McCain’s climate change?

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the “the grandfather among Republicans on climate change,” may be changing sides at least with respect to the Waxman-Markey bill, according to Energy & Environment Daily.

According to the report,

Asked about the Senate debate [on Waxman-Markey], McCain said only, “I hope it’s vastly different than the House bill.”

McCain also rationalizes that his criticism does not conflict with his earlier efforts. “It says I’ve had good bills, and this is a lousy one,” he said.

But the Republican’s stance has launched a guessing game of which McCain will take part in this year’s debate…

Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) also expects McCain to get more involved when the legislation ripens. But when he does, Voinovich expects McCain to have a different take than many expect. “I think he probably has a much better appreciation of the impact all this has on various sections of the country because he ran a presidential campaign. Up until that, I don’t think there were a lot of things he was aware of.”

This would indeed be a good time for McCain to redeem his embarrassing performance during last fall’s campaign.

Clothesline law nixed in North Carolina

North Carolina state representative Pricey Harrison has apparently visited Al Gore’s web site one too many times.

Rep. Harrison pushed a bill through the North Carolina House that would have prohibited local governments from banning clotheslines. Harrison claims,

“It’s been a real problem for folks who feel pretty adamantly they want to use clotheslines. It’s their small step that they can take toward global warming issue.”

Drying your clothes outdoors as way to slow the much-dreaded global warming is, of course, the brainchild of Al Gore and is recommended on the web site for An Inconvenient Truth.

Sadly for Pricey, the State Senate clotheslined her bill, the News-Record (Greensboro, NC) reported.

Pricey Harrison (with John Edwards) in happier times
Pricey Harrison (with John Edwards) in happier times

GE’s ‘net-zero energy home’ scam

GE brings good schemes to life. Consider its recently announced “net-zero energy home” initiative.

The program calls for the installation in homes of networked appliances powered by home-based solar panels and wind turbines. So what’s not to like about homes that are energy self-sufficient?

Even accepting the GE fantasy that homes can be net-zero users of energy, that sadly does not mean that the cost of that energy is zero.

The system will add about 10 percent to the cost of a home, according to GE — a price that likely would take more than a decade to pay for itself.

GE’s net-zero-energy plan amounts to little more than a shift in check-writing.

Instead of writing monthly checks to your local utility for the energy you actually use, you’ll just write one big check to GE (or your contractor) upfront — a payment that might or might not cover a decade or more of home energy use and that probably does not include any maintenance costs for your system. Additionally, since most people borrow to purchase their homes, you’d essentially wind up financing you electric bill over the life of your mortgage, further adding to the cost of the system.

If your home turns out not to be net-zero-energy, you’ll still wind up writing those monthly checks to your local utility while GE and your contractor bask in the unearned glow of the original upfront payment.

Beware: green or clean energy — whatever you want to call it — is the new snake oil. It’s sad that the only sort of energy innovation occurring today is based more on financial shenanigans (cost-shifting, subsidies and worse) than technologies to produce more energy at less cost.

Wal-Mart cons customers with green labeling

If you need a new or, perhaps, a first reason to detest Wal-Mart, consider this.

Wal-Mart will require its suppliers to calculate the environmental impact of their products, according to a report in Greenwire (July 15).

According to the report,

“I envision the day that you look at a piece of apparel, you flip a tag over, and learn about how sustainable it really is,” said John Fleming, Wal-Mart’s chief merchandising officer. The tags would work similarly to nutritional labeling today, though some standardization needs to take place, he said.

Interesting… since the greens don’t think that modern agriculture (cotton and wool) or the chemical and petroleum industries (synthetic fibers) are sustainable, what exactly will Wal-Mart apparel be made of?

Last year, former Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott told a Wall Street Journal conference audience that the company didn’t have any scientists and didn’t know anything about science — yet Wal-Mart will now start harassing suppliers over, and deceiving customers with the dubious concept of “sustainability.”

Attention Wal-Mart shoppers — go to Target.

Vets join vet-haters for Waxman-Markey?

Some deluded military veterans are lobbying for Waxman-Markey, apparently trying to convince politicians and voters that climate change represents some sort of national security issue.

Iraq/Afghanistan vet Rep. John Boccieri (R-OH), former Virgina Republican Sen. John Warner, VoteVets.org and the Truman National Security Project reportedly are trying to put national security at the “center of the climate change debate,” according to ClimateWire.

This effort is absurd for at least three main reasons.

First, Waxman-Markey will have no impact on global climate — even alarmist-in-chief James Hansen admits that. So whatever national security issues may be presented at some far-off time by droughts, rising sea-levels, etc., they will not be avoided by this bill.

Next, it’s hard to see how making energy more expensive and weakening our economy will make us more economically or militarily secure. Military spending is a tremendous drain on the economy — remember the Soviet Union? — and only a wealthy nation can have both guns and butter.

Finally, for those worried about our dependence on foreign oil, it’s not clear how enacting an anti-coal bill will solve that problem. It would seem that if you want us to move away from gasoline-powered cars and toward electric cars, for example, we’re going to need to burn coal to get there. Coal can also be converted into liquid fuel.

Beyond these reasons, why would vets decide to team up with the greens who, for the most part, tend to be military-hating left-wingers? How many U.S. soldiers were killed and wounded thanks to the Left’s Vietnam and Iraq war protests that only encouraged our enemies?

Hero of the day: Sen. John Barrasso

Energy and Environment Daily reports in “Barrasso makes a name for himself fighting EPA, climate bill” that

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), a [Senate Environment and Public Works Committee] member, predicted that [Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY)] will play a “very active role” in the climate change debate.

“I think Senator Barrasso clearly not only understands the issue, has taken the time to try to read up on it,” Cardin said. “He’s personally visited a lot of places. He’s made this a priority. … We may not agree with him on a particular topic, but he is well prepared and he certainly represents his view very effectively.”

Sen. Cardin was much more gracious than Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) who “was not as kind,” according to E&E:

By teaming up with [Sen. James Inhofe] and other GOP critics of the administration’s climate policies, “He has positioned himself with the very radical deniers,” Boxer said.

Welcome to the club, Sen. Barrasso.

Jobs war: West, Midwest vs. East

Waxman-Markey was a win for the East in the brewing battle over renewable energy jobs, the New York Times reported yesterday.

Eastern states oppose a super-high voltage transcontinental grid that would reduce the need for wind farms in their region. Waxman-Markey blocks the federal government from overturning eastern state objections to new transmission lines.

Hero of the day: Sen. Lamar Alexander

Carbon Control News reports that,

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) says he would not vote for any climate change legislation that places a mandatory cap on carbon emissions even if it fully incorporates GOP proposals to build 100 new nuclear plants in 20 years, electrify half of the U.S. vehicle fleet, expand offshore drilling and double energy-related research & development.

Unlike trade association embarrassments like EEI’s Tom Kuhn and ACC’s Cal Dooley, Sen. Alexander is not trying to make Waxman-Markey a better bill, he flat-out opposes it.

Would you sweat out a heatwave for $2.50 per hour?

Following up on yesterday’s story about Baltimore Gas & Electric’s program to install 2 million Obama-meters in homes, BG&E says that on peak days (i.e., very hot days when there’s a lot of demand for air conditioning), its Obama-meters helped…

… lots of customers cut power use [between 2p-7pm] to 30kwh from 40kwh… [earning a rebate of] $12.50 for that day,

according to a report in SmartGridToday.

So that works out to being paid $2.50 per hour to sweat at home — much less than the minimum wage, which is scheduled to rise to $7.25 per hour on July 24.

Of course, if you went to the shopping mall or visited neighbors with air conditioning on those days then it would be money-for-nothing.

Imagine if entire neighborhoods gathered in one air-conditioned house on “peak days” (house-pooling?) everyone could save $12.50, less the cover charge for the home in which everyone “pooled” to play that new board game, Cap and Charade.

Will Obama sacrifice the EIA’s credibility?

Carbon Control News reports that,

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) is hoping to complete within the next few weeks an analysis of the massive House climate bill that could reshape the climate debate and ultimately determine the stance of several hesitant lawmakers…

Moderate Democrats from coal-reliant states are among those being most fiercely courted by climate bill backers, and they likely will be looking for some reassurance from EIA that implementing a cap-and-trade program will not cause their constituents’ electricity rates to sky rocket.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), a key fence-sitter, said avoiding “a spike in energy prices” was one of his top two concerns with the House legislation. “I don’t think we’re entirely there, for coal states,” he told reporters July 7.

We predict that the Obama administration will force the EIA to cast aside its objectivity and provide the “reassurance” that wobbly Democratic Senators seek.

Wind weakens UK energy security

Excessive reliance on wind power jeopardizes the UK’s energy security says, the business advocacy group CBI.

According to a report in the Financial Times, CBI warns,

Britain will see rapid growth both in wind power and in new gas-fired power stations – needed when the wind is not blowing.

That will make the country more dependent on imported gas, from Russia and elsewhere, more exposed to volatile commodity prices, and less able to cut the CO2 emissions produced by burning fossil fuels.

Instead, the CBI wants more help for investment in new nuclear reactors and “clean coal” power stations that can capture and store emissions.

It’s too bad that CBI doesn’t yet understand that, if CO2 emissions are all it’s worried about, then coal is already “clean.”