Media mogul and climate alarmist Ted Turner addressed the American Wind Energy Association’s annual gala this week. The highlight of his speech, as reported by the Huffington Post, was when he told the audience, “Let’s go out and kick their asses. That’s what they need, a good ass-kicking.” The antecedent of “their” and “they” was the coal industry.
Turner’s machismo seems to have been lost on the wind folks. The day after Turner called for an ‘ass-kicking,’ AWEA representatives held a conference call with reporters, in order to publicize their plea for an early extension by the Congress of the Production Tax Credit, the lifeblood subsidy of the wind industry. Without this ultra-generous taxpayer give-away, there would be no wind industry in America, because there isn’t a utility in the country that would pay full cost for intermittent, expensive energy.
Needless to say, Ted Turner’s tough talk comports poorly with the AWEA’s begging for a handout.
The non-profit Chicago Council on Global Affairs this week gave the Obama administration a B-minus grade for its progress in furthering food security in poor countries, according to a story in today’s ClimateWire (subscription required).
I do not understand how any rational foreign policy expert could award the Obama administration a B-minus for its performance on global food security. This high a score is possible only if the U.S. was graded on a curve with North Korea and Zimbabwe.
During the period under evaluation by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, America’s Soviet-style production quota for ethanol, a motor fuel distilled from corn, increased almost 4 billion gallons, or 104 billion pounds of maize. This year American farmers will dedicate about a third of the U.S. corn crop—the largest in the world—to ethanol. As I explain here, here, and here, this massive distortion pushes up the price of foodstuffs on the global grains and oilseeds market, which harms urbanites in developing countries. Simply put, our stupid ethanol policy is one of the greatest threats to food security in the world today, if not the greatest.
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Is It ‘Game on’ over Energy Subsidies in the Show-Me State?
Chris Horner, AmSpecBlog, 25 May 2011
NAS Panel Backs Manufactured Crisis To Tame Climate Change
Chip Knappenberger, Master Resource, 25 May 2011
A Win for Gangster Government
Henry Payne, Planet Gore, 24 May 2011
Oil Speculators Are Our Friends
Jerry Taylor & Peter Van Doren, Forbes, 24 May 2011
Energy Subsidies Threaten To Break GOP’s Small Government Promise
James Valvo, Washington Times, 23 May 2011
Climategate Docs Confirm Wegman’s Hypothesis
Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit, 23 May 2011
Inconvenient Truths about Renewable Energy
Matt Ridley, Wall Street Journal, 21 May 2011
If you’re unfamiliar with the LaRouchies, collectively known as the LaRouche movement, they are mostly young people, organized in cells, dedicated to delivering the wacky message of their namesake, Lyndon LaRouche. Read all about Mr. LaRouche on Wikipedia. Here’s a highly edited snippet:
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr…American political activist…largely promoting a conspiracist [sic] view…was a perennial presidential candidate…15 years’ imprisonment…Members of the LaRouche movement see LaRouche as a political leader in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt…conspiracy theorist, fascist, and anti-Semite…cult…”what may well be one of the strangest political groups in American history.”
While I could never support or respect a group whose ideological leader is an anti-Semite, and they are almost uniformly wrong, I will admit that the LaRouchies are my guiltiest pleasure. The movement has the right spirit on climate change policy, and their Abbie Hoffman stylings are entertaining to a “denier” like me.
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SUVs Saved Chrysler
Henry Payne, Michigan View, 24 May 2011
Smearing Skeptic Scientists: What did Gore know and when did he know it?
Russell Cook, Climate Depot, 24 May 2011
Natural Gas a Natural Winner? Let the Market Decide!
E. Calvin Beisner, Master Resource, 24 May 2011
General Motors Will Never Repay Taxpayers
Shikha Dalmia, Reason, 24 May 2011
Fact Checking Al Roker’s Climate Claims
Greg Pollowitz, Planet Gore, 24 May 2011
Getting Hosed at the Pump? Don’t Blame Obama
Larry Bell, Forbes, 24 May 2011
I’ve long suspected that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) keeps Brawny paper towels in his kitchen cabinet. Brawny paper towels are the best—they’re the quickest, thickest picker-uppers—and Rep. Waxman lives in one of the richest Congressional districts, so it makes sense that he uses them, right? I think it does. Rep. Waxman’s logical affinity for Brawny paper towels is troubling, because they are manufactured by Georgia Pacific, which is owned by….KOCH INDUSTRIES!!! Possibly, every time Rep. Waxman wipes spilled caviar off his marble countertops, he’s funding the insidious KOCHTOPUS!!! I doubt his far-left base would appreciate this apparent financial link to a company reviled by liberals for supporting conservative causes. Why, it’s as if Rep. Waxman is contributing to the Tea Party!
I know what you are thinking: These are baseless and ridiculous claims. Indeed. Yet they are no more baseless and ridiculous than the stunt Rep. Waxman pulled yesterday at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on the Keystone XL Pipeline. I explained in detail the politics of the pipeline in a previous post. Suffice it to say, it would double U.S. imports of Canadian tar sands oil, and it is staunchly opposed by environmentalist special interests. The focus of yesterday’s hearing was a Republican bill that would speed up the pipeline approval process, but Rep. Waxman wanted to take the panel in a different direction. Namely, he wanted to fabricate an association between the Keystone Pipeline and the left’s favorite piñata, Koch Industries, a.k.a, the Kochtopus.
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British columnist Johann Hari recently took to the Huffington Post to try to whip up alarm about the supposed dangers posed to drinking water by ‘fracking,’ a.k.a hydraulic fracturing, an American-made technological miracle in natural gas production that has roughly doubled known North American gas reserves in only the last five years. I rebutted Hari’s baseless environmentalist talking points in a previous post, and I am much pleased to report this morning that the British Parliament agrees with my debunking of his nonsensical claims.
According to Public Service Europe (by way of the Global Warming Policy Foundation),
“Shale gas drilling has been given the go-ahead by members of the UK parliament who have insisted that the process is safe. An inquiry by the Energy and Climate Change committee concluded that fracking, the process by which gas is extracted from shale rock, poses no risk to underground water supplies as long as drilling wells are properly constructed.”
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The Los Angeles Times editorial board last week penned a widely circulated thesis that “[t]he environment and public health will be thrown under a bus for the sake of his [President Barack Obama’s] reelection in 2012.” While I would love, love, love for this to be true, it isn’t; the L.A. Times editorial board’s contention that the president has abandoned greens to score political points is bunk.
In fact, this administration is waging a war on conventional energy supply and demand in this country, with very real repercussions for everyday Americans. Just ask the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, oil and gas drillers along the Gulf, or coal miners in Appalachia, all of whom have urged the Congress to roll back the president’s regulatory crackdown in an effort to protect their livelihoods.
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Sen. Lamar Alexander Sets the Record Straight on Wind Subsidies
MasterResource.org, 23 May 2011
California High Speed Rail on Fast Track to Nowhere
Babbage, The Economist, 23 May 2011
The Facts about ‘Fracking’
John Stossel, Reason, 19 May 2011
Obama’s Supposed Support for Drilling
Dana Joel Gattuso, Planet Gore, 19 May 2011
U.S. Nuclear Policy after Fukushima: Trust but Modify
Jack Spencer, Heritage Backgrounder, 18 May 2011
Update on Japanese Nuclear Crisis
Barry Brook, Brave New Climate, 18 May 2011
I just finished watching the Sunday morning political talkies, and the second biggest ad buy of the day was in support of H.R. 1380, the NAT GAS Act, legislation that was produced by billionaire T. Boone Pickens to benefit the natural gas industry. T. Boone Pickens is a major player in the natural gas industry, so he basically made H.R. 1380 to make himself richer. That’s why this blog has referred to H.R. 1380 variously as the “Pickens Your Pocket Boondoggle Bill,” and the “T. Boone Pickens Earmark Plan.”
The advertisements I saw left me troubled. They indicated that T. Boone Pickens is less tone deaf, and therefore potentially more successful, than the last time he tried to get the Congress to enact legislation that he wrote to further enrich himself.
That was the 2008 “Pickens Plan,” and it was even bigger rip-off than H.R. 1380. The “Pickens Plan” was a simple four-step strategy: (1) subsidize wind produced by T. Boone; (2) subsidize transmission towers to deliver T. Boone’s wind power to cities; (3) force Americans to buy wind power produced by T. Boone; (4) force American motorists to fill their cars with T. Boone’s “leftover” natural gas, the stuff that was displaced by T. Boone’s wind power.
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