The world is not warming.
According to enviros, only Luddites and lunatics would believe such a ridiculous statement. Well, now government scientists must be added to the list of the so addled: Here it is, straight from the (high tech) horses mouth, a NASA report titled “Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects”:
“Global temperature in 2011 was lower than in 1998.”
Oops. There’s an inconvenient truth for you.
You can almost feel the disappointment seeping through their ink as major media outlets around the world are forced to report on a flurry of new data showing – horror! – the world may not be going up in flames after all. Yet still they cling to the hope that maybe we will burn up, that maybe this new data is just a fluke, a blip, an unnatural respite from Man’s descent into unnatural global conflagration.
[click to continue…]
In this excerpt from Eco-nomics: What everyone should know about the environment, economist Richard Stroup explains why there’s always a cost to environmental regulations. This is because when people are faced with choices, they must always give up something to get something. Many environmentalists ignore this cost as Stroup explains.
Eco-nomics was published in 2003
The Forest Guardians, an advocacy group based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sued the federal government to stop logging on the national forest in New Mexico. The group thought that the forests should be preserved rather than cut down, and it pushed for such policies during the 1990s. In 2000, a fire began around Los Alamos, New Mexico, that eventually wiped out many of the forests that the Guardian wanted to preserve. When the fire was over, Rex Wahl, executive director of the Forest Guardians, reconsidered his position. “Judicious cutting of small trees is what’s needed,” he said.
This example illustrates one of the problems with environmental issues. Things are not always what they seem. The Forest Guardians thought that its goal should be to preserve trees. Yet by ignoring the need to thin the forest and remove dead and dying trees, they allowed the forest to become vulnerable to wildfire, and the ultimate destruction of the forests was much greater.
[click to continue…]
Eco-rhetoric has infiltrated all forms of media, consumer products, and political campaigns, fashioning a bias in effective energy sources. Renewable and non-renewable energy have been divided and labeled into opposing categories: “Conventional” or “unconventional,” “sustainable” or “unsustainable.” These categories have created energy associations that are contrived and deceptive.
Let’s start with the pejorative “unconventional.” The modifier “unconventional” has been associated with fossil fuels like tar sands, shale gas, and coalbed methane. What makes these resources unconventional is their past inability or difficulty to be accessed. Now, new but “unconventional” technology (hydraulic fracturing, open pit mining, etc.) has made these resources accessible. In eco-tease, however, “unconventional” has become synonymous with “dirty.” The Sierra Club’s “dirty fuels” page exemplifies the use of eco-rhetoric towards new non-renewables: “It’s one thing for society to be saddled with an existing energy strategy that could result in dangerous climate change; it’s another thing when new technologies are exploited that push us closer to climate disaster – and that is what the commercialization of unconventional fossil fuels would do.” Claims such as these hold no water; the efficiency of new technologies to expedite “unconventional” fossil fuels like shale gas and oil have made these non-renewables viable— that is, “conventional.”
The irony of this eco-rhetoric is that renewable energy is unconventional. Green power producers wouldn’t exist if they weren’t showered with subsidies, yet you rarely hear this slighting term associated with them in the mainstream.
[click to continue…]
“To me, the smoke coming out of those stacks is the most beautiful sight in the world. It means there is progress being made somewhere. Somewhere, some place, someone is making progress. If there is no smoke coming out, we look at it as trouble.” Joe Bulich, third generation farmer in New York’s Hudson Valley, recounted the words his father Frank Bulich said in response to a question from a National Geographic reporter regarding the cement plants that could be seen on the river. She viewed them as an eyesore, Joe’s father had a different perspective. Reflecting on that conversation from the mid 90s, Joe says, “That’s why we are where we’re at.”
Today, the people who think of themselves as progressives, are actually against progress.
[click to continue…]
The Competitive Enterprise Institute today reacted to President Barack Obama’s decision to block construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline by urging the House of Representatives to revive legislation that would take the decision out of the President’s hands and direct a federal agency to permit the project. The 1700-mile Keystone XL Pipeline would move over half a million barrels of oil a day from Canada’s Alberta province and from the Bakken Field in North Dakota to refineries in Texas and Louisiana.
“We urge the House of Representatives to include a provision in the payroll tax cut extension bill that must be enacted by the end of February that would require the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to permit the project within thirty days,” said Myron Ebell, Director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “As oil production in Venezuela and Mexico likely declines dramatically in the next few years, the Obama Administration’s claim that importing more oil from Canada is not in the national interest is preposterous.”
[click to continue…]
Great news! Thanks to the technolution in oil and gas extraction known as hydraulic fracturing, natural gas prices are ultra-cheap. Because gas accounts for about 20 percent (and growing) of the U.S. electricity supply, its bottom-rock prices have diminished utility bills nationwide. According Bloomberg’s Julie Johnsson and Mark Chediak, “a shale-driven glut of natural gas has cut electricity prices for the U.S. power industry by 50 percent.”
Alas, it’s not great news for the entire country. In those regions that have most aggressively pushed intermittent and expensive renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, utility bills are heading north, despite the gas glut.
This week, for example, PG&E, which serves much of northern California, announced the first of two planned rate hikes this year. The utility has to raise prices to comply with all the green energy mandates coming out of Sacramento, where state lawmakers have long prided themselves on being the greenest in the nation.
Austin, Texas is a bastion of progressivism and the city government owns its own utility. Naturally, then, it has spared no expense in pursuing a green energy economy. Now, citizens are paying the bill: The city’s Electric Utility Commission is deliberating on a rate hike of almost $20 a month.
Notably, these two utilities use much more natural gas than renewable energy. Austin’s fuel generation mix for FY 2009 had 27 percent gas and 10 percent renewable. PG&E’s 2010 fuel mix included 20 percent gas and 16 percent renewable. Gas provides relatively more juice, and its price has plummeted, but wind and solar are so expensive, that electricity rates increase nonetheless!
[click to continue…]
In her new book Energy Freedom: The role of energy in your life & how environmentalists control its use, Marita Noon gives a down-to-earth explanation of energy and environmentalism. In this passage, she explains how energy makes our lives comfortable.
Energy Freedom was released in 2012
“Greed is good” was far more than a catch phrase made part of the vernacular through the popular late ‘80s movie Wall Street. As is often the case, art imitates life. “Greed is good” was more than a line from a movie; it was the mantra of the times. However, as Gordon Gecko, the famed character played by Michael Douglas, found out, too much greed was not good. His tactics sent him away for twenty years.
Today, in an age of simplicity and even austerity, “greed is good” sounds horribly outdated. Replacing it would be the slogan, “green is good.” Anything or anyone who can label one’s self as “green” has a perceived marketing advantage. Without fully understanding the implications of “green,” people support the “green” concept as generally being better for the environment. Without a specific universal definition of “green,” products as diverse as political candidates, diapers, and cars proudly sport the moniker. Though like Gordon Gecko learned, it is possible to have too much. Blind adoption of concepts labeled “green” may imprison America for the next twenty years or more. Resources, which America needs to move forward, are being locked up.
The resources I am referring to are energy, specifically oil, gas, coal, and uranium—the essential ingredients that fuel America. But other natural resources are also a part of what supplies our energy. We need copper for wires in transmission lines. Sulfur, lead, lithium, and rare earths are needed for batteries—and these resources, too, are being locked up. While most people think of gasoline and/or electricity when they think of energy, if they think about it at all, there is much more involved.
[click to continue…]
A Christian minister’s zeal in Pennsylvania to save Mother Earth from the indignities of hydraulic fracturing has caused her to go a bit too far. Claiming that Jesus would oppose all fracking, the Rev. Leah Schade told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “God put human beings into the Garden to till it and keep it, not drill and poison it.”
The Rev. Schade overlooks the fact that we’re no longer living in the Garden of Eden, but in a world in which the hunter-gatherer lifestyle really won’t work for most people. If Jesus really wants us not to disturb the ground, then there goes industrial civilization, which is based on digging stuff up.
(By the way, the Tribune-Review article describes the Rev. Schade as being a Lutheran pastor and also as ministering to a United Church of Christ congregation in Union County, Pennsylvania. The United Church of Christ is the major denomination of Congregationalists, whose roots go back to the Calvinism of New England’s Puritan settlers, not to Martin Luther. The green religion has taken hold in both Congregationalism and Lutheranism, as it has in many branches of Christianity.)
[click to continue…]
Iain Murray and I had an article in the Sacramento Bee this weekend that highlighted President Obama’s persistent attempts to keep his environmental agenda as secret as possible. This war on environmental transparency is an issue that globalwarming.org has been covering, notably here and here. Below is the article in its entirety.
When Vice President Dick Cheney held secret meetings for his energy task force in the early days of President George W. Bush’s first term, he was excoriated by the left and even some on the right. Both Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club sued, but the Supreme Court found the proceedings were protected by executive privilege.
President Barack Obama came into office pledging to end such secrecy, saying, “The way to make government accountable is to make it transparent.”
On his own energy agenda, however, the president has been as opaque as Cheney, repeatedly holding closed-door meetings, anonymously courting lobbyists, dodging Freedom of Information Act requests, and ignoring subpoenas from Congress.
[click to continue…]
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
CEI.org