Category: Green Hell

The Obama administration’s new mileage standards are not slated to apply to vehicle makers that sell fewer than 400,000 cars per year in the U.S., reports the Wall Street Journal — taking BMW, Daimler AG, Suzuki and Mitsubishi Motors off the hook.

In effect, the provision would make it easier for Mercedes to keep selling cars like its $147,000, 12-cylinder S600 sedan, rated at 13 miles per gallon, while GM or Toyota would be required to meet tougher mileage standards with smaller, more efficient cars.

Do you think that Government Motors CEO Obama realizes the competitive disadvantage at which he placed his own company?

The Obama administration turned aside a loan guarantee application by Bethesda,MD-based USEC to build a Piketon, OH-based plant to produce nuclear fuel for reactors, apparently in favor of giving the loan guarantee either to French company Areva or UK company Urenco, Greenwire reports.

According to Greenwire:

DOE’s loan-guarantee decision drew quick criticism from Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio), whose district includes the proposed USEC plant.

“It’s death. It cannot wait another 18 months,” said Schmidt’s chief of staff, Barry Bennett.

“It is interesting that Iran has the technology and it seems to be working fine, but the Department of Energy can’t find a way to do it here in the United States,” Bennett said. Schmidt will be sending President Obama a letter urging him to reverse the decision, he said.

Rep. Schmidt said that unless the decision is reversed, job lay-offs will begin in August.

Ft. Collins plans to build the largest “zero-energy district” in the world in which the neighborhood generates as much power as it consumes, according to Newsweek.

But “zero-energy” doesn’t come at zero cost. Newsweek reports:

Officials estimate that the Fort Collins project will cost roughly $350 million. The stimulus money kicks in only $4.8 million, which leaves the city to do significant fundraising. Money could come from a mix of government, private investments, utility companies, and research and development grants. “It’s a ton of money, and there’s no way we can do this on our own,” says Mike Freeman, Fort Collins’s chief financial officer and economic-development guru. “The biggest risk for us is that we won’t have enough money and that this will take 20 years.”

The so-called FortZED district contains 7,000 commercial and residential customers. So that works out to spending $50,000 per customer.

The average electric bill in Fort Collins is $50.66 per month.

So it will take more than 82 years for FortZED to break-even.

Washington DC’s trade press is all a buzz with reports of how much money the impliedly evil energy industry is spending to lobby on Waxman-Markey. Nowhere are any reports of what the greens and rentseekers are spending to lobby against consumers, taxpayers and America. So in the name of fairness:

• Al Gore’s venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers has paid the lobbying firm Bay Bridge Strategies Inc. $100,000 so far this year to lobby on President Obama’s stimulus bill and Waxman-Markey.
• The U.S. Climate Action Partnership paid the Lighthouse Consulting Group a total of $490,000 so far in 2009 to lobby on climate.

Click for Bay Bridge’s first quarter and second quarter lobbying reports.

Click for Lighthouse Consulting’s first quarter and second quarter lobbying reports.

… $875,000 per year amid a a $1.4 billion five year deficit, reports USA Today.

I wonder what the settlement will be on the first injury caused by the new trash can/compactors? $875,00? More?

Why not just ban trash altogether? That would save even more money!

Carbon Control News reports:

A key Sierra Club attorney says the group’s support for final passage of a climate bill is conditioned on the preservation of EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act [CAA] to require reductions in greenhouse gases (GHGs) from existing facilities, an assertion that appears to be a reversal from the group’s prior support for a House-passed cap-and-trade bill that would strip the agency of most of its air act authorities in dealing with GHG emissions.

One reason many industries have been willing to go along with cap-and-trade is to escape tortuous and unpredictable EPA regulation of CO2 under the CAA. In addition to the many onerous provisions of the CAA, the law has aggressive “citizen suit” provisions that enable the greens to enforce the law by legal action.

So the greens are either:

• Using the threat of EPA regulation as a way to coerce any industry hold-outs into signing a climate deal now; or they are
• Maneuvering to pull the rug out from industry at the last moment and have EPA regulation somehow inserted into any final bill.

Any CEO who signs on to a climate bill in order to create so-called “regulatory certainty” is too stupid to live has reached his level of incompetence. 🙂

California bill S.B. 722 would require that carbon offset vendors provide consumers with information about the environmental bona fides of their products. But offset providers oppose the bill as it would outlaw about 90 percent of existing voluntary offsets in California, according to ClimateWire.

Surprisingly, green groups — including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the American Lung Association and the League of Conservation Voters — support the bill.

Apparently, the greens feel that the offset industry is a fraud too far. Maybe they’ll hold that mirror up to themselves next.

California bill S.B. 722 would require that carbon offset vendors provide consumers with information about the environmental bona fides of their products. But offset providers oppose the bill as it would outlaw about 90 percent of existing voluntary offsets in California, according to ClimateWire.

Surprisingly, green groups — including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the American Lung Association and the League of Conservation Voters — support the bill.

Apparently, the greens feel that the offset industry is a fraud too far. Maybe they’ll hold that mirror up to themselves next.

From the New York Daily News:

Mayor Bloomberg, who casts himself as a green movement leader, has been caught red-handed letting his official SUVs idle – sometimes for more than an hour.

In just the past week, the city-owned SUVS that hustle hizzoner around the city were timed idling from 10 minutes to more than an hour eight times, The Associated Press reported.

Bloomberg strengthened the city’s anti-idling law earlier this year, allowing just three minutes of idling…

The Obama administration has proposed to cut snowmobile use in Yellowstone National Park by more than half (318 vs. 720 per day).

Does last week’s revelation that regulators granted Goldman Sachs special trading advantages over the public in the stock market indicate that Goldman will also get to freeboot in any carbon market created by cap-and trade?

An inquiring mind put that question to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Click here for the media release.

“Unless [the Waxman-Markey] legislation is modified and revised, Georgians could see their electric utility bills go up by as much as $66/month by 2020,” Georgia Public Service Commission Chairman Doug Everett told Restructuring Today.

This would amount to about a 70% increase in average monthly residential electricity bills for Georgia Power customers, based on data from the Georgia Environmental Facilities Authority.