Sen. Arlen Spector (D-PA) said last week that he would vote for cloture on climate legislation, thereby allowing a bill to move to a simple majority vote for passage, according to Greenwire.
The odd thing, of course, is that there is no Senate bill yet.
If Spector’s cloture commitment represents his sentiments on the House-passed Waxman-Markey, woe is Pennsylvania.
The Heritage Foundation says that Pennsylavnia stands to lose an average of 46,762 jobs per year between 2012-2035 and Pennsylvania familes stand to lose and average of $4,888 per year during that period if the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill is enacted into law.
Greenpeace recently leaked a memo from the American Petroleum Institute discussing the trade group’s involvement with so-called “Energy Citizen” rallies against Waxman-Markey. Greenpeace likens these grassroots efforts to “astroturf.”
The problem with API — aside from failure to keep its communications confidential — is not that it is funding grassroots rallies against Waxman-Markey. We are for anybody that opposes the bill and would welcome their support with open arms.
The group’s real problem is that, while it opposes Waxman-Markey, it wants Waxman-Markey Lite.
According to this API memo issued in the wake if the Greenpeace kerfuffle, the oil industry association says,
API has a clear position on climate legislation: It opposes Waxman-Markey, and calls for the Senate to get it right. API is not opposed to fair and transparent climate legislation that limits greenhouse gas emissions but protects U.S. jobs and ensures that energy prices are not raised to the point where they threaten the economy.
How the oil industry thinks it can live with greenhouse gas regulation is beyond comprehension. Regardless of how lax they start, greenhouse gas limits will only get more expensive, stringent and draconian.
API’s effort to cut a deal with the carbon devil is reminiscent of France opting for Nazi occupation-lite through its Vichy government. The only sensible — and honorable — thing to do, however, is to fight evil all out.
API President Jack Gerard: The oil industry's Marshall Petain?Captain Renault looks at Vichy water in disgust in Casablanca
The Obama EPA is explicitly saying for the first time that a pending greenhouse gas (GHG) vehicle emissions rule, when finalized, will define carbon dioxide (CO2) and other GHGs as regulated under the Clean Air Act and will therefore trigger mandates for new power plants and other stationary sources to limit their GHGs.
The purpose of this threat, of course, is to scare industries and Congress into a cap-and-trade bill this fall.
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.
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.
…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?
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].
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:
RFK Jr, Planetary Zero. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his activist group Riverkeeper pressured GE to undertake the clean-up. Ironically, Time magazine had declared Kennedy one of its “Heroes of the Planet” for his Hudson River activism.
Corporate Neville Chamberlain-ism. GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt who, in hopes of appeasing the greens, reversed former CEO Jack Welch’s policy against dredging.
Your gooberment at work. The EPA, which in forcing GE to dredge sediments that should have been left alone, failed its eponymous mission — environmental protection.
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.”
