The Empire State Divide is now available for viewing on the Foundation for Land and Liberty website. It is a documentary film about the harm to human well-being wrought by an environmentalist campaign against hydraulic fracturing in New York. This film was inspired by my mother, Karen Bulich Moreau, President of The Foundation for Land and Liberty. It was funded exclusively by her mother and siblings in memory of my grandfather, Frank Bulich.
The documentary can be found here. In a previous post, I wrote about the film in detail.
Within 24 hours of rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline project, President Obama released a television ad touting his record on energy. The ad cites a study from the Brookings Institute and implies that President Obama has created 2.7 million jobs in green energy, a number that is “expanding rapidly.” Next the ad brags about the fact that for the first time in 13 years, America is now less than 50% dependent on foreign oil. Both numbers have some truth—but both have little to do with the President’s efforts.
First, the jobs number. 2.7 million green jobs is the total number of green jobs in the economy—many of which existed long before President Obama took office. Additionally, according to a Reason fact check, while the 2.7 million number may be “clean” jobs, only a small fraction of that number are actually in the “green energy” industry: 140,000 according to Brookings—and this was before thousands of jobs were lost at Solyndra, Stirling Energy, Range Fuels, or other green energy companies that have gone under in the past few months.
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In a previous post, I compared renewable energy spending in the 2009 Stimulus to a green albatross burdening the President. I argued that Stimulus spending was inherently wasteful, because politics invariably corrupts government’s investment decisions. The result is taxpayers losses on bankrupt companies that existed only by the grace of political favoritism, a la Solyndra. I predicted the green stimulus would haunt the President, in the form of a slow drip public relations nightmare, as a litany of bad investments go belly-up in the run up to the 2012 elections.
And so it continues. Yesterday, Evergreen Energy, a manufacturer of renewable energy components and recipient of Stimulus largesse, filed for bankruptcy.
In his upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama will push for more green-jobs subsidies at taxpayer expense in the name of job creation: “With a Solyndra-scandal-be-damned attitude, President Obama is expected to revive his push for new green fuel sources in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, claiming that they will boost jobs.” But these impractical proposals are haunted by the utter failure of Obama’s existing green-energy programs to produce economically-viable jobs or fuel.
There are only 140,000 jobs in the whole renewable-energy sector, which illustrates the absurdity of Obama’s unrealistic 2008 promise “to create 5 million new green jobs.” Most of America’s existing green jobs predate the Obama Administration, which did not create them: “from 2003-2010, the rate of growth for clean jobs was 3.4 percent.” By contrast, Obama wiped out 20,000 jobs recently just by blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline, and recent EPA rules will wipe out at least 800,000 more.
More job losses are yet to come: in 2008, President Obama admitted that under his greenhouse gas regulations, people’s utility bills would “skyrocket,” and coal-fired power plants would go “bankrupt.” That will wipe out vast numbers of jobs in the energy sector.
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Power grabbing is hard work. Usually the power grabbee resists the infringement of its rights, so the Environmental Protection Agency has had to employ a number of machinations to get the job done. Without further ado, I present to you nos. 10 through 6, of EPA’s top 10 tricks to steal more power:
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Over at the PJ Tattler today, my colleague Chris Horner receives warmly the news that the President might make the administration’s record on renewable energy a focus of his State of the Union Address:
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With the political fallout from President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline putting heat on the administration, Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler appears to be trying to pin the blame on …. Republicans.
Yes, as absurd as that may sound, Beutler claims that, “House Republicans made a conscious choice to undercut the Keystone XL oil pipeline project” because they refused the let the White House delay the project for nothing other than political gain.
Recall that the Obama administration planned to make a formal decision on the pipeline a year from now. A great deal of reporting and inference suggested that the administration supported the project in principle, but chose to delay the decision for several months for further study, largely to avoid picking an election year fight with environmental advocates. Instead Republicans forced his hand, and, with the review incomplete, he had to formally reject the proposal. [Emphasis added]
Why shouldn’t House Republicans “force” Obama’s hand, as Beutler would say, given how long the project has taken already—and given the fact that Obama’s motivation to delay is purely political? Essentially, Beutler is criticizing GOP House members for not letting Obama roll right over them. As Conn Carroll points out in the Washington Examiner today, notes that criticism of Obama’s decision has been widespread, including among the nation’s major newspaper editorial boards.
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Last week I spoke with an editorialist at the Orange County Register, about the silliness that is the California Energy Commission’s latest efficiency mandate, for battery chargers. On Saturday, the paper ran an editorial about our conversation. The entire editorial, “Bureaucrats Eyeing Your Device Chargers,” is reprinted below. Afterwards, I have two extra thoughts on energy efficiency policy.
It’s enough to make the Energizer Bunny pound his drum in protest. This month the California Energy Commission imposed new regulations – the Appliance Efficiency Standards for Battery Chargers. According to the CEC’s website, “The purpose of this rulemaking is to adopt efficiency standards, certification and marking requirements for large and small battery charger systems.”
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News You Can Use
Hedge Fund Wins Big Bet against Solar
In a quarterly newsletter, the hedge fund Greenlight Capital, Inc. announced that it has closed its short position in First Solar, “one of the most profitable shorts in the history” of its funds. Stock prices for First Solar, which received a $1.4 billion stimulus loan from the same program that propped up Solyndra, plummeted primarily because Germany rolled back solar power subsidies.
Inside the Beltway
Myron Ebell
Obama Punts on Keystone (again)
President Barack Obama on Wednesday, 18th January, announced that he would not approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries in the Gulf States. A provision in the payroll tax cut extension legislation required the President to make a decision before 21st February based on the national interest. The President’s statement used the deadline to blame Congress for his decision:
“This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people.”
The New York Times was almost alone among major papers in supporting the President’s decision. The Washington Post noted that the President’s own Council on Jobs and Competitiveness had reported the day before that the United States needed to be building more energy infrastructure, including pipelines. Post columnist Robert Samuelson wrote that Obama’s decision was an “act of national insanity.”
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