Sen. John McCain caps his weeklong push for U.S. energy independence with a trip Friday to Canada, but his own environmental plan discourages use of Canadian oil and drastically increases American reliance on oil from the Middle East and other potentially unfriendly places.
2008
A year after the Tennessee Center for Policy Research exposed Gore’s prodigious personal use of electricity at his Nashville mansion (20 times the national average), the center reported this week that Gore’s personal electricity consumption during the past year actually increased by 10 percent.
The late Natalie Grant Wraga once wrote, "Protection of the environment has become the principal tool for attack against the West and all it stands for. Protection of the environment may be used as a pretext to adopt a series of measures designed to undermine the industrial base of developed nations. It may also serve to introduce malaise by lowering their standard of living and implanting communist values."
In this presidential election year, the Democrats really do seem to think they can fool most of the people all of the time. Gasoline prices have reached well over $4 in much of the country, but instead of fulfilling the duties given to them by the voters in 2006 and allowing access to more domestic sources of oil and gas, Democrats have thrown a new headline-grabbing smear at Big Oil.
With gas prices rising and billions of additional dollars flowing to the Middle East to buy oil, energy policy is turning into a battleground in the race for President. On June 17, the presumptive Republican nominee, Arizona Senator John McCain, laid down the gauntlet with a speech in Houston, talking about his vision "to free America once and for all from our strategic dependence on foreign oil."
In New York last week, Senator Thomas Morahan (R-Rockland) introduced S. 8390, the “Greenhouse Gas Pollution Control Act,” which calls for an 80 percent reduction in the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. An identical version of the bill already was passed by the State Assembly. Like similar climate laws passed in California and Washington, the “Greenhouse Gas Pollution Control Act” omits real policy, and instead delegates the task of planning future emissions reductions to state regulators.
New Hampshire Governor John Lynch (D) signed a bill that makes the Granite State the newest party to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state cap-and-trade climate change program in the Northeast. Experts say that RGGI is guaranteed to raise utility bills. However, they are not sure if it will decrease emissions, because it only applies to a portion of electricity generating units in the region. As a result, demand is likely to increase for electricity from unregulated, cheaper, more carbon-intensive wholesale sellers of power, a phenomenon known as “emissions leakage.”
The environmental movement, only recently poised for major advances on global warming and other issues, has suddenly found itself on the defensive as high gasoline prices shift the political climate nationwide and trigger defections by longtime supporters.
Thus, I am thankful to Al Gore for proving that even in a high profile demonstration project these "solutions" won't work. The Tennessee Center for Policy Research reports that Gore's home in Nashville has increased its energy usage by 10% in the past year.
Taking a break for a moment from domestic politics, let's turn to our supposed model for rationing GHG emissions: Europe. The EU has just released its report to the UNFCCC, “Annual European Community greenhouse gas inventory 1990–2006 and inventory report 2008” (summary here). The short version of the story is that the report does not support either a claim that the EU is “on track” to meet emission reduction promises, or that the ETS is a success.
This is true although the document claims a 2006 GHG emission reduction of 08.% over 2005, following on an equivalent reduction in 2005 over 2004.
That of course won't get them anywhere near where they need to go, and I'm still poring over details (though already I've encountered extensive explanations of wholesale revisions of past claims, "no explanation offered" about certain important claims, and an admission that certain reduction data is facially suspect and likely to be the subject of revision).
But notable is how different this is from preliminary indications, detailed earlier here. One possible explanation for the discrepancy is one reality that jumps out in a first reading of the report, that the GHG reductions largely did not come from CO2.
Still, those early reports from industry just don't jibe that well with the official Brussels claim of a reduction. As I wrote here, there is every reason to take this and all EU GHG reports with a grain of salt given the EU's rather breathtaking willingness to fudge its numbers.
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
That the presidential race inhabits every nook and cranny of the mind of cable television news hosts became ridiculously clear in a Wolf Blitzer interview with Chevron Corp. CEO David O'Reilly:
Blitzer: You know you have — you and ExxonMobil, the Big Oil companies –have a huge public relations problem. In all the recent polls, when the American public is asked, who do you blame for these huge gas prices at the pump, they — more than any other single source — they blame Big Oil. They blame you. What's going on?…
Blitzer: There's other blame, but more than any other single source, they blame Big Oil….
Blitzer: Because you have had record profits, right?
O'Reilly: We're investing those record profits.
Blitzer: But billions and billions of dollars in profits, more than ever before….
Blitzer: You know that Barack Obama says if he's president, he wants a windfall profits tax. He wants to take a chunk of your profits right now and give it back to the American people. John McCain opposes that, as you know. So I assume you would like to see John McCain elected president?…
Blitzer: So, I guess, given the stark difference when it comes to Big Oil between Obama and McCain — let me rephrase the question — do you want McCain to be elected?
Talk about obsessed — and can someone please tell me how that's "rephrasing the question?!"
If you read the whole interview, CNN's iReporters show themselves to be better questioners than the Blitzer.
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