Category: Green Hell

Carbon Control News reports that Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said yesterday that,

“We may just have a situation where the bill comes over from the House and goes directly onto the calendar and shows up in a conference, simply because they are combining their global warming bill, at this point as far as we know, with the energy package. So when we go back to do energy, we could have a debate on the global warming bill when we come back from conference or during the energy debate.”

Now that the Senate has voted to allow a filibuster of any climate bill, Sen Boxer’s strategy would avoid, “a contentious Senate debate over climate provisions given limited political support in the upper chamber,” accord to Carbon Control News.

A manifesto allegedly from the eco-terrorist group Earth First! claims to have dumped mercury and chemical solvents at the Plainfield, CT site of a proposed wood-burning power plant, reports the local NBC affiliate.

Although an Earth First! spokesman denied the dumping, Connecticut officials reportedly have found three areas of the site that are contaminated with unidentified substances.

Earth First!’s credo is:

“We believe in using all the tools in the toolbox, from grassroots and legal organizing to civil disobedience and monkeywrenching. When the law won’t fix the problem, we put our bodies on the line to stop the destruction.”

President Barack Obama’s effort to use the budget reconciliation process to fast-track global warming legislation was officially blocked by the Senate yesterday when it voted 67-31 against the President’s move.

Under the budget reconciliation process, President Obama would only have needed 51 votes (a simple majority) to pass climate legislation and ensure that a bill couldn’t be filibustered.

Now as a result of the Senate vote, climate legislation will need 60 votes to avoid a filibuster.

Maryland Rep. Christopher Van Hollen has introduced a “cap-and-dividend” bill that would:

• Set emissions reductions targets at 25 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 85 percent below 2005 levels by 2050 for covered emissions.
• Place an upstream compliance obligation on the first seller of fossil fuels into the U.S. market.
• Auction 100 percent of carbon permits.
• Establish tariffs to protect U.S. manufacturers of carbon-intensive goods from imports of carbon-intensive goods originating in countries.
• Return 100% of auction proceeds in the form of a monthly Consumer Dividend to every lawful resident of the United States with a valid Social Security number.

A few thoughts:

1. At best, Van Hollen’s “dividend” would be just a return of your own money that you had to spend on higher energy costs that were caused by the bill. This hardly a true “dividend,” which is a return on investment.
2. Van Hollen’s dividend is unlikley to cover your higher energy costs. Click here for some back-of-the-envelope calculations.
3. A carbon tariff would likely do little more than bring on a trade war with China.

The only upside to Van Hollen’s bill is that a 100% auction of carbon credits is likely to light a fire under businesses to kill any such bill.

Click here for a copy of the bill.

Though BP went green with its “Beyond Petroleum” campaign and helped push America to the precipice of global warming regulation, it’s getting no credit from the Obama Justice Department.

From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Seeking maximum penalties, the U.S. government filed a civil lawsuit against a BP PLC (BP) unit in Alaska for breaking federal laws during two major 2006 oil spills in Prudhoe Bay, the largest oilfield in the country.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, Alaska, said that BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc. discharged 200,000 gallons of oil onto the North Slope during two different oil spills, according to a statement released Tuesday by the Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The complaint accuses BP of failing “to prepare and implement spill prevention” and take other measures mandated by the Clean Water Act.

The complaint also alleges that the company “improperly” removed asbestos-containing materials from its pipelines, violating the Clean Air Act, and didn’t comply in a timely manner with a federal order requiring tests, inspection and repairs.

The government asked the court for civil penalties “up to the maximum amount authorized by law,” and to order BP to “take all appropriate action to prevent spills in the future,” the statement said.

No corporate green turn goes unpunished.

Click here to listen to Bill LuMaye’s interview (WPTF 680 AM, Raleigh, NC) today with Steve Milloy about Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.

Now the greens want to regulate rocket launches lest they damage the ozone layer.

Here’s the first few paragraphs from the University of Colorado media release:

The global market for rocket launches may require more stringent regulation in order to prevent significant damage to Earth’s stratospheric ozone layer in the decades to come, according to a new study by researchers in California and Colorado.

Future ozone losses from unregulated rocket launches will eventually exceed ozone losses due to chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which stimulated the 1987 Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, said Martin Ross, chief study author from The Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles. The study, which includes the University of Colorado at Boulder and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, provides a market analysis for estimating future ozone layer depletion based on the expected growth of the space industry and known impacts of rocket launches.

“As the rocket launch market grows, so will ozone-destroying rocket emissions,” said Professor Darin Toohey of CU-Boulder’s atmospheric and oceanic sciences department. “If left unregulated, rocket launches by the year 2050 could result in more ozone destruction than was ever realized by CFCs.”

My first reaction was, “Oh my, we’re going to be trapped forever on the same planet with the greens!”

But on second thought, since no one really understands the continual fluctuations in stratospheric ozone to start with, nor do they understand (simple chemistry aside) the impact of CFCs on the ozone layer, and since there’s no evidence that any harm was ever caused to anyone or to the environment by whatever spotty thinning may have occurred during the 1980s and 1990s, this new study seems to be nothing more than yet another green anti-technology moment.

Besides, private rocket launches can’t be evil — Google is for them.

President Obama announced on March 27 that he would nominate Cathy Zoi to become Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the Department of Energy.

Zoi is a Gore-bot of the first order.

In January 2007, she became the Alliance for Climate Protection’s founding CEO. The Alliance is Al Gore’s non-profit front for advancing his personal wealth-building agenda. He is a foudning partner in the UK-based investment company, Generation Investment Management, and a partner with the U.S. based ventuire capital firm of Kleiner Perkins.

Beyond buffalo-ing America about global warming, Zoi’s has a passion for smart-metering — that is, enabling local utilities to ration your electricity.

Zoi was the chief of staff in the White House Office on Environmental Policy in the Clinton-Gore administration, where she managed the team working on environmental and energy issues (1993-95). She was also a manager at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where she pioneered the Energy Star Program.

In a March 30 op-ed in Roll Call, Zoi wrote,

We stand at the verge of a major opportunity for leadership that can take our economy in a new direction…

I guess that means what wealth doesn’t go down the toilet will go into Al Gore’s pockets.

The Associated Press reports that,

The quest for squeaky-clean dishes has turned some law-abiding people in Spokane into dishwater-detergent smugglers. They are bringing Cascade or Electrasol in from out of state because the eco-friendly varieties required under Washington state law don’t work as well. Spokane County became the launch pad last July for the nation’s strictest ban on dishwasher detergent made with phosphates, a measure aimed at reducing water pollution. The ban will be expanded statewide in July 2010, the same time similar laws take effect in several other states.

More…

Real estate agent Patti Marcotte of Spokane stocks up on detergent at a Costco in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and doesn’t care who knows it.

“Yes, I am a smuggler,” she said. “I’m taking my chances because dirty dishes I cannot live with.”

(In truth, the ban applies to the sale of phosphate detergent — not its use or possession — so Marcotte is not in any legal trouble.)

Marcotte said she tried every green brand in her dishwasher and found none would remove grease and pieces of food. Everybody she knows buys dishwasher detergent in Idaho, she said.

Supporters of the ban acknowledge it is not very popular.

“I’m not hearing a lot of positive feedback,” conceded Shannon Brattebo of the Washington Lake Protection Association, a prime mover of the ban. “I think people are driving to Idaho.”

As the American Thinker put it,

It’s not easy being green.

From the dishwasher soap industry,

“We’ve tried to market no-phosphate dishwasher detergents, but consumers flatly rejected them.”

Citing economic concerns, the Obama administration has issued federal gas mileage standards that are less stringent that those proposed by the Bush administration.

As reported by Carbon Control News,

The combined standard for vehicles and light trucks will be set at 27.3 miles per gallon (mpg) and the passenger vehicle standard is expected to be set at 30.2 mpg. The Obama administration standard will strengthen the combined vehicle and light truck standard from the current 25.3 mpg, as well as the current passenger vehicle standard of 27.5 mpg. But the final standard is weaker than what the Bush administration proposed last year—a combined 2011 CAFE standard of 27.8 mpg and a passenger car standard of 31.2 mpg.

Carbon Control News reports that the greens are unhappy with the decision but that they have

refrained from faulting the decision too harshly.

A spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists told Carbon Control News that,

“The Obama administration had its hands tied. The 2011 rule is based on fundamentally flawed methodology and data held over from the Bush administration, so it’s no surprise that it isn’t that much of a boost.”

The greens hope that Obama will issue a “more robust” standard in future years.

Click here for the final rule.