Horrible Excuses
Henry Payne, Planet Gore, 12 July 2011
Incandescent Light Bulb Ban: A Step Toward a Nanny State
Melvin Barnhart, Baltimore Sun, 12 July 2011
A World Food Crisis?
Fred Singer, American Thinker, 11 July 2011
The Feds Wage War on Wealth Creation in Alaska
Dave Harbour, Master Resource, 11 July 2011
Global Warming: A Primer
John Hinderaker, Power Line, 10 July 2011
Despite a downward trend in the prices at the pump, overall energy costs are rising. While most people could not quote the price they are paying per kilowatt hour—as they can for a gallon of gas, they do know their electricity bills are skyrocketing. They also understand that the government policy of picking winners and losers makes taxpayers the losers.
As legislators fight to show their spending-cutting credentials, folks phoned their Senators in June and expressed enough ire that a Democrat-sponsored amendment easily won bipartisan support: by a margin of 73-27 the Senate voted to end ethanol subsidies. The Feinstein amendment was attached to a bill that did not pass and, therefore didn’t change anything. Its importance is mostly symbolic and represents more than just ethanol.
The EPA gives millions to the environmental groups that sue it. “When the EPA settles or loses those suits, it then awards the groups millions more in attorneys’ fees,” notes legal commentator Walter Olson. “‘The EPA isn’t harmed by these suits,’ said Jeffrey Holmstead, who was an EPA official during the Bush administration. ‘Often the suits involve things the EPA wants to do anyway. By inviting a lawsuit and then signing a consent decree, the agency gets legal cover from political heat.’ Holmstead called this kind of litigation ‘sweetheart suits.'”
The EPA gave millions to groups that sued it to get it to regulate greenhouse gases, like the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council. Those groups brought a lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), which vastly expanded the EPA’s jurisdiction. More recently, they sued to compel the EPA to issue greenhouse gas “performance standards” for power plants and refineries. In a recent settlement, the EPA agreed to do just that. Critics “said the costly settlement was ‘concocted in secret’” and that other lawsuits by EPA grantees resulted in collusive settlements that cost the economy billions, increased the EPA’s powers, and gave environmental groups things that they were unlikely to win in any court ruling.
House Moves To Block EPA Greenhouse Gas Regulations
The House Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee marked up its funding bill for Fiscal Year 2012 on Thursday. Under Chairman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), the subcommittee voted to cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 18 percent.
Quick, which one of these statements does NOT come from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four?
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
INCANDESCENT BULBS AREN’T GETTING BANNED…IN FACT, THEY ARE GETTING BETTER.
Tough choice? OK—take a few more seconds.
Well, what many predicted has come true, subsidies for ethanol aren’t actually going away:
Ethanol advocates Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), meanwhile, won multi-year extensions of tax credits for producing “cellulosic” ethanol — which isn’t made from corn — and installing ethanol blender pumps at gas stations.
The deal will steer $1.33 billion — two-thirds of the savings from ending the blenders’ subsidy — into deficit reduction, while the balance of $668 million would support the other incentives, according to the lawmakers.
Any rational proposal for the future of ethanol should aggravate industry trade groups, and they’re predictably cheer-leading about how they’re being fiscally responsible, fueling our freedom, and all that other nonsense. It seems as if they saw the light at the end of the tunnel was fading fast, and they hopped on a train that would funnel a remaining 600 million into the industry. [click to continue…]
The Obama Car
Eric Peters, American Spectator, 7 July 2011
Snoopy and the Green Baron
Peter Foster, Financial Post, 6 July 2011
Washington Post: ‘Misinformation and Outright Lies about Climate Change’
Chris Horner, Big Government, 6 July 11
Science by Artillery Shell? Or Science by Cooperation?
James Taylor, Forbes, 6 Jul7 2011
Michael Mann and the Climategate Whitewash, Part 2
Larry Bell, Forbes, 5 July 2011
Swiss Re, one of two global re-insurance titans, yesterday issued a report, “The hidden risks of climate change: An increase in property damage from drought and soil subsidence in Europe,” suggesting that global warming could “magnify” the risks of property damage caused by soil subsidence. In 2010, the other global re-insurance titan, Munich Re, concluded that, “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.”
The above claim made by Munich Re is a favorite of global warming alarmists. For example, it was cited by former Vice President Al Gore in a high-profile Rolling Stone article published two weeks ago. No doubt, yesterday’s Swiss Re study also will prove to be an oft-mentioned talking point for green special interests. Environmental extremists dismiss virtually all science that is skeptical of catastrophic climate change as being “industry funded,” so it is interesting that they are quick to embrace “evidence” produced by insurance companies, for which there is a clear profit motive at stake. After all, insurance is the business of pricing risk. Swiss Re and Munich Re therefore have an incentive to incorporate into their assessments an allegedly significant, yet amorphous, source of risk like global warming. By doing so, they can jack up premiums and make a mint.
Farhad Manjoo of Slate is convinced that a new L.E.D light bulb being produced will look similar to incandescent lighting and still save consumers money over the life of the bulb, according to their predictions and his calculations:
[…] On average, an incandescent bulb lasts about 1,000 hours—that’s about a year, if you keep it on for about three hours a day. Electricity in America also costs about 11 cents per kilowatt hour (that’s the average; it varies widely by region). In other words, a 50-cent, 60-watt incandescent bulb will use about $6.60 in electricity every year. Switch’s 60-watt-equivalent LED, meanwhile, uses only 13 watts of power, so it will cost only $1.43 per year. The Switch bulb also has an average lifespan of 20,000 hours—20 years. If you count the price of replacing the incandescent bulb every year, the Switch bulb will have saved you money by its fourth year. Over 20 years, you’ll have spent a total of about $142 for the incandescent bulbs (for electricity and replacement bulbs) and less than $50 for Switch’s 60-watt bulb. (I made a spreadsheet showing my calculations.) [click to continue…]
Energy & Environment News (subscription required) reported this morning that Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-WA) purchased 21 iPads for senators and committee staff, in an effort to cut down on paper use. According to the story, “Each is loaded with all the relevant documents” necessary to legislate effectively.
When I read this news, I couldn’t help but think how great it would have been if the House of Representatives had one such iPad, “loaded with all the relevant documents,” on the evening of June 26, 2009*. At the time, the Democrat-controlled House was about to pass the American Clean Energy and Security Act, a cap-and-trade energy-rationing scheme, despite the fact that no one had read the bill. Indeed, it would have been impossible for anyone to have read the bill, because there wasn’t a copy of the legislation available.
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