Category: Miscellaneous

Why we need a National Climate Service

The House Committee on Science and Technology yesterday passed a bill to establish a National Climate Service within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

In supporting the establishment of a National Climate Service, Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA) said,

“In a climate that is changing, it is imperative that we have reliable information to help us adapt and respond to these changes.”

I must, albeit reluctantly, agree. Just look at what happens when there’s no government agency around to tell people that beach season is over.

Calvert Cliffs-hanger: Nukes’ now or never?

The ongoing battle over the proposed reactor at the existing Calvert Cliffs, MD nuclear power plant is shaping up to be do-or-die for the U.S. nuclear power industry, according to a report in Carbon Control News.

The Constellation Energy-Electricite de France joint project moved a step closer to reality on April 28 when the Maryland Public Service commission recommended that initial construction on the reactor be allowed to commence. Then on May 19, the proposed reactor became one of four projects to be considered by the Department of Energy for part of the $18.5 billion in federal loan guarantees available for new nuclear projects. At least $10 billion in loan guarantees are needed for the plant to proceed, according to Constellation.

But the greens are claiming that the project’s 49.99% ownership by Electricitie de France would allow a foreign government to control a U.S. nuclear reactor  and are raising concerns about Constellation’s finances, including its ability to secure financing for the eventual decommissioning of the plant.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce told Carbon Control News that the Calvert Cliffs project,

“… will have a ridiculously huge bearing over what happens with the rest of the industry.”

The greens are downplaying the notion of any imminent “nuclear renaissance” since only four applications have been filed with the DOE for loan guarantees. The anti-nuclear group Public Citizen told Carbon Control News,

“Four applicants is not a renaissance.”

Propagreenda: Cap and trade not central planning

Desperate greens really will say anything to advance their agenda (i.e., totalitarianism-via-global-warming-regulation).

Rhapsodizing about der wunder of cap-and-trade in a May 31 letter to the Washington Post, Nathaniel Keohane of the Environmental Defense Fund Sturmabteilung wrote that,

History has not been kind to central planners. The way to solve global warming is to harness the power of the market rather than let the government pick the winners. It’s time to unleash America’s entrepreneurs and inventors to solve this critical challenge.

Keohane sets up his deception by seeming to acknowledge that  central planning was debunked by the 20th century — insincerity at its very best since every solution the greens offer to every environmental problem (whether real or imaginary) is central planning.

Keohane then tries to position cap-and-trade as some sort of market-based/free-market mechanism — it’s not.

First, the current iteration of cap-and-trade as embodied in the Waxman-Markey bill is nothing less than the government picking winners (every special interest group that would get free carbon allowances, tax credits and subsidies, not to mention the greens who would acquire unrivaled political power) and losers (the rest, and vast majority of us).

Next, there’s little market-like about cap-and-trade since the government will arbitrarily determine the supply of, and arbitrarily create the demand for the central commodity to be traded (permits to emit CO2).

Cap-and-trade is more akin to musical chairs than a free market. Every year there will be fewer and fewer emissions allowances available. When the music stops — at government whim — businesses that can’t obtain or can’t afford allowances will lose.

Underscoring Keohane’s disingenuosness and the economic threat posed by cap-and-trade is, surprisingly, Bill McKibben, an all-pro green propagandist who, as co-founder of 350.org, agitates to return the planet to its supposed halcyon days — pre-1990, when the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide was less than 350 parts per million.

Writing about the choppy water ahead for the Waxman-Markey climate bill in The New York Review of Books, McKibben wrote that,

“… it could be a messy fight…”

because

“[the] country [is] still suspicious of big government, and currently fearful of depression.”

Yes, Bill, and why shouldn’t clear-thinking people be suspicious of the central planning that is big government and that has been so disastrous to so many?

As one lefty talking to other lefties in the NYRB, I guess McKibben felt comfortable being honest about cap-and-trade. Keohane, in contrast, tells the public in a major daily newspaper that totalitarianism is really just markets-plus-ingenuity.

It’s all rather reminiscent of that old “Arbeit macht frei” ruse.

Nancy Pelosi: Haute-ing up the planet

Thanks, Nancy Pelosi. In one fell swoop, you’ve single-handedly validated Steve Milloy’s new book Green Hell.

While preaching green to a Chinese audience, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said,

“Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory … of how we are taking responsibility.”

It’s eerily similar to the Introduction to Green Hell:

The central concept of this book is that there is hardly any area that the greens consider off-limits to intrusion. There is almost no personal behavior of yours that they consider too trivial or too sacrosanct to regulate.

So let’s “inventory” Nancy Pelosi’s life:

She treats the U.S. Air Force as her own personal airline, according to documents uncovered by Judicial Watch. Air travel, after all, has a disproportionately large impact on the climate systen, according to the greens.

Pelosi has five children and seven grandchildren — each one a planetary burden, according to John Holdren, Barack Obama’s top science advisor and long-time population-control freak.

According to Holdren’s environmental impact equation Human Impact=Population x Affluence x Technology (I=PAT), Pelosi’s offspring, $25 million-plus net worth from her husband’s commercial real estate and other investments, and her penchant for jet and limo travel, there can be no doubt that Nancy Pelosi’s personal impact on the environment is quite high.

Generously assuming that the average American family of four has a net worth of $100,000, then the impact on the planet of Nancy Pelosi and her family would be at least 437 times greater, according to I+PAT — and that does not take into account her family’s energy use which is undoubtedly much greater than that of the average American family.

It might make you wonder what size shoe Pelosi wears — she favors Manolo Blahnik Kidskin Slingbacks which retail at a pricey $575 — to fit her immense carbon footprint.

I wonder if her baby goat-skin shoes come in our favorite color — hypocritical green, anyone?

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.

Obama’s Economic Recovery ‘Advisory’ Board: Little dissent, lots of self-dealing on climate

President Obama’s so-called Economic Recovery Advisory Board held its first quarterly meeting today — it was a spectacle of the sort of self-dealing and corruption that we may rightly expect to become routine if cap-and-trade legislation passes.

After the meeting, CNBC’s Becky Quick interviewed ERAB board member John Doerr, head of the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins — that’s right, the very same Kleiner Perkins that has invested more than $1 billion in 40 cap-and-trade-dependent business ventures and that has Al Gore as a partner.

Doerr said that ERAB talked about the need for:

  • Green technologies;
  • Cap-and-trade; and
  • Rewarding electric utilities for selling less electricity.

Doerr also told Quick that an EPA analysis showed that cap-and-trade would cost Americans less than $100 per year. (LOL!)

But we have no reason to believe that Doerr wouldn’t say and do absolutely anything to help ram through cap-and-trade legislation that would enable his firm to steal billions of dollars from consumers and taxpayers through bogus Al Gore-endorsed “green technologies.”

If you’re thinking that Doerr is only one voice on the ERAB and that less-biased heads will prevail, think again. Here are the other ERAB members and their interests/positions on cap-and-trade:

  • Austan Goolsbee as staff director and chief economist (Obama administration);
  • William H. Donaldson, SEC Chair, 2003-05 (Obama supporter who has spoken in support of climate legislation);
  • Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., president and CEO, TIAA-CREF (TIAA-CREF promotes climate change legislation through shareholder activism and possibly stands to benefit from “green” investments);
  • Robert Wolf, chairman and CEO, UBS (sells climate change-related financial products);
  • David F. Swensen, CIO, Yale University (Yale supports climate change legislation);
  • Mark T. Gallogly, founder and managing partner, Centerbridge Partners L.P. (early Obama supporter);
  • Penny Pritzker, chairwoman, Pritzker Realty Group (Obama campaign finance chairman);
  • Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO, GE (parent company of NBC News) (lobbying for climate legislation through USCAP);
  • John Doerr, partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (lobbying for climate legislation through Al Gore);
  • Jim Owens, chairman and CEO, Caterpillar Inc. (lobbying for climate change legislation through USCAP);
  • Monica C. Lozano, publisher & chief executive officer, La Opinion (her newspaper endorsed Obama);
  • Charles E. Phillips, Jr., president, Oracle (wants to use Oracle technology to ration electricity to consumers through a “smart grid”);
  • Anna Burger, chairwoman, Change to Win (union group that supports green jobs);
  • Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasurer, AFL-CIO (the union has joined with greens to lobby for climate legislation);
  • Laura D’Andrea Tyson, dean, Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley (Obama supporter who has advocated climate change legislation);
  • Martin Feldstein, professor of Economics, Harvard (opposes cap-and-trade)

So of the 16 members of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, only one (Feldstein) opposes cap-and-trade. At least six (Immelt, Owens, Doerr, Ferguson, Wolf, Phillips) expect direct financial benefits from cap-and-trade. The remaining members are either Obama supporters/employees or union representatives. Taxpayers, consumers and non-rent-seeking businesses have been left out in the cold.

Click here for the Quick-Doerr interview. Don’t miss Green Hell endorser Larry Kudlow’s anti-green fusillade at the end.

And the winner is…

… actually there was a tie in JunkScience.com’s Cap-and-Trade Re-branding Contest between:

  • Deceive-and-thieve; and
  • Tax-and-ration.

Both of these entries will receive autographed copies of Steve Milloy’s new book, Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.

Congrats to the winners — and woe to us all if deceive-and-thieve and tax-and-ration become the law of the land.

You decide: Re-brand ‘cap-and trade’

Thanks to all for entering JunkScience.com’s re-branding contest for cap-and-trade.

Because of the difficulty in choosing the best entry among the hundreds of entries received — the winner gets an autographed copy of Steve Milloy’s new book Green Hell — we narrowed down the field to the five in the poll below. Please vote once for your favorite. Results will be announced Tuesday, May 19.

Honorable mentions go to the following entries that more than adequately describe the nature of cap-and-trade:

  • Energy tithing
  • Waxman Malarkey
  • The Great Leap Forward
  • Energy Option 19/22 (i.e., 19th century energy options at 22nd century prices)
  • Carbon Concentration Control Program, or “CCCP” for afficianados of the old USSR
  • Tree and Economic Starvation Act