Category: Green Hell

Brookings: Waxman-Markey a $9 trillion tax!

The Waxman-Markey climate bill amounts to a $9 trillion tax that will reduce personal consumption by up to $2 trillion by mid-century, according to an analysis presented yesterday by the left-leaning Brookings Institution.

No effort was made to estimate the benefits of Waxman-Markey, apparently because of the difficulty of such an estimation, according to a report in Carbon Control News.

To summarize: We know Waxman-Markey will hurt taxpayers, consumers and the economy, and it’s too difficult to determine whether the bill will provide any benefits — so let’s hurry up and enact the Mother of All Taxes?

Click here for Brookings’ “Fact Sheet.”

Click here for Brookings’ Powerpoint presentation.

UN green chief: Ban plastic bags

UN environmental chief Achim Steiner said yesterday that,

“Single use plastic bags which choke marine life, should be banned or phased out rapidly everywhere. There is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere.”

The notion that plastic bags pose some special hazard to marine life, however is a myth. As reported in the Times (UK) on March 8, 2008,

Scientists and environmentalists have attacked a global campaign to ban plastic bags which they say is based on flawed science and exaggerated claims.

The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds…

Campaigners say that plastic bags pollute coastlines and waterways, killing or injuring birds and livestock on land and, in the oceans, destroying vast numbers of seabirds, seals, turtles and whales. However, The Times has established that there is no scientific evidence to show that the bags pose any direct threat to marine mammals…

Poor countries: Tax international air travel for global welfare fund

From The Guardian,

Britain and other rich countries will be asked to accept a compulsory levy on international flight tickets and shipping fuel to raise billions of dollars to help the world’s poorest countries adapt to combat climate change.

The suggestions come at the start of the second week in the latest round of UN climate talks in Bonn, where 192 countries are starting to negotiate a global agreement to limit and then reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The issue of funding for adaptation is critical to success but the hardest to agree.

The aviation levy, which is expected to increase the price of long-haul fares by less than 1%, would raise $10bn (£6.25bn) a year, it is said.

Poor countries are just cutting their own throats by siding with the greens who, if they had their way, would simply ban international air travel — except, of course, for the green elites like Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Richard Branson, the Google creeps, etc.

Moreover, if poor countries want to be richer, in addition to political reform, they should kick the anti-development, people-hating greens out of their countries, as Paul Driessen explains in his book Eco-imperialism: Green Power, Black Death.

Mass transit not so green

From AFP:

You worry a lot about the environment and do everything you can to reduce your carbon footprint — the emissions of greenhouse gases that drive dangerous climate change.

So you always prefer to take the train or the bus rather than a plane, and avoid using a car whenever you can, faithful to the belief that this inflicts less harm to the planet.

Well, there could be a nasty surprise in store for you, for taking public transport may not be as green as you automatically think, says a new US study…

Click here for the full article…

Obama’s new coal scare: U.S. not the ‘Saudi Arabia’ of coal

A new report from the Obama administration’s Department of Energy says we may no longer be the “Saudi Arabia of coal,” according to the Wall Street Journal, because we may only have 120, rather than 240 years years of economically accessible reserves.

I promise to worry about what people will do for energy in 120 years right after I finish worrying about free enterprise and capitalism surviving the Obama administration.

Waxman-Markey federalizes local building codes

… even the Washington Post is worried about this one:

In fact, the [Waxman-Markey] bill also contains regulations on everything from light bulb standards to the specs on hot tubs, and it will reshape America’s economy in dozens of ways that many don’t realize.

Here is just one: The bill would give the federal government power over local building codes. It requires that by 2012 codes must require that new buildings be 30 percent more efficient than they would have been under current regulations. By 2016, that figure rises to 50 percent, with increases scheduled for years after that. With those targets in mind, the bill expects organizations that develop model codes for states and localities to fill in the details, creating a national code. If they don’t, the bill commands the Energy Department to draft a national code itself.

The Post concludes:

Is the best way to achieve that, though, to federalize what has long been a matter of local concern? And if the point of cap-and-trade is to change market incentives, why does Congress, and not the market, need to dictate these changes? Those are a few questions that emerge when you begin to read through the 900 pages.

One dream. One world. Obamaland für alle.

If you pay a lot for power…

… then you probably don’t rely on coal.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on June 2 that,

If you were paying a lot for power in 2008 and you were not from Hawaii, you were probably living in the Northeast or California. All of the remaining utilities with the 10 highest power prices in 2008 were located in California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts…

The cheapest power prices in the United States in 2008 were again found in the Midwest and Southeast, where utilities with ample coal-fired generation supply were able to offer customers prices frequently less than 6 cents or 7 cents per kWh on average across customer classes.

The anti-coal nature of cap-and-trade will ensure that all of us pay a lot for power and everything else that is produced by means of electricity — i.e., all goods and services.

PowerPrices2008

Obamanomics: Green jobs = Pay cuts

The Left still lambasts the trickle-down theory behind Reaganomics. Meanwhile, the green jobs theory behind Obamanomics is turning out to be more akin to a nose-dive for worker wages.

The hype

In campaign literature abotu creating 5 million “green jobs,” then candidate Obama said,

The Obama plan will increase funding for federal workforce training programs and direct these programs to incorporate green technologies training, such as advanced manufacturing and weatherization training, into their efforts to help Americans find and retain stable, high-paying jobs. [Emphasis added]

in its article about a March 26 White House “townhall meeting”, the Associated Press reported that,

Obama said job creation in America is difficult in a time of economic hardship and that the work of the future should be in more high-paying, high-skill areas like clean energy technology. [Emphasis added]

The reality

But CNNMoney reports:

Massive investment in renewable energy could ultimately create 4 million manufacturing jobs. But for the workers in the bottom rung of this movement, the shift to green jobs could very well mean a pay cut of nearly 60%, a trend spreading across the entire manufacturing sector.

Many of the entry-level jobs making green energy components start at $12 an hour, much less than the now extinct $28 an hour job that had allowed high school-educated workers in the auto sector to achieve middle class status.

“Particularly at the lower end, these are not very good jobs,” said Philip Mattera, research director at Good Jobs First, a labor-friendly research group, also acknowledging that the renewable energy sector paid wages that were “all over the map”… [read more]

Obama buddy Al Gore will possibly make more than a billion dollars from his “green job” — that is, investing in, and lobbying for cap-and-trade — but not everyone will be so fortunate.

Obama: No global climate deal without China

Carbon Control News reports State department climate envoy Todd Stern said in a June 3 speech that,

“Certainly no [global climate] deal will be possible if we don’t find a way forward with China.”

So what does this mean given that China has repeatedly vowed to never reduce its greenhouse gas emissions out of concern for its economic growth, believes that climate change is the fault of the West, and has demanded that the West give developing nations (including China) up to 1 percent of annual GDP supposedly to “assist climate adaptation and mitigation efforts”?

Does it mean that President Obama is looking for a way out of shackling the U.S. economy to the Son of the Kyoto Protocol which will be negotiated in Copenhagen this December?

Or is President Obama preparing us for his surrender of our money to Chinese extortion?

Stay tuned…

Al Gore invests millions to make billions in cap-and-trade software

Al Gore’s venture capital firm has invested $6 million in a software company that stands to make billions of dollars from cap-and-trade regulation — further fueling controversy that Gore lied about his profiteering from cap-and-trade to Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee during testimony in April.

Hara Software sells software to help track greenhouse gas emissions. The market for such software is now about $2.5 billion dollars in size, and is expected to grow by a factor of ten to $25 billion if cap-and-trade legislation is enacted, according to Hara CEO Amit Chatterjee.

Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm in which Al Gore is a partner, invested in Hara just last year. Chatterjee told Reuters that,

“This company would not have existed if Al Gore had not bought off on the idea.”

Gore is also under fire for lying to Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) at the same congressional hearing about his relationship with Goldman Sachs.

Operating as a stealth tax, cap-and-trade will make the vast majority of Americans poorer and less free — but Al Gore, Kleiner Perkins, Amit Chatterjee and Hara will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Sonia Sotomayor: Environmental extremist?

Obama Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor represents a potential threat to U.S. consumers and to the economy in terms of energy and the environment.

In her 2007 Second Circuit decision in Riverkeeper, Inc. v. EPA 475 F. 3d 83, Judge Sotomayor sided with extreme green groups who had sued the U.S. EPA because the agency permitted cost-benefit analysis to be used in the determination of environmental protection technology for power plant cooling water intake structures.

Fortunately, Judge Sotomayor’s decision was recently overturned by the Supreme Court, fittingly on April 1, 2009 (Entergy v. Riverkeeper, No. 07-588).

Had the EPA been required to abide by Judge Sotomayor’s decision, American consumers would have been forced to pay billions of dollars more in energy costs every year as power plants producing more than one-half of the nation’s electricity would have had to undertake expensive retrofits.

President Obama said this weekend in an interview that,

“What I want is not just ivory tower learning. I want somebody who has the intellectual firepower but also a little bit of a common touch and a practical sense of how the world works.”

But Sotomayor didn’t have too much of a “common touch” and “practical sense” when it came to the cost-benefit analysis.

Senators should probe whether Judge Sotomayor lacks the common-sense realization that the benefits of environmental regulation ought to outweigh its costs — a worldview with ominous implications given the nation’s present rush toward cap-and-tax global warming regulation and other green mindlessness.