There is no question that the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for natural gas in New York State’s Marcellus Shale Formation is the current dividing issue among New Yorkers. There are those who spout environmental litanies of an outright ban on the process and those who lionize economic growth over such anti-risk hysteria. But amongst all of this potent polarization, Gov. Andrew Cuomo neglected the issue entirely in his second State of the State Address he made last week, leaving both groups dumbfounded.
Cuomo stated, “Our challenge for 2012 is this: How does government spur job creation in a down economy while limiting spending and maintaining fiscal discipline? The answer is forging public-private partnerships that leverage state resources to generate billions of dollars in economic growth and create thousands of jobs.” You would think fracking would be a no-brainer in his economic blueprint since itwould “spur job creation” without costing taxpayers a dime; however, fracking took form of the elephant in the room as Cuomo outlined his plans for “economic development:”
Barack Obama swept into the Presidency promising a new political order, one characterized by “transparency” and “openness.” Three years later, the President’s lofty campaign promises are belied by the Environmental Protection Agency’s record of suppression.
Federal agencies cannot issue regulations willy-nilly; rather, they are bound to rules stipulating administrative procedure, in order to ensure the voice of affected parties is heard. Obama’s EPA, however, evinces a troubling tendency to circumvent these procedural rules. Regulated entities are being subjected to controversial, onerous regimes, before they even have the opportunity to read the rules, much less voice an objection. The wayward Agency is exercising an unanswerable power, straight out of a Kafka novella.
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Dear Mitt,
Congratulations on winning the Iowa Caucus! I know you have worked long and hard for the Republican Presidential Nomination.
On the night of the caucuses, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DWS), was heard saying: “Republicans, in general, aren’t enthusiastic about any of their choices.” This is clear as evidenced by the search for the “not Romney” candidate.
While DWS was correct, one thing all Republicans are enthusiastic about is beating President Obama. They will unite behind that cause. If you are to be the candidate who unites the Republican Party, you are going to have to differentiate yourself from President Obama to win support beyond Iowa. You’ve got several problems there.
One problem is your view on manmade climate change. The American public doesn’t view global warming as an important issue—this is especially true for Republicans. Yet President Obama continues to tout green jobs. In the name of saving the planet, his administration’s policies are making it difficult for people to feed their families and heat their homes.
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This just in. An AP story posted on Fox News reports that GM will ask Volt owners to bring in their vehicles to dealers for fire hazard-related structural modifications. Here’s the AP story in full:
AP Source: GM to call back 8,000 Chevy Volts
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Last week, Judge Lawrence O’Neill of the U.S. District Court in Fresno issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), a regulation requiring a 10% reduction in the carbon content of motor fuels sold in the state by 2020. O’Neill concluded that the LCFS violates the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution because it discriminates against out-of-state economic interests and attempts to control conduct outside the state’s jurisdiction. [click to continue…]
The question of whether the green energy industry can fight its own battles within the competitive energy market was answered Wednesday with the release of U.S. EPA’s Utility MACT rule. The unsurprising answer is no, it cannot. This rule, dressed with the façade of an earth-friendly health-protecting mandate, is a regulation intended to fade out the coal industry—one of the renewable industry’s strongest competitors.
The Utility MACT rule, announced by EPA Chief Lisa Jackson on December 21, 2011 at the choice location of the Children’s National Medical Center in D.C., has two rules for coal-fired power plants. The first rule curbs air pollution in states downwind from “dirty” coal-fired power plants. The second would set the first standards for mercury and other pollutants from power plant smokestacks, requiring plants to install “maximum achievable control technology” to reduce emissions of pollutants. EPA estimates this rule will cost $9.6 billion while the industry approximates the cost of $100 billion; between the two, this rule is one of the most expensive regulations to date. An analysis done by AP stated that these rules eliminate more than 8 percent of coal-fired energy nationwide. AP also found that more than 32 mostly coal-fired power plants in a dozen states will be forced to shut down and an additional 36 might have to close because of new federal air pollution regulations; together, those plants produce enough electricity for more than 22 million households.
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On the first day of 2012, the New York Times published an editorial, “Where the Real Jobs Are,” that is uniformly backwards. If the federal government did the exact opposite of every recommendation made by the New York Times editorial board, Americans would benefit the most.
According to the Times, President Barack Obama should reject the shovel-ready Keystone XL Pipeline, because it would carry “conventional” oil from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. The editorial board then suggests that “real” jobs are those in the sector of the economy responsible for the production of “alternative” energy, like wind and solar power. Instead of allowing the private sector to create 6,000 (presumably fake) jobs by permitting the Keystone XL, the Times argues that the President should “lay out the case that industry, with government help, can create hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs.” In the Times’s mind, Europe has shown the way:
“Europe has encouraged the commercial development of carbon-reducing technologies with a robust mix of direct government investment and tax breaks, loans and laws that cap or tax greenhouse gas emissions. This country needs a comparably broad strategy that will create a pathway from the fossil fuels of today to the greener fuels of tomorrow.”
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Earthworks’s Oil and Gas Accountability Project has recently commissioned a report on behalf of anti-drilling special interests, and delivered it to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, donning the title: “A Human Rights Assessment of Hydraulic Fracturing for Natural Gas.” This flagrant instrument of green propaganda alleges that the “environmental damage” created by hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), the contentious natural gas extraction process that involves blasting a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals underground, poses “a new threat to human rights.” The basis of this accusation rests upon a citation of a recent United Nations Resolution that states, “environmental damage can have negative implications, both direct and indirect, for the effective enjoyment of human rights.” Again, the archetypal environmentalist assumes the posture of the humanitarian do-gooder, when in reality, their green agenda with the “at-all-costs” underpinnings will ravage the already depressed economies of those areas in upstate New York where natural gas development offers hope for impoverished people.
The report enumerates the possible (not affirmed) risks to air quality, ground surface waters, climate change, soils and ecosystems that qualify as “violations” of human rights (26 violations, to be exact), even though they admit that “the current state of knowledge about potential human health and environmental impacts of these airborne and waterborne contaminants, as well as of their mixtures and interactions, is poor.” It goes to the level of labeling fracking a “human rights” issue because it overrides all other possible policy tests. The report states, “Human rights standards are recognized as trumping other types of policy considerations such as utility, cost-benefit analysis, economic value, social policy, etc.” The cherry on top of this outrageous assessment is that the last two listed human rights accused of being violated by fracking pertain to the Nuremberg Code— a document that assures the rights of medical subjects that came out of the World War II Nuremberg Trials where Nazi doctors were rightly accused of performing atrocious experiments on prisoners in the concentration camps. As stated, there is no evidence that fracking poses a threat to the environment, let alone to human rights. To parallel real human suffering with an industrialized process that mitigates human struggle by creating wealth is insulting and absurd.
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A favorite doomsday scenario of the anti-carbon crusade hypothesizes that global warming, by melting frozen Arctic soils on land and the seafloor, will release billions of tons of carbon locked up for thousands of years in permafrost. Climate havoc ensues: The newly exposed carbon oxidizes and becomes carbon dioxide (CO2), further enhancing the greenhouse effect. Worse, some of the organic carbon decomposes into methane, which, molecule for molecule, packs 21 times the global warming punch of CO2 over a 100-year time span and more than 100 times the CO2-warming effect over a 20-year period.
The fear, in short, is that mankind is fast approaching a “tipping point” whereby outgassing CO2 and methane cause more warming, which melts more permafrost, which releases even more CO2 and methane, which pushes global temperatures up to catastrophic levels.
In a popular Youtube video, scientists flare outgassing methane from a frozen pond in Fairbanks, Alaska. A photo of the pond, with methane bubbling up through holes in the ice, appears in the marquee for this post. Are we approaching the End of Days?
New York Times science blogger Andrew Revkin ain’t buying it (“Methane Time Bomb in Arctic Seas – Apocalyplse Not,” 14 Dec. 2011), nor does his colleague, science reporter Justin Gillis (“Artic Methane: Is Catastrophe Imminent?” 20 Dec. 2011).
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James Hohman of Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy estimates that state and federal incentives for GM’s plug-in hybrid vehicle, the Chevy Volt, total $3 billion. That works out to between $50,000 and $250,000 in taxpayer support for each of 6,000 Volts sold so far, “depending on how many of the subsidy milestones are realized.”
The per vehicle subsidy cost is bound to decrease as more Volts are sold and as current subsidies expire.
Nonetheless, as GM acknowledges, the typical Volt purchaser earns $170,000 a year, so it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Volt program is a reverse-Robin Hood wealth tranfer from middle-income households to GM, other big corporations, and high-income auto buyers.
Hohman’s analysis appears below in full. [click to continue…]
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