Recent polling indicates that seventy-six percent (76%) of voters say the country is heading down the wrong track. Clearly, something needs to be done to turn the train around and head in a different direction.
First we need to know where we’ve been headed and then make a conscious decision to do a 180.
Three recent news stories—all under-reported—offer a snapshot of the wrong direction.
The Julia Field
Exxon is in a legal battle with the US government. The company has a new oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico in what is called the Julia Field. Exxon reports an estimated one billion barrels of recoverable oil—worth potential royalties to the government of $10.95 billion. The discovery is believed to be the largest in the Gulf of Mexico. (Note: we are not out of oil; we keep finding more.)
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Last week, President Barack Obama’s green jobs agenda suffered a major setback when Solyndra, Inc, a heavily subsidized manufacturer of rooftop solar power components, declared bankruptcy. In a previous post, I explained how the company’s collapse was a long time coming. In this post, I will address the political and policy fallout.
- For starters, it will embolden Rep. Cliff Stearns’s on-going investigation into whether or not political connections had a role in the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office’s issuance of a $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra.
- In light of the troubling history of the DOE’s Loan Programs Office, House Republicans might attempt to freeze all pending loan guarantees until Rep. Stearns’s investigation is complete. Last week, the Los Angeles Times editorial board suggested such a course of action. This is notable because the LA Times editorial board is ardently environmentalist.
In late 2009, Solyndra, a California-based manufacturer of solar power rooftop components, received a $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy (DOE). It was the first such loan guarantee offered by the DOE with stimulus money. Last week, in a major blow to President Barack Obama’s green jobs agenda, the solar company became the latest stimulus-beneficiary to fail. It announced that it was entering Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.
The announcement came as a surprise to many observers, such as Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills). Over the summer, Rep. Waxman, the architect of the stimulus program that benefited Solyndra, praised the company’s economic outlook. In an April letter, he boasted that “Solyndra has obtained additional equity investments from existing equity holders, an indication of investor confidence in the company’s prospects.”
California Governor Jerry Brown, too, must have been surprised by Solyndra’s sudden collapse. Two weeks ago, he invited Solyndra, Inc. to join him onstage to unveil a proposed package of tax subsidies for green energy companies. Solyndra’s presence was supposed to lend evidence to the “success” of past clean energy subsidies. Obviously, this is a poor omen for Governor Brown’s tax plan.
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On Friday morning, President Obama announced, “I have requested that Administrator Jackson withdraw the draft Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards at this time.”
Just hours before, the worst jobs numbers in a year were released.
Business and industry groups have been beating the drum regarding the EPA’s excessive regulations and their impact on the struggling American economy. The EPA has already backed down from their foolish attempt to apply oil-spill regulations to spilled milk on dairy farms. Now common sense and economic necessity can chalk up another win.
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A new peer-reviewed study in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons by Dr. Indur Goklany calculates that global ethanol production resulted in 192,000 excess deaths in developing countries in 2010. By diverting ever-greater quantities of food into the fuel supply, ethanol—a motor fuel distilled from corn, wheat, soy and palm oils—is making food more expensive, which starves poor people.
Vermont Environmentalists: “Time Out” for Industrial Wind
Sherri Lange, Master Resource, 6 September 2011
Does This Fat Make Me Look Green?
Chris Horner, AmSpecBlog, 6 September 2011
Enough with the Green Jobs
Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, 5 September 2011
Where the Jobs Aren’t
David Brooks, New York Times, 5 September 2011
The Lies We Tell about Green Energy
Sherman Frederick, Las Vegas Journal Review, 5 September 2011
No net jobs were created in America last month (even as the people needing jobs increased), as the Obama Administration drafted a host of new job-killing regulations and threatened costly lawsuits against employers. But rather than rethink his failed economic policies, Obama is planning to spend billions more on green-jobs fantasies and boondoggles, in his upcoming “stimulus” proposals. Forbes describes some of the past green-jobs fiascos promoted by the Obama Administration that cost taxpayers billions while creating no lasting jobs:
even as the president claims he is now laser-focused on job creation, he wants the public to forget all of his previous taxpayer-funded efforts to create those “green jobs” of the future, many of which have been abject failures. Like the $20 million federal grant given to Seattle to weatherize houses. The promise? To create “2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.” . . . The reality a year later: “only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program.”
The much-hyped company Solyndra, which manufactures—um, make that “manufactured”—solar technology, has closed its doors and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Only a year ago Obama gave it $535 million in low-cost loan guarantees, touting the company “as a prime example of how green technology could deliver jobs,” according to an NBC-affiliate report. Now another 1,000 people have become unemployed victims of Obama’s job-creating skills. And taxpayers have become victims of another half-billion dollars sucked down the Obama job-creating drain. . .
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It’s a trick employed by rhetoricians from time immemorial. When their case against an opponent is unpersuasive on the merits, they invoke the image of something their target audience fears or hates. Thus, for example, political pleaders have asserted that money, Dick Cheney, or Zionism “is a cancer on the body politic.”
Perhaps the most influential use of this tactic in modern times is the attack on carbon dioxide (CO2) as “global warming pollution” and on CO2 emitters as “polluters.” Many who know better, including highly credentialed scientists, routinely couple the words “carbon” and “pollution” in their public discourse.
In reality, CO2 — like water vapor, the atmosphere’s main greenhouse gas — is a natural constituent of clean air. Colorless, odorless, and non-toxic to humans at 30 times ambient concentrations, CO2 is an essential building block of the planetary food chain. The increase in the air’s CO2 content since the dawn of the industrial revolution — from 280 to 390 parts per million – boosts the water-use efficiency of trees, crops, and other plants; helps protect green things from the damaging effects of smog and UV-B radiation; and helps make food more plentiful and nutritious. The many health and welfare benefits of atmospheric CO2 enrichment make CO2 unlike any other substance ever previously regulated as a “pollutant.”
A closely related abuse of the English languge is the oft-repeated claim that America is “addicted to oil.” Although popularized by a Texas oil man, former President G.W. Bush, the phrase is a rhetorical staple of the same folks who inveigh against “carbon pollution.” NASA scientist James Hansen, arguably the world’s most famous carbonophobe besides Al Gore, recently denounced the Keystone XL Pipeline as a “dirty needle” that, if approved, would feed our supposed oil addiction. [click to continue…]
Costco is removing its electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, citing lack of consumer demand, reports Jim Motavalli in the New York Times. Plug-In America, an EV advocacy group, has issued an “action alert” urging its members to email Costco CEO James Sinegal and ask him to maintain and upgrade the charging stations. From Montavalli’s article:
Costco, the membership warehouse-club chain, was an early leader in offering electric-vehicle charging to its customers, setting an example followed by other retailers, including Best Buy and Walgreen. By 2006, Costco had installed 90 chargers at 64 stores, mostly in California but also some in Arizona, New York and Georgia. Even after General Motors crushed its EV1 battery cars, the Costco chargers stayed in place.
Yet just as plug-in cars like the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt enter the market, Costco is reversing course and pulling its chargers out of the ground, explaining that customers do not use them.
“We were early supporters of electric cars, going back as far as 15 years. But nobody ever uses them,” said Dennis Hoover, the general manager for Costco in northern California, in a telephone interview. “At our Folsom store, the manager said he hadn’t seen anybody using the E.V. charging in a full year. At our store in Vacaville, where we had six chargers, one person plugged in once a week.”
Mr. Hoover said that E.V. charging was “very inefficient and not productive” for the retailer. “The bottom line is that there are a lot of other ways to be green,” he said. “We have five million members in the region, and just a handful of people are using these devices.
Why is consumer demand for EVs — hence for charging stations — so low? [click to continue…]
Remember how the stimulus was pitched? In order to defibrillate job creation, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was supposed to inject almost $1 trillion of taxpayer money into the economy, in a manner that was “timely, targeted, and temporary.”
About a tenth of ARRA funds were given to creating so-called “green jobs,” and a spate of recent news stories suggest that these “clean energy” stimulus dollars have been a massive failure. Instead of “timely, targeted, and temporary,” these environmentalist earmarks are better described as “late, loose, and lasting.” Consider:
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