The pay roll tax cut package managed to escape the grasp of renewable energy stage-5-clingers as President Obama signed it into law on Wednesday. Unsurprisingly, wind farm hopefuls still remain committed to making this relationship work. Proponents of the government-funded windustry are now frantically searching for an extension of the wind production tax credit (PTC) which is set to expire at the end of the year. After twenty years of government dependency, wind energy still cannot compete without the taxpayer crutch; it’s time to throw in the towel.
Government has been playing matchmaker with its insistence that wind energy is a complete catch: it’s clean, comes from an elite family (the Renewables) and will be good for you (i.e. the environment) “in the long-term.” But from the get-go, there are several reasons why taxpayers wouldn’t want to take this industry to the prom. Modern wind turbines are very large, expensive, visually unappealing permanent structures that inhibit land use and create a loud drone when in operation. When the wind is actually blowing, the spinning wind turbines end up accumulating a massive death count of thousands of birds and bats.
Beauty isn’t everything, you say? Well, even if wind farms were a total fox, wind energy is inseparable from its inherent baggage. For instance, if you’re looking for that long-term special some-energy to see you through the good times and bad, wind energy is risky. It only can only sustain itself when there is—wait for it—wind! Consequentially, it must have the constant back-up connection with the grid, depending on generators or batteries (that use fossil fuels) to keep you satisfied. Wind turbines (produced with the aid of fossil fuels) can be quite the intermittent diva too: when the wind current isn’t strong enough, it is unpractical to operate them; if the wind is blowing too fast, it completely shuts down to avoid damage. Wind farms can only thrive in specific geographic settings, usually in remote areas that require the expensive construction of transmission lines. In the end, with its absolute dependence on alternatives, wind farms are not taxpayer-healthy to pursue at all.
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The president sneers at drilling for domestic oil. After all, it wouldn’t be to market for a few years. It won’t do anything to alleviate the pain you feel now.
Which is what the same crowd said when vetoing opening ANWR in 1995. And in opposing opening ANWR in 2000. And in 2002. And, per him in a speech in Miami the other day, in 2007. And again today.
So, here’s a challenge, Mr. President.
Let’s have a race.
Allow for more drilling. And, since you’re going to do so anyway, you go spend a bunch of our grandkids’ money on putting some algae in our tank.
Might work as well as Solyndra. Or Synfuels. Who knows?
First one there wins.
You’re a confident guy. That sarcastic speech in Miami, dripping with condescension at your fellow countrymen who would like to tap domestic resources indicates, wow, he must really know something. We’re impressed. We want to believe you.
Whaddyasay. Deal?
Yesterday, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) requested that the House Resources Committee investigate whether Department of Interior employee Indur Goklany accepted “illegal outside payments” from the Heartland Institute, and “what confidential information Goklany may have shared with Heartland officials in the course of negotiating his payment agreements.”
Grijalva made this request in a letter to Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) and Ranking Member Ed Markey (D-Mass.). The alleged ‘issue’ arose because one of the stolen Heartland documents, the Institute’s 2012 budget, proposes to pay Goklany $1,000/m to write a chapter on economics and policy for a forthcoming book, Climate Change Reconsidered: 2012 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.
Grijalva, citing a letter from Greenpeace to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, claims federal employees are not allowed to take payment from outside organizations, particularly for “teaching, speaking and writing that relates to [their] official duties.”
I fully understand why Greenpeace and Grijalva want to harass and silence Goklany. Goklany is one of a handful of indispensable thought leaders in the climate policy debate. He has demonstrated, for example, that, largely because of mankind’s utilization of fossil fuels, global deaths and death rates related to extreme weather have declined by a remarkable 93% and 98%, respectively, since the 1920s. He has also demonstrated that, even assuming worst-case impacts from the UN IPCC’s high-end warming scenario, developing countries in 2100 are projected to be much richer than developed countries are today. Nobody takes the hot air out of climate hype like Indur Goklany! So naturally, Greenpeace guttersnipes want to besmirch and muzzle him. [click to continue…]
Anthony Watts’s indispensable Web site, Watts Up with That?, has a trove of hard-hitting commentaries on climate scientist Peter Gleick’s theft and publication of the Heartland Institute’s fund-raising documents and apparent forgery of a “confidential” climate strategy memo. Gleick earlier this week confessed to stealing the documents, but not to fabricating the strategy memo, although textual and other evidence point to him as the culprit.
Gleick, who described his conduct as a “serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics,” has resigned from his post as Chair of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Task Force on Scientific Integrity. He nonetheless tried to blame the victim, claiming “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”
Yep, it’s the small underfunded band of free market think tanks who are stifling the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the National Academy of Sciences and their numerous brethren overseas, the European Environment Agency, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the EPA, NRDC, Greenpeace, etc. etc. Heartland invited Gleick to attend a public event and debate climate change just days before he stole the documents. Gleick turned down the invitation. Yet Gleick has the chutzpah to plead “frustration” at those trying to “prevent this debate.”
Among the key posts on Anthony’s site to check out: Joe Bast’s Skype interview with the Wall Street Journal; Dr. Willis Eschenbach’s Open Letter to Dr. Linda Gunderson, who succeeds Gleick as Chair of the AGU Scientific Integrity Task Force; and Megan McCardle’s column in The Atlantic reviewing among other things evidence fingering Gleick as the author of the fake strategy memo. [click to continue…]
Whining about the way in which the media covers climate change stories is probably absolutely a waste of time, but many mainstream media outlets seem to consistently misinterpret (intentionally or unintentionally) the skeptical position on climate change.
This is to be expected from organizations who are well-established as being on the other side of the fence (I will call them climate hawks, which I believe is a neutral term), but one would like to think that the allegedly objective media would make an effort to at least accurately express the views of those they write about (the U.S. is, admittedly, better than many things I’ve read from Europe):
I don’t know every small detail regarding Heartland’s attitude towards climate change, but I’ll work off of Joe Bast’s recent comments to the WSJ.
Where do we start? [click to continue…]
The recent acquisition of Heartland documents (apparently along with a fraudulent “strategy” document) has created a minor journalist firestorm. I’ll comment on the particulars of this incident but the broader implication is but one battle in the war to drive the market from the marketplace of ideas. More on this but first let me summarize the facts as they now appear.
Peter Gleick, a climate scientist, claimed to be a board member and thus requested that Heartland re-forward him the materials sent out for a forthcoming Board meeting. The staffer did so and Mr. Gleick then emailed “the” documents to interested parties, and they were originally posted on DeSmogBlog. I put the in quotes because it now appears that amongst the purloined documents was also enclosed a “strategy” document that outlined ideas to advance a more balanced understanding of the global warming policy area. Serious doubts about the authenticity of this strategy document have since been raised. Not surprisingly, the global warming alarmists view this entire imbroglio as “proof” that skeptics are “only doing it for the money!” I wonder whether they’ve ever done a comparison of salaries in right-of-center and left-of-center NGOs?
Ignored in all this is, however, a larger and even more serious issue – the growing effort to drive the market (and market-friendly voices) from the marketplace of ideas. The left has found that their statist alliances – trial lawyers and environmentalists, unionists and consumer groups – have been powerful in advancing their agenda. They’re not eager to see economic liberals do the same.
Note their systematic ideological-cleansing program: no one with any business links serving on a government policy advisory group; no one with a business background to serving in government; pejorative labeling in academic journals of any business funded research; banning academics funding by business; passing stockholder resolutions against companies assisting pro-market policy allies; providing financial aid to our groups or of even interacting cooperatively with us (e.g. the Heartland crime).
If these efforts succeed, then the only legitimate voices in the policy debates will be crony capitalists and statist intellectuals. A serious threat and one that the Heartland incident should alert us to.
Updated 4:34 pm, Feb. 21, 2012
“Climate scientist Peter Gleick has acknowledged that he was the person who convinced the Heartland Institute to hand over the contents of its January Board package, authenticating the documents beyond a doubt and further exposing the disinformation campaign Heartland has pursued in the last week, trying to discredit the information,” writes DeSmog Blog in a post titled “Whistleblower Authenticates Heartland Documents” (Feb. 20, 2012).
Gleick is indeed the culprit, but he is not a “whistleblower” because to be a candidate for that honorable title, he’d have to be a current or former employee. Gleick acknowledges that he, an outside critic of the organization, solicited and received Heartland documents under false pretenses, an action he describes as a “serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics.”
More importantly, contrary to DeSmog’s spin, Gleick does not claim to authenticate the document titled “Confidential Memo: Heartland 2012 Climate Strategy,” the only document among those posted on the DeSmog Web site that even vaguely resembles the stuff of scandal.
Even more pathetic is the sanctimonious open letter by Michael Mann and six colleagues who suggest that Heartland merely got its comeuppance for cheering and publicizing the release of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) emails that sparked the Climategate scandal. [click to continue…]
House Passes Energy Bill That Includes ANWR and Keystone Pipeline
The House of Representatives voted on Thursday evening, 16th February, for a package of four energy bills that if enacted will greatly expand U. S. oil and natural gas production on federal lands and the Outer Continental Shelf plus permit the Keystone XL pipeline. The omnibus energy bill, H. R. 3408, passed by a vote of 237 to 187. Twenty-one Democrats voted yes, and twenty-one Republicans voted no.
The most significant provision would require the Department of the Interior to open a small portion of the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska’s North Slope to oil and gas exploration. Producing oil in ANWR has been an issue since Congress enlarged the Refuge in 1980 and allowed oil production in the coastal plain subject to a report from the Department of the Interior that it could be done without compromising the Refuge’s purpose of protecting wildlife. That report was issued in 1986. The Congress passed legislation in 1995 to open ANWR, but President Bill Clinton vetoed it. The House and Senate passed different bills opening ANWR in 2005, but couldn’t agree on the same bill.
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Updated February 18, 12:34 a.m.
Earlier this week, the climate hysterics at DeSmog Blog and ThinkProgress tried (but failed) to manufacture a scandal by posting board-meeting and fund-raising documents stolen under false pretenses from the Heartland Institute, the Illinois-based free-market think tank. You can read Heartland’s response to the document heist here.
In the climate debate, Heartland is perhaps best known as organizer and host of six international climate conferences and as publisher of Climate Change Reconsidered: The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
The Heartland conferences transformed the disparate ranks of climate-alarm skeptics into a confident, energized, networked movement. The NIPCC report and related publications not only debunk Al Gore’s “planetary emergency” but also provide the only comprehensive, fully-documented alternative to the alleged “scientific consensus” represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
So it’s not hard to understand why eco-bloggers are desperate to sully Heartland’s good name and damage the Institute’s funding. But, it turns out, one of the documents is a fake, one of the facts headlined in the exposé is an error, and all that the documents show is what everybody already knows: Heartland seeks financial support from like-minded individuals, foundations, and corporations to combat climate alarmist propaganda, and, to its credit, generously seeks to help fund other worthy organizations to build the larger movement of which it is a part. [click to continue…]
Within 48 hours of giving a decidedly populist State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama shilled for the Billionaire’s Bailout. At the time, I thought this was situational irony of the worst sort. Unfortunately, it gets worse.
As was noted this afternoon by my colleague David Bier, the President’s budget, which was proposed this week, actually increases the regressive green vehicle tax credit financed by all taxpayers, but enjoyed only by the upper crust—i.e., the only kinds of people with enough spare cash to buy an eco-statement like the $100k+ Tesla roadster. People like Brad Pitt. According to political pundits, the President’s budget isn’t a serious proposal; rather, it is meant to galvanize his base. If this is true, then the EV tax credit is a regressive component of a progressive budget. Sort of like a black fly, in your chardonnay. Or a death row pardon, two minutes too late. Or, myriad spoons, when you only need a knife.
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