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Posts Tagged ‘Environmentalism’
May 29th, 2014 at 4:54 pm
Podcast: The Radical Environmentalist War on Private Property
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In an interview with CFIF, Marita Noon, Executive Director of Energy Makes America Great, discusses the latest dubious efforts by extreme environmentalists to keep private property owners from selling, developing or using their land.

Listen to the interview here.

December 6th, 2013 at 4:07 pm
The Dark Side of the Environmental Movement
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In case you needed further proof of the slightly sadistic quality of the most wall-eyed environmental extremists, I provide you with documentary evidence from Greenpeace, which has produced this video to terrify children into hectoring their parents about global warming:

As James Taylor from the Heartland Institute notes, there’s one big problem with this (well, apart from the reimagining of Santa as Mephistopheles): polar sea ice is doing just fine. But you can understand Greenpeace’s dilemma: it’s hard to make a horror film out of that.

h/t: Jim Lakely

November 21st, 2013 at 12:01 pm
Google’s Green Hypocrisy Pollutes the Environment, Costs Taxpayers

Google likes to promote itself as a green, environmentally conscious company. After all, the company stays busy lobbying for carbon tax and cap-and-trade schemes, encouraging government to shutter coal plants and building solar farms. In reality, however, as I point out in a piece featured today on The Blaze, Google is far from green.

The company’s executives control a fleet of private jets that they use to gallivant to vacation spots around the globe – burning an average of 100,000 gallons of fuel every month. The supposedly environmentally conscious company’s jets have emitted more than 100 million pounds of carbon dioxide over the last four years alone.

What’s worse is that you are helping to fund Google’s green hypocrisy. Google, thanks in part to its hefty campaign donations and cozy relationships with federal lawmakers and the Obama Administration, gets to park its jets in a taxpayer-funded NASA hangar and purchase its jet fuel at below-market prices from NASA and the Department of Defense. Google officials spent an estimated $29 million on jet fuel at the facility, roughly $10 million less than what they would have paid on the open market.

Read the entire story here.

November 15th, 2013 at 3:46 pm
Brace Yourself: Feds Take Sensible Step on Energy Policy
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It’s rare that we get anything other than green inanity in federal energy policy these days, which is why this news is so welcome. From Ben German at The Hill:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is cutting the amount of ethanol and other biofuels that must be blended into the nation’s fuel supply, a victory for oil companies that call the federal ethanol mandate unworkable.

On Friday, the EPA proposed draft 2014 blending volumes under the federal Renewable Fuel Standard that are lower than the 2013 requirements, and far less than called for in a 2007 law that expanded the mandate.

The EPA is proposing to require 15.21 billion gallons in 2014, down from 16.55 billion gallons in 2013, marking the first time the agency has lowered the target from the prior year.

A senior administration official said the Obama administration is firmly supportive of biofuels, but said  “market, infrastructure and other constraints” warrant paring back the mandate.

If you’re wondering when the hell the Obama Administration actually started worrying about the real-life effects of their policies, the answer is: when it put them at cross-purposes with a well-financed lobby. As the Wall Street Journal notes:

The EPA says it is trying to fix a problem known as the “blend wall,” which occurs when the annual requirement mandated by Congress exceeds the amount of ethanol that can be mixed into conventional blends of gasoline.

Oil companies and refiners have been warning of the blend wall for several years. If the EPA had stuck to Congress’s original target, refiners said they would have hit the blend wall in 2014 for the first time.

Which, of course, the ethanol lobby is using as an argument that this whole thing is one big gift from the government to “big oil.” That’s pretty rich coming from an industry that wouldn’t exist at any substantial scale without political collusion.

What’s the difference between ethanol and gasoline? You don’t need to pass laws to create a market for gasoline. The oil industry isn’t looking for special favors in this case; it’s looking from relief from a government-imposed drag on its business. The ethanol folks, meanwhile, are the ones trying to use state power to force people into buying their product. Which one sounds more corrupt to you?

As Drew noted earlier this week, ethanol is one big disaster. It doesn’t work in terms of economics, it doesn’t work in terms of energy, and it doesn’t work in terms of the environment. In a perfect world, we would’ve been able to abolish its mandate outright. In this flawed one, seeing it reduced at any level is a welcome change of pace.

November 12th, 2013 at 2:56 pm
The AP Condemns Government Ethanol Policy

You could almost hear environmentalists’ jaws hit the floor this morning when they opened their newspapers and took to their phones and computers for their morning news. In a fierce 4,150-word exposé, the Associated Press dispelled any notion that ethanol is the wonder cure for what ails the environment.

The AP points out that the explosion in corn farming as a result of government ethanol mandates have damaged land, polluted drinking water from fertilizer runoff, and killed aquatic life in rivers and lakes.

To top it all off, the article notes that, “The government’s predictions of the benefits have proven so inaccurate that independent scientists question whether it will ever achieve its central environmental goal: reducing greenhouse gases.”

At best, according to the article, ethanol is only 16% better than gasoline when it came to carbon dioxide emissions. And that small 16% benefit comes at a tremendous cost to the environment:

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact.

Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like south central Iowa.

The hilly, once-grassy landscape is made up of fragile soil that, unlike the earth in the rest of the state, is poorly suited for corn. Nevertheless, it has yielded to America’s demand for it.

‘They’re raping the land,’ said Bill Alley, a member of the board of supervisors in Wayne County, which now bears little resemblance to the rolling cow pastures shown in postcards sold at a Corydon pharmacy.

All energy comes at a cost. The environmental consequences of drilling for oil and natural gas are well documented and severe. But in the president’s push to reduce greenhouse gases and curtail global warming, his administration has allowed so-called green energy to do not-so-green things.

The AP’s stunning article should send a strong message to Washington about the failure of federal ethanol policies.

About 17,500 newspapers and websites are currently featuring the piece, according to a web search.

November 13th, 2012 at 7:34 pm
Obama Shuts Down More Energy Development Out West
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It was just a few weeks ago that President Obama was on the debate stage telling that nation that Mitt Romney had unfairly tarred his administration as anti-energy development:

We have increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years … Now, I want to build on that. And that means, yes, we still continue to open up new areas for drilling.

As I noted at the time, Obama’s defense of his record was essentially dishonest. Increased oil production was due almost entirely to a combination of private-sector development and federal efforts initiated by the Bush Administration. As for his pledge to open up new drilling sites? Well, judge for yourself. From The Hill:

The Interior Department on Friday issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres of federal land in the West originally slated for oil shale development.

The proposed plan would fence off a majority of the initial blueprint laid out in the final days of the George W. Bush administration. It faces a 30-day protest period and a 60-day process to ensure it is consistent with local and state policies. After that, the department would render a decision for implementation.

Interior’s Bureau of Land Management cited environmental concerns for the proposed changes. Among other things, it excised lands with “wilderness characteristics” and areas that conflicted with sage grouse habitats.

The sage grouse, it should be noted, is not endangered, though it is on the waiting list to earn that classification. In 2010, the Fish and Wildlife Service described the bird’s status as, “numerous relatively small populations existing in a patchy mosaic of increasingly fragmented habitat.” Count me skeptical that  a population in such shape requires 1.6 million acres (2,500 square miles) to survive.

August 22nd, 2012 at 12:20 pm
Federal Energy Policy in Microcosm
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As a resident of the Los Angeles area, I’m accustomed to the petty indignities of big government. In a number of local communities, I can’t get a plastic bag from a grocery store and remain on the right side of the law. In the bedroom community of Calabasas (where I used to live), lighting up a cigarette is illegal virtually everywhere. There was even a small uproar earlier this year when it looked like L.A. was green-lighting $1,000 fines for playing football on the beach (of course that was the one that actually got the public incensed).

Traveling in South Florida last week, I encountered a new one: jam-packed parking lots where the only open spaces (and yes, they were virtually always open) were set aside for electric cars. In an instance of federalism working in exactly the opposite fashion it should — bad state and local ideas trickling up to Washington — it looks like the Capitol is about to get a taste of similar medicine. From National Journal:

Both the House and Senate approved plans to install public charging stations for electric vehicles earlier this month, and President Barack Obama signed those laws late last week. But in conversations with more than a dozen relevant Capitol Hill offices, the Alley could only track down one staffer with an electric car.

The phenomenon — whether in Miami, Capitol Hill, or anywhere else in the nation — is always the same: No one’s buying what the government’s selling. A better parking spot, a charging station, and a guest pass to the HOV lanes aren’t enough to convince the average American consumer to sacrifice quality, reliability, and safety.

This, I think, is the most telling part of the NJ piece:

Though few staffers currently drive electric cars, the sponsors of the legislation hope the stations will act as incentive for staffers considering purchasing one. There are only about 55,000 electric vehicles on the road, according to a CBS projection, which falls well short of Obama’s goals to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

Count me skeptical of the incentive argument. The proponents of electric cars think they have a chicken and egg problem on their hands: no one will buy electric cars if there aren’t widespread charging stations, but no one will build the charging stations if there aren’t widespread electric cars. There’s an oft-unacknowledged parallel with the infrastructure, of course: conventional vehicles require gasoline, but you don’t see government having to mandate the creation of your local service station. It turns out that when people actually want a good, the logistics normally sort themselves out.

The problem isn’t that the product creates a chicken and egg dilemma. If we stay with this metaphor, the problem is that the consumer is a vegan. No matter how you present the product, they’re just not interested. When we start realizing this — and applying the principle writ large — we’ll save billions in taxpayer dollars, unravel the green crony capitalism represented by firms like Solyndra, and get our energy economy back on track.

June 20th, 2012 at 1:45 pm
Federal Government Creating Green Jobs … at $12 Million a Pop
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Further evidence that the Obama Administration’s green jobs fetish defies all logic, economic or otherwise, comes from this report from CNS News:

An Obama administration green jobs grant program that spent $11 billion lacks a verifiable job-counting system and likely created only a fraction of the jobs it claims, according to a staff report by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

While Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the grants “created tens of thousands of jobs,” the government’s own National Renewal Energy Laboratory estimates it created 910 direct jobs.

The House report criticized even those numbers, saying: “The job creation numbers that exist for Section 1603 are based on models, not actual data from completed projects. Neither Treasury nor DOE have turned over actual jobs data on the Section 1603 grants program to the committee.”

In the spirit of generosity, let’s assume the 910 number is correct. At $11 billion, that comes out to well over $12 million per job. A ludicrous amount to be sure, but also one that comes with an enormous opportunity cost. Scroll down the page to Ashton’s post on the cost-effectiveness of Washington D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship program and you’ll find that the whole thing (which the Obama Administration has consistently targeted for elimination) could be funded at the cost of less than two of those green jobs.

The character of this administration can be defined by its priorities. Does anything more need to be said than that they would rather slip millions of taxpayer dollars to tech firms who haven’t so much as worked up a business model than to poor children in the inner city? Hope indeed.

May 23rd, 2012 at 1:34 pm
A Sign the End is Near
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I think we can all agree that this is probably the death rattle of American liberty. From the Washington Examiner:

President Obama’s eco-friendly EPA inked a green partnership deal with high-octane NASCAR Monday to promote recycling and environmentally-friendly products to the sport’s millions of fans.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, NASCAR will encourage fans to buy “sustainable concessions” at races, expand the use of “safer chemical products,” conserve water, reduce waste, promote recycling, push products approved by the EPA that have a small enviro footprint and encourage suppliers to get an “E3 tuneup” aimed at promoting sustainable manufacturing.

Yes, you read that right: NASCAR. Civic religion of the red states. Featuring cars that reach speeds around 200 MPH, with fuel economies as low as two miles per gallon.

We’ve gone ’round the bend, ladies and gentlemen. All we can hope is that someday this will be included in the chronicles of the last, delusional days of the Obama Administration.

May 17th, 2012 at 3:41 pm
The Case for Green Jobs: America Should be More Like Bankrupt Countries
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At a time when Spain is in the news because it lingers on the edge of a full-blown economic meltdown, it’s instructive to remember that this is the country that’s supposed to be the model for the green jobs revolution that President Obama continually claims will help revitalize the American economy. Over at The Blaze, the American Enterprise Institute’s Kenneth Green looks at the factual case and finds it far from compelling:

Now, to the empirical evidence. When talking about our bold green energy future, President Obama held up Spain as an example of what America should be doing. Spain invested heavily in wind power and other types of renewable energy. Alas, after studying the Spanish Experience, Professor Gabriel Calzada Álvarez and colleagues at Spain’s Universidad Rey Juan Carlos found if America followed Spain’s example, for every renewable energy job that the U.S. managed to create, the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 traditional jobs on average. And they found that green jobs are costly: each green job created in Spain’s effort cost about $750,000, and only one in 10 of the new green jobs were permanent. Doing the math on that, creating even 3 million new green jobs would cost $2.25 trillion. Even in a time where the trillion is the new billion, that’s a lot of money.

Indeed it is. But the money isn’t the real issue. Any “jobs plan” that entails a net loss in jobs shouldn’t be taken seriously by anybody, let alone the President of the United States. If green jobs really are the future of the economy, then sufficient market demand will arise to compel their creation. If, as is far more likely, they are simply a progressive fantasy financed at taxpayer expense, they deserve to have their grip on the public purse shaken as abruptly as possible.

May 16th, 2012 at 12:48 pm
Forget Obama’s Energy Scarcity — More Oil in Three U.S. States than Rest of the World Combined
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President Obama’s views on energy have always been defined by a sense of false scarcity. This is the man, after all, who told Oregon voters in 2008, “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times.”; who constantly invokes the fact that “the U.S. has only 2 percent of the world’s oil supplies” (an utterly misleading statistic that would be irrelevant even if it were literally true); who admitted to wanting the price of coal “to necessarily skyrocket”; and who hired an Energy Secretary who longs to see American gasoline prices reach the stratospheric levels of Europe.

Testifying before the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment last week, Anu Mittal, Director of Natural Resources and Environment at the Government Accountability Office delivered some stunning news about the amount of oil shale available in the Mountain West.

Here’s how CNSNews reports the story:

“USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions,” Mittal testified.

“The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered,” Mittal told the subcommittee. “At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”

Read that again. If less than half of this oil shale is recoverable, it still represents an amount equal to that available in the rest of the world. By extrapolation, that means that as future extraction methods become more technologically sophisticated (and more economical) we could be talking about a grand haul equal to more than double current global reserves. And that’s only in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — not in the other 47 states.

There are huge policy implications here because of the simple fact that most of this shale occurs on federal lands. That means that getting this material out of the ground will require a proactive effort from government. The current President — who likes to boast about record oil production without noting that the vast majority of it is coming from private land — is not the person to kick start this new era of energy abundance. One more reason to send him packing in November.

March 5th, 2012 at 2:13 pm
The Obama Energy Famine, Continued
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In my column last week, I focused on how the Obama Administration’s energy policies harm the economy by subsidizing “clean fuels” that are not viable at market while handicapping the energy sources that actually work (and are affordable) in the here and now. An editorial in today’s Washington Examiner drives the point home:

The number of approvals for drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf in the Gulf of Mexico — which accounts for a third of all U.S. oil production — under Obama has plunged from more than seven per month to only three. Measured in terms of how long is required for the government to consider a permit application, the average for the five years before Obama was 60.6 days. The average is now almost 110 days, according to the Institute for Energy Research. Viewed in terms of the percentage of all permits sought that are approved, the five-year average before Obama was 73 percent. Today under Obama, it is 23 percent and falling. In other words, it is almost certain that the oil-drilling rig count will head back down in coming months, but it will be in response to government interference rather than as a result of price fluctuations. And the price of gas at the pump will continue to go higher.

Read that again. A 2/3 reduction in the number of permits issued and a doubling of the time it takes to get said permits. And the president really wants us to believe he doesn’t have any “silver bullets” for gas prices?

February 29th, 2012 at 4:31 pm
Obama’s Energy Secretary: Administration’s Goal is Not to Lower Gas Prices
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About the only thing that Dr. Steven Chu, President Obama’s Secretary of Energy, deserves credit for these days is honesty. Testifying before Congress yesterday, Chu was asked by Republican Congressman Alan Nunnelee of Mississippi whether the Obama Administration’s energy goal is to reduce the cost of gasoline. Chu’s response, according to Politico:

“No, the overall goal is to decrease our dependency on oil, to build and strengthen our economy,” Chu replied. “We think that if you consider all these energy policies, including energy efficiency, we think that we can go a long way to becoming less dependent on oil and [diversifying] our supply and we’ll help the American economy and the American consumers.”

… “We agree there is great suffering when the price of gasoline increases in the United States, and so we are very concerned about this,” said Chu, speaking to the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee. “As I have repeatedly said, in the Department of Energy, what we’re trying to do is diversify our energy supply for transportation so that we have cost-effective means.”

In other words, “We’re perfectly content to see oil prices shoot through the roof if it means all you knuckle-draggers will start driving Smart Cars.” Should we really be that surprised from the man who once told the Wall Street Journal, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,”? Chu’s intransigence represents a broader liberal pathology: an ideological allergy to economic growth.

February 1st, 2012 at 5:44 pm
Who Killed the Electric Car? The People Who Made It
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Over at RealClearMarkets, the American Enterprise Institute’s Kenneth Green has a wonderful take-down of California’s delusional alternative energy mandate, which would “require that 15.4 percent of all vehicles sold by 2025 must be electric cars, plug-in hybrid cars, or (currently non-existent) fuel cell cars.” Green notes that this is the second time the Golden State has gone down this road, after a similar mandate — imposed back in 1990 — had to be scrapped due to its total infeasibility.

As you may recall, it used to be fashionable amongst conspiracy-minded greens to posit that the electric car had been undermined by some nefarious cabal of big oil, the auto industry, and hydrogen fuel cell advocates. They even made a film about it: 2006’s “Who Killed the Electric Car?”, which included the contributions of such noted experts in transportation economics as Martin Sheen, Mel Gibson, and Phyllis Diller. As Green points out, however, the electric car and its alternative fuel cousins have never taken the market by storm for a much simpler reason — they’re just not economically viable:

The GM Volt sells for a non-competitive $40,000, and is barely selling despite federal tax subsidies up to $7,500, and some state subsidies that further sweeten the pot. Plug-in hybrid technology is more expensive to manufacture, more expensive to repair, more expensive to insure, and, after 22 years, they still have overheating and fire problems.

As Robert Bryce points out in his book Power Hungry, electric cars are the “Next Big Thing. And they always will be.” Bryce observes that EV-boosters have been flogging electric cars since 1911, when the New York Times declared that “the electric car “has long been recognized as the ideal solution” because it “is cleaner and quieter” and “much more economical.”

Scan the hard data on any alternative energy source being promoted as a panacea and you’ll find much the same thing: Too little performance for too much money and too little convenience. And that’s the real tragedy of mandates like California’s or federal handouts to firms like Solyndra. The reality is that we probably will shift away from our reliance on conventional sources of energy like coal and oil in the future. But in order to do so, alternative energy sources will have to be scalable, affordable, and efficient. Providing subsidies for those technologies before they reach that point only delays their viability by reducing the financial incentive to get a better product to market.

The upshot? Reliable green energy may indeed be on the horizon for California. But if it does arrive, it will be because of the efforts of businessmen, not bureaucrats.

January 30th, 2012 at 2:50 pm
Newest Tactic of Radical Environmentalists: Purging TV Weathermen
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Unbelievable. From the Daily Caller:

Concerned that too many “deniers” are in the meteorology business, global warming activists this month launched a campaign to recruit local weathermen to hop aboard the alarmism bandwagon and expose those who are not fully convinced that the world is facing man-made doom.

The Forecast the Facts campaign — led by 350.org, the League of Conservation Voters and the Citizen Engagement Lab — is pushing for more of a focus on global warming in weather forecasts, and is highlighting the many meteorologists who do not share their beliefs.

“Our goal is nothing short of changing how the entire profession of meteorology tackles the issue of climate change,” the group explains on their website. “We’ll empower everyday people to make sure meteorologists understand that their viewers are counting on them to get this story right, and that those who continue to shirk their professional responsibility will be held accountable.”

Remember that these are the self-styled defenders of objective science and sweet reason — and they’re promoting nothing short of an ideological purge. God save us from our betters.
January 20th, 2012 at 5:21 pm
Everything That’s Wrong About the Keystone XL Pipeline Decision in One Paragraph
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This insight, courtesy of Warren Meyer writing in Forbes, tells you everything you need to know about why the Obama Administration’s decision to block the Keystone XL Pipeline is misbegotten:

Some would argue that [the pipeline’s] opponents aren’t anti-energy, they just want to shift energy use from fossil fuels to “green” energy like wind and solar.  This is either disingenuous or unbelievably naive. The Keystone XL pipeline would have single-handedly carried more energy to the United States than the sum of all the green energy projects funded by the Obama Administration. And it would have done so entirely with private  funds rather than the Administrations increasingly ill-fated and ham-handed attempts at venture capitalism with taxpayer funds. The fact of the matter is that, for the foreseeable future, opposing fossil fuels is equivalent to opposing energy use.

That, my friends, is the nub of the issue. Liberal environmentalists — those same individuals that sneeringly deride their opponents as “anti-science” — can’t come to grips with the empirical reality: there are conventional energy sources that work and “alternative energy” sources that are viable only in the more fevered recesses of their imaginations. The greens can deny that reality all they want, but they won’t be able to deny the subsequent consequences: higher energy prices and lower economic well-being. That’s a very high price to pay for a sense of moral superiority.

September 12th, 2011 at 3:38 pm
What Al Gore and Karl Marx Have in Common
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It’s a little something called “false consciousness.” An essential aspect of Marxist thinking (though it was actually propagated by his partner, Friedrich Engels), false consciousness is a term that one uses to tell an ideological adversary, in essence, “You disagree with me not because of your reasoned conclusion, but because your ability to understand reality is so polluted as to prevent you from even discovering truth without the enlightened guidance of your betters.”

That seems to be the tact that former Vice President Gore is taking on — what else? — climate change skepticism. And his need for proselytization is now taking on a particularly bizarre form. According to Reuters:

“24 Hours of Reality” will broadcast a presentation by Al Gore every hour for 24 hours across 24 different time zones from Wednesday to Thursday, with the aim of convincing climate change deniers and driving action against global warming among households, schools and businesses.

The campaign also asks people to hand over control of their social networking accounts on Facebook and Twitter to it for 24 hours to deliver Gore’s message.

That last paragraph is particularly cultish. Tell the former VP to get his own damn Twitter account.

Gore and his ilk are accustomed to referring to their critics as “anti-science”. Yet they’re the ones engaged in something that sounds a lot more like televangelism than a climatology symposium.

Here’s an idea: if Gore really wants to be seen as a paragon of sweet reason — and really intends to convert the skeptics — why not have that hour of programming feature a debate between himself and one of the leading critics of his theories? Someone, perhaps, like Christopher Monckton of the British House of Lords, the former Thatcher advisor who has been challenging Gore to a scrimmage on global warming for years.

Of course, this format would put Gore on the spot. But when the science is ‘undeniable’ that should be an easy fight to win, no?

August 16th, 2011 at 9:40 pm
$20 Million Obama “Green Jobs” Program Creates Work for 14 in Seattle
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In the Obama era, the news on any given day seems seems like a real-time seminar on the disutility of Keynesian economics and “green energy” faddishness. The latest such entry comes from KOMO-TV news in Seattle, which reports the following:

Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.

McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.

But more than a year later, Seattle’s numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program.

Fourteen jobs instead of 2,000. That means the Administration’s estimates were off by 99.3%. Since this president is so fond of telling us how much he respects the private sector, how about a few analogies from the real world?

— A baseball player with this level of accuracy would be hitting .007

— A financial adviser with this level of accuracy would have invested $250,000 and ended up with $1,750.

— A doctor with this level of accuracy who saw 850 patients a year would misdiagnose 844 of them.

If you had that baseball player, you’d cut him. If you had that financial adviser, you’d fire him. And if you had that doctor, you’d find a new physician and probably report the old one for malpractice. If you had this president …

March 18th, 2011 at 1:48 pm
Precautionary Principle Applies to Government Assurances on Japan Radiation Levels

Environmentalists embrace the ‘precautionary principle’ in opposing human development of land.  In essence, the principle boils down to better-safe-than-sorry.

Though eco-crazies use the precautionary principle as a substitute for science that empowers government, Americans on the West Coast should put the teaching to another use: being skeptical of government assurances that radiation from Japan is too little to harm humans.

As one commentator puts it:

In addition, the radiation currently being measured does not take into account radiation emitted by pools of deadly spent nuclear rods, which only began to emit serious amounts of radiation a few days ago.

We will not know the true level of the threat until the radiation particles emitted as a result of the three explosions that devastated Fukushima hits the west coast over the weekend and into Monday.

The article goes on to recount similar guarantees that turned out to be fatally false.  The most recent example involved Ground Zero workers being told – erroneously – that the air on site was safe to breathe.  Tragically, hundreds of ground crew workers are suffering from crippling illnesses associated with inhaling toxic substances.

Now, we’re being told that buying over-the-counter potassium iodine pills verges on alarmism.  If the price of a helpful supplement puts one’s mind at ease, have at it.  After all, it’s not like the president and his party can boast a sterling track record when it comes to predicting outcomes in the economy, health care or job creation.

March 14th, 2011 at 12:53 pm
Unions, Environmentalists at War over EPA Regulations

Since at least the FDR era, the Democratic Party has served as an umbrella for a motley coalition of special interest groups that have only one thing in common: demanding action from government.  Most of the time, the competing priorities of the groups don’t come into direct conflict.  But when they do, it is a delight to sit back and watch each carve up the other.

Today’s example comes from the pages of the Wall Street Journal.  Apparently, businesses in the energy sector aren’t the only ones fighting the Obama Administration’s job-killing EPA regulations.  Labor unions like the Utility Workers Union of America and the United Mine Workers are demanding a ceasefire on cap-it-or-close-it regulations that could force companies to close 18% of the nation’s coal factories if they fail to comply with the EPA’s proposed climate change rules.

Unions recognize that without factories workers get fired.  Environmentalists don’t want to budge on what the Natural Resources Defense Council calls “the biggest public health achievement” of the Obama Administration.

Simple math is likely to break the stalemate.  Unions in coal states account for millions of campaign contributions and thousands of votes.  With Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin all flipping from Obama in 2008 to the Republicans in 2010, don’t count on the president to sacrifice his reelection chances on the altar of green jobs.

If he does, union voters – and their dollars – just might stay home in 2012.