I like where I live, but I didn’t quite realize that it was turning into a green hell. At least not until I read Steven Milloy’s new book, Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.
Read the rest of Mark Hemingway’s review of Green Hell at NationalReviewOnline…
Al Gore’s group Repower America apparently is looking to hold townhall meetings on Waxman-Markey, reports the News-Sentinel (Knoxville, TN). Stay tuned. This could be fun!
The creator of the cap-and-trade concept told the Wall Street Journal that he doubts the scheme will work for greenhouse gas emissions. According to the article:
Mr. [Thomas] Crocker sees two modern-day problems in using a cap-and-trade system to address the global greenhouse-gas issue. The first is that carbon emissions are a global problem with myriad sources. Cap-and-trade, he says, is better suited for discrete, local pollution problems. “It is not clear to me how you would enforce a permit system internationally,” he says. “There are no institutions right now that have that power.”…
The other problem, Mr. Crocker says, is that quantifying the economic damage of climate change — from floods to failing crops — is fraught with uncertainty…
“Once a cap is in place,” he warns, “it is very difficult to adjust.” For example, buyers of emissions permits would see their value reduced if the government decided in the future to loosen the caps…
Crocker’s last point is more correctly expressed as there being a great deal of uncertainty about whether climate change is necessarily a bad thing. A slightly warming planet, after all, is most likely much more desirable than a slightly cooling planet.
From ClimateWire:
…And a Center for American Progress report released yesterday that pushes for retrofitting 40 percent of the country’s buildings — 50 million structures — by 2020 isn’t ambitious enough, [former President Bill] Clinton said. “Let’s do them all over the next 5 years and put millions of people to work,” he said.
He pointed to financing options on the local level, as well, citing Berkeley, Calif.’s model that allows homeowners to pay for retrofits through their property taxes. “I believe our success in proving there’s a new economy out there requires us to do much more, much more quickly, on the easy ideas,” he said. “Nobody is thinking of this on a scale. It is so simple.”
But Bill, no one ever said that ripping off consumers and taxpayers was complicated.
The Maryland Public Service Commission has sided with AARP in denying Baltimore Gas & Electric’s request for an expedited processing of the utility’s smart meter program, reports SmartGridToday.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) plans to control your home appliances when you’re not there.
According to SmartGridToday, the TVA is planning a $400 million smart meter pilot program, including $200 million of Obama stimulus money, that would allow the TVA to turn off appliances when people are away from their homes and businesses.
And just how will the TVA know when you are away? What if you don’t want your appliances turned off?
From Bloomberg:
President Barack Obama’s push for wind and solar energy to wean the U.S. from foreign oil carries a hidden cost: overburdening the nation’s electrical grid and increasing the threat of blackouts… “As we add more and more wind power, the grid will get more stressed, and there’s going to be a point where the grid can’t handle any more,” [said Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman Jon Wellinghoff].
There’s nothing quite like central planning.
The green-forced “clean-up” by General Electric of PCBs in Hudson River sediments has — to no one’s surprise — backfired.
As predicted by everyone with an ounce of common sense, GE’s dredging stirred up the formerly entombed PCBs. EPA water-test results revealed that PCB levels in the river exceed safety limits.
Chalk up another green disaster, courtesy of:
And now, we’re on the verge of turning over energy policy — via the Waxman-Markey climate bill — to these very same people?
In an article titled “Calif. looks to storage technologies and people to balance its grid” (Aug. 11), ClimateWire reports that,
Another technology [seen as key] is demand management, a process by which consumers adjust how much electricity their homes or offices are using based on real-time information from the grid on prices and other indicators of how much supply is available at the moment. Such communication… would be based on a smart grid, which will automatically receive information from the grid operator and adjust electricity use — for example, by turning off a house’s air conditioner for five minutes during times of peak demand.
Only in the bizarre world of green-think would your local utility’s ability to turn off your air conditioning when you need it the most be considered “technology.”
If you listen to President Obama these days, you are likely to hear him attack and deride people who oppose or raise questions about his policies.
Just today, for example, he blasted critics of his healthcare reform policies:
“I don’t find Canadians particularly scary, but I guess some of the opponents of reform think that they make a good bogeyman.”
Also today, he blasted critics of his policy on Honduras:
“The same critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras are the same people who say that we’re always intervening and the Yankees need to get out of Latin America. You can’t have it both ways.”
The Detroit News recently editorialized that:
President Barack Obama is chiding critics of his carbon cap-and-trade proposal to combat global warming for being afraid of a future shaped by new energy technologies and thriving with so-called green jobs.
So is he really the post-partisan politician that was pitched to America in 2008? You decide in the poll below:
This July 28 letter from the National Academy of Sciences says that there is no existing way to monitor CO2 emissions around the world — meaning that there would be no way to verify that countries around the world are complying with emissions limits that may be set by international treaty.
Of course, monitoring and verification are just the first steps of enforcement. How would anyone actually compel China, India, Mexico, Russia and the rest of the developing world to comply with limits on emitting greenhouse gases?
Would the UN invade? Would Wal-Mart be forced to stop buying Chinese? What about the sort of international sanctions that have worked so well with Iran and North Korea? A beer summit? What?
Northeastern governors may ban home furnaces that burn oil in order to meet greenhouse gas emission limits.
The governors are expected to approve “a blueprint for slashing carbon dioxide from cars — and perhaps home furnaces — by January,” reports ClimateWire.
About half of Massachusetts 2 millions homes, for example, rely on oil heat. “Thousands of homes might have to replace oil furnaces with wood-burning heaters” or with heat from renewable electricity or natural gas, or upgrade furnaces to burning biofuels, ClimateWire reports.
New home furnaces cost between $3,000 to $5,000.
There would also be international trade implications from such a policy since about half of the region’s heating oil comes from Canadian tar sands.