Whomever is elected tomorrow will face — and probably support — the next enviro-whacko catastrophe, the Dingell-Boucher bill. If you liked McCain’s global warming bill, you’ll just love this.
November 2008
For more than three years, a number of politicians and media observers have prophesied about the fracturing of the coveted “Evangelical Vote” over the issue of environmental stewardship. And during the same period, a handful of evangelicals have toiled to persuade the faithful that manmade global warming is such a serious threat that it deserves top priority in their social witness.
In a January 17, 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Senator Obamasaidthat “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under his plan to fight global warming. He also said that under his plan, “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them.” “An Obama spokesperson said that Obama’s remarks were taken out of context.”
Is there something in the water in San Francisco that makes officials utter explosive disclosures? Earlier, Obama attracted controversy for saying at a San Francisco fundraiser that people in “small towns in Pennsylvania” and Ohio “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
T Boone Pickens has a simple business plan: convince the government to force Americans to buy his wind power and natural gas, so he can get rich.
Already in Texas, he benefits from a law that requires that Texans get 20% of the electricity from wind power—T Boone’s wind power. He even convinced the State to spend $5 billion in taxpayer money on transmission lines to deliver his wind power to consumers.
In California, he is spending millions on Prop 10, which would mandate that the Golden State use natural gas—T Boone’s natural gas—in public vehicles. If Prop 10 passes, the real windfall for T Boone would be the scores of millions that the State spends on a compressed natural gas (CNG) infrastructure (fuel trucks, fuel stations and the like), which could pave the way towards greater use of CNG—and greater profits for T Boone.
But T Boone’s biggest score is the “Pickens Plan,” his vision to have Congress force all of America to get a fifth of its electricity from wind energy—T Boone’s wind energy—and then forcing Americans to use natural gas—T Boone’s natural gas—to fuel their cars and trucks. T Boone is spending more than $50 million on a public relations campaign for his Plan, but that’s chump change compared to billions his Plan would make him if Congress heeded his wishes.
Obviously, I don’t care for T Boone’s business model. That’s why I derive no small amount of pleasure from an article in the Charlotte Observer that reports T Boone’s mega-wind project (which is being built only because it benefits from mega-mandates and mega-government subsidies) is in big trouble because of the economic crisis. The tough economic environment means that demand for energy is lower, so natural gas prices have dropped, thereby making wind energy even less economically viable that it is already. Financing is also more difficult to obtain, which is bad news for T Boone’s capital intensive wind farms.
As a result, T Boone has scaled back plans significantly.
Washington remains quiet as everyone awaits the election returns. Environmentalists are talking about making any second stimulus bill that may be taken up by Congress in its lame duck session (scheduled for the week of November 17th) into a “green stimulus” package. Lots of new money for make-work “green jobs,” new and higher subsidies for “green energy,” and so on. It should be fun to watch the pushing and shoving at the trough, but the outcomes of these spending sprees are always depressing. It’s hard to see how wasting money and replacing lower-cost energy with higher-cost energy can revive the economy.
T. Boone Pickens will probably be back in Washington rattling his tin cup. The Charlotte Observer reports that Pickens is scaling back his plans to build a wind farm in Texas because of a lack of financing.
The other way of looking at a “green stimulus” is that it indicates that the air has been sucked out of the climate issue by the credit crunch and looming recession. Cap-and-trade legislation now looks less likely to be a front-burner issue in the next Congress. So the environmental pressure groups are left to scramble for anything they can get. They should take comfort in the fact that global greenhouse gas emissions are certain to decline for as long as the recession lasts.
Snow fell on London this last week, a beautiful blanket of snow — the first to fall in the month of October since the year of grace 1922 — while the Mother of Parliaments gave third reading to an extraordinary piece of legislation, which will put a huge new bureaucracy in place to monitor and fight global warming, sucking taxes from a shrinking British economy.
China has now destroyed Western hopes for a new global warming agreement, just weeks before global talks in Poland aimed at writing a successor for the Kyoto Protocol- which expires in 2012. China has attached a ransom not to its Polish meeting RSVP: They might go along with a new warming pact if the rich countries agree to hand over 1 percent of their GDP-about $300 billion per year-to finance the required non-fossil, higher-cost energy systems the West wants the developing countries to use.
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