then coal is already clean — and that’s what all Republican Senate candidates believed, except perhaps for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Senator-elect Mark Kirk (R-IL).

Radical environmentalists are trying to put out the post-election message that support for cap-and-trade wasn’t a big negative for House Democrats.

But as a former senior Senate staffer pointed out to me…

…one need look no further than the ten House Democrats who voted for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill but who voted against the healthcare bill — i.e., Reps. John Adler (NJ), Rick Boucher (VA), Frank Kratovil (MD), Ike Skelton (MO), Zack Space (OH), Harry Teague (NM), Ben Chandler (KY), Dan Lipinski (IL), Stephen Lynch (MA), Collin Peterson (MN).

Of the ten, three were in noncompetitive seats (Peterson, Lynch, and Lipinski). Lynch and Lipinski, in fact, voted against healthcare because it didn’t go far enough. That leaves seven House members who voted against healthcare but supported Waxman-Markey, six of whom were defeated last night and the seventh, Chandler led by only 600 votes (out of 239,000 cast), but the race hasn’t been called yet (as of Nov. 4).

So Waxman-Markey seems to have figured prominently in all seven of these races, especially in Boucher’s, considering his role in helping to craft the bill. In the Teague race, returning Congressman Pearce cited the cap-and-trade vote as one of the primary reasons he decided to challenge Teague.

Sen. McConnell should wake up to the new reality in Washington, DC — a reality that does not include the discredited and lamebrain ideas of President Obama and the Pelosi-Reid 111th Congress. Many of yesterday’s Republican victors would probably just as soon have the tea party-esque and already-hip-to-the-new-reality Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) as their leader.

If Sen. McConnell keeps prattling about ”clean coal,” he may just one day find himself in the same scrap heap as all the Democrats who were smoked yesterday for their Waxman-Markey votes.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery 2009).

The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) just released its state energy efficiency scorecard.

Spurred by ACEEE’s ranking of California as the most energy efficient state and the fact that California is only exceeded by Michigan and Nevada in unemployment, we ran a simple regression of ACEEE energy efficiency rankings versus state unemployment rankings according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for August 2010.

Unemployment ranking was positively correlated (slope=.15) with energy efficiency ranking — i.e., states with higher unemployment rankings tended to have higher energy efficiency rankings.

ACEEE claims that energy efficiency creates jobs — and maybe it does. But do the jobs created through energy efficiency efforts wind up destroying other jobs — and more of them?

Energy efficiency is a policy of contraction, not one of growth — and job gains only occur during periods of growth. While energy efficiency may make sense on a case-by-case basis, blindly implemented on a societal scale, it is a suicidal policy.

There is plenty of energy out there. We need to put as much of it to good use as soon as possible to get our economy and standard of living back on the positive track.

By Steven Milloy
Human Events, October 8, 2010

It’s hard to sufficiently mock President Obama’s decision to install solar panels on the White House. But I’ll try.

The cost of the panels at this point is unknown. But the White House has assured the public that the installation job will be offered through a competitive bidding process. Given that Jimmy Carter spent about $30,000 in the 1970s installing solar panels on the White House (removed in 1986 by President Reagan), you can bank on President Obama’s folly blowing that price tag away, especially when you consider all the federal employee staff time, and security and public relations efforts that will go into the project.

Since the annual savings of the system is estimated to be only $2,300, you could also safely bet that the system will never actually pay for itself—no matter how many decades (centuries?) the system is used.

The system won’t make the White House energy independent since nighttime, clouds and rain will all force the building to remain hooked up to its existing power sources and back-ups.

Finally, the system will offer no environmental benefits. Whether or not you believe that manmade greenhouse gas emissions are changing global climate for the worse, whatever few tons of carbon dioxide emissions that might possibly be avoided through White House (or anyone else’s) use of solar panels will scarcely offset the new coal-fired power plant that China erects every other week.

The panel installation can be, then, little more than a too-little-too-late exercise in public relations to salvage something legislatively for President Obama’s green base.

While even President Obama has given up on a cap-and-trade bill coming out of this Congress, he no doubt would like to prod Congress into passing a so-called national renewable electricity standard (RES) in the upcoming lame duck session of Congress. An RES would require that a certain percentage of electricity generation come from solar, wind biomass and other supposedly renewable sources. Conveniently, Senators Jeff Bingaman (D.-N.M.) and the retiring Sam Brownback (R.-Kan.) have just introduced such a bill (S. 3813).

Although the Bingaman-Brownback bill is little more than cap-and-trade in renewable drag, it has attracted some Republican support in the Senate from Susan Collins (Maine), Jon Ensign (Nev.) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa). But Democratic skeptics like Mary Landrieu (La.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.) have offset these Republican votes. Sen. Dick Durbin has also rained on the Bingaman-Brownback RES parade, telling Congressional Quarterly, “It’s not an easy and quick bill. There are many choices, and most of them are controversial. To think we can do them quickly in a lame duck is a long shot.”

The President’s desperate green supporters insist the White House project is not completely symbolic. The CEO of solar panel maker Sungevity told Climatewire that, “This is not about Carter and another President doing solar; it’s about the fact that solar is able to save customers money.” Just who those customers are and how much money they’re actually saving, wasn’t disclosed, however.

The Center for American Progress’ Richard Caperton told Climatewire that if the President used the solar panel announcement “appropriately,” he could “show that the [solar] industry leads to jobs.” But of course the vast majority of solar manufacturing jobs are in China, where renewable energy workers earn about 1/10 of American workers.

DuPont is expanding its facility in Circleville, Ohio, to manufacture solar energy materials, accepting $56 million in federal stimulus and state aid for the $175 million project. What does the taxpayer get for all that money? Seventy new jobs created, 444 existing jobs retained and 230 construction jobs. Add all the jobs up and divide and you get a per job cost of $235,000, $76,000 of which comes from taxpayers.

Taxpayers are on the hook for about $114,000 for each stimulus-funded solar panel job at projects in Longmont, Colo., and Tipton, Ind. Then there is the $592,000-per-solar-job cost at the Emmet J. Bean Federal Center in Indianapolis, Ind.

Pardon me, but since the purpose of all this is to force consumers to spend more money buying high-priced energy (but only when the sun shines), as a taxpayer, I vote for unemployment.

Mr. Milloy is the founder and publisher of JunkScience.com. His columns and op-ed pieces have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Financial Times, and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of “Green Hell,” a new book from Regnery Publishing.

By Steve Milloy
The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA), October 3, 2010

It’s terrific that Sen. Chuck Grassley wants to help out Iowa’s wind industry, but does he have to sell out the rest of the state in the process?

Last week, Sen. Grassley co-sponsored a bill (S.3813) to establish a national renewable electricity standard (RES), legislation that Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) has indicated he would try to make the consolation prize in this Congress’ final lame duck-clash over global warming regulation.

Despite his co-sponsorship, Sen. Grassley is rightly wary of Sen. Reid’s gambit and told the media that unless more than a handful of Republicans also sign on to the bill, “I’m not going to be a part of one or two Republicans, get 60 votes, so they can have a partisan victory.”

What is RES and why should Sen. Grassley not go down the RES road at all?

An RES would require that electric utilities generate a set percentage of their power from so-called “renewable” power sources, like solar and wind, by a certain date. The disastrous-for-House-Democrats Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed in June 2009, for example, would require that utilities generate 20 percent of their power from renewables by the year 2020. S. 3813 would reduce the Waxman-Markey standard to 15 percent.

But even a 15 percent RES would be quite the monumental challenge given that solar and wind power provide less than 2 percent of current electricity generation and require massive subsidies to do so. According to the Department of Energy, solar and wind are each subsidized at a rate 55 times that of coal, 97 times that of natural gas and 15 times that of nuclear power.

Solar panels and windmills aside, it’s only the taxpayer wallet that makes these forms of energy “renewable.”

But even cost is not the main reason for rejecting the arbitrary targets and deadlines of a national RES.

Imagine a utility that generates 100 percent of the electricity it sells by burning coal or natural gas. Impose the S. 3813 RES standard on that utility and, all of a sudden, only a maximum of 85 percent of its electricity can be generated by fossil fuels. In other words, the utility’s use of fossil fuels has been capped — the result would be skyrocketing energy prices.

Since the passage of the Waxman-Markey bill, Americans have been up in arms against cap-and-trade. As Sen. Grassley recently observed “If we pass cap and trade we’d export all of our jobs, manufacturing jobs to China.”

But the same reasons for opposing cap-and-trade can and ought to be applied to RES, which ought to be labeled as calling cap-and-subsidize.

Under cap-and-trade, electric utilities would be compensated for higher generation costs by charging consumers more for electricity and by selling billions of dollars of carbon credits, which they received for free courtesy of taxpayers. Under RES, electric utilities would be similarly compensated for higher generation costs, courtesy of over-charged consumers and untold billions in taxpayer subsidies.

So the difference between RES and cap-and-trade is merely a change in form, not a change in substance of an economy-killing consumer/taxpayer rip-off.

None of this is to dissuade Sen. Grassley from trying to help Iowa’s wind industry, which is the second largest in the U.S. – but that path forward is much different than a job- and economy-killing cap on fossil fuel use.

The first step forward for wind entrepreneurs is to push for tax and regulatory policies that will restart economic growth. A growing economy requires more energy, thus enlarging the opportunities for renewable technologies. Next consumers who value renewable electricity should be allowed — not forced — to purchase it at whatever price the market will bear.

The renewables industry should also be encouraged to look for niches where its technologies are competitive with conventional energy technologies. Finally, like all other business enterprises, the renewable energy businesses should look for efficiencies that make its products more cost competitive.

Many in the renewable energy sector have gotten lazy and have decided that hiring lobbyists is easier than innovating and competing. Sen. Grassley should work to help the latter and to discourage the former.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them” (Regnery 2009).

This video from the 10:10 climate activist group speaks for itself. Watch it and pass it around before YouTube pulls it down.

Also, note that Sony and Kyocera Mita, among other corporations, are sponsors of the 10:10.