Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan recently took to the Huffington Post to promote subsidies for money-saving, “green” retrofits and appliances. While he never articulated why the Obama administration thinks American consumers are so stupid that they need government help in order to save money, Secretary Donovan did offer a nonsensical justification for these tax handouts. Here’s how he opened his HuffPo post,
“With gas prices topping $4 a gallon families and businesses are facing a real burden. But we can take action to ensure the American people don’t fall victim to volatile energy costs over the long term.”
There is a big problem with the Housing Secretary’s lede: Gasoline fuels cars, not houses. The fact that “gas prices [are] topping $4 a gallon” has almost nothing* to do with HUD’s wasteful green subsidies for energy efficient appliances and retrofits.
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In a recent post, I predicted that Japan is likely to turn from nuclear to coal in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. This would have global ramifications, as Japan would become a major importer of coal at the very moment that China’s burgeoning demand for coal was creating export opportunities in the United States and Australia. For major coal companies, the global coal market is looking strong to quite strong.
In addition to being a boon for the international coal industry, there are repercussions in other energy markets. In Europe, where anti-nuclear sentiment already was high before the Japanese crisis, the nuclear industry is reeling. Plans for future nuclear power plants are being shelved; existing plants are being decommissioned. According to EUractiv,
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Obama’s Energy Policies Benefit the Powerful at the Expense of Everyone Else
Deneen Borelli, Fox News, 5 June 2011
Do GOP Hopefuls Trust Al Gore?
Steve Milloy, Washington Times, 3 June 2011
Latest Global Warming Alarm: Biodegradable Cups
Sheela Philomena, MedIndia, 2 June 2011
WalMart’s Support for Cap-and-Trade To Be Challenged at Shareholder Meeting
Peter Flaherty, National Legal and Policy Center, 2 June 2011
Don’t Fall for Socialist Global Warming Hysteria
Davis Patterson, letter to the editor The Bridgeton News, 31 May 2011
President Barack Obama this week nominated John Bryson to be Secretary of Commerce. Senator James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) immediately announced that he would try to defeat Bryson’s confirmation by the Senate. It’s easy to see why Inhofe didn’t have to spend much time weighing Bryson’s qualifications. Bryson is a model crony capitalist, lifelong professional environmentalist, and leading promoter of cap-and-trade legislation to raise energy prices.
Here is what Bryson said at a symposium at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009: “Greenhouse gas legislation – either with a tax or with a cap and trade, which is a more complicated way of getting at it, but it has the advantage politically of sort of hiding the fact that you have a tax, but at the same – you know that’s what you’re trying to do, trying to raise price of carbon….” He went on to say that the Waxman-Markey and other cap-and-trade bills in Congress would not raise energy prices enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the required amount, so that he also favored federal regulations, such as renewable requirements for electric utilities, on top of cap-and-trade. Later, Bryson referred to Waxman-Markey as a “moderate but acceptable bill.”
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Aussie Labor Party Prime Minister Julia Gillard is waging an aggressive PR campaign to sell carbon taxes in the Land Down Under. Resistance is fierce, with opposition leaders saying the tax “is so toxic that Labor MPs could dump her to save their own seats” (The Australian, June 3, 2011). [click to continue…]
The vote is 18 months away, but the politics of re-election already are having a major impact on the President’s environmental policy-making. In an effort to woo the American Heartland, President Barack Obama is (temporarily) reining in the Environmental Protection Agency. However, in those States where the President has no chance of victory in 2012, the regulatory steamroller proceeds apace.
Politico Morning Energy reported today that the President is signaling that he intends to delay the Environmental Protection Agency’s issuance of New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. They were supposed to have been issued in July. In essence, these NSPS standards act as the minimum threshold (the “floor”) for all pollution control mandates for greenhouse gas emissions from new coal power plants pursuant to the Clean Air Act. Although NSPS standards traditionally have applied only to new power plants, the Obama administration is interpreting the law creatively, so that it can regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants, too.
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Big, Bad Wolf Romm
Robert Bradley, Master Resource, 3 June 2011
The Inherently Ideological Interpretation of the GM Bailout
Jim Manzi, National Review Online, 2 June 2011
Sigourney Weaver: Climate Change Is Sexist
Noel Sheppard, News Busters, 2 June 2011
A Request for Light Bulb Sanity
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Real Clear Markets, 2 June 2011
Climate Dictatorship of the Enlightened: More Great Ideas from Germany
Chris Horner, AmSpecBlog, 29 May 2011
Obama Administration officials had advance notice that General Motors would run deceptive ads claiming to have paid taxpayers back for its bailout, and did not veto or object to those ads despite the opportunity to do so. Only later did Administration officials distance themselves from those deceptive claims, and they did so only after the falsity of those claims became so obvious to the public that they could no longer be parroted. Treasury Secretary Geithner had parroted those deceptive claims, which then drew criticism from the TARP inspector general, members of Congress, and financial reporters. Geithner publicly repeated GM’s deceptive claims, even though the Treasury Department had weeks in which to review GM’s claims and discover their inaccuracy.
Treasury Department Documents released last week in response to a think-tank’s Freedom of Information Act request make this clear. Those documents illustrate that GM and the Obama Administration coordinated GM’s PR strategy regarding the company’s controversial TV and print ad campaign in 2010, in which the car maker misleadingly claimed to have repaid what it received from taxpayers. In those ads, GM’s then-CEO, Ed Whitacre, claimed GM had already repaid its government bailout loan “in full, with interest, five years ahead of schedule.”
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The answer is three, the same number of licks it takes an owl to reach the center of a Tootsie Pop.
American Wind Energy Association CEO Denise Bode recently appeared on Fox Business News to promote wind power. At the 6:45 mark of her segment, she defended wind energy subsidies with a flurry of misinformation and wishful thinking. Here’s the exchange,
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Update 6/3/2011:
In a hastily written post, I erroneously conflated the difference between ‘oil shale’ and ‘shale oil’ and incorrectly thought that the report mentioned below was referring to ‘shale oil.’ Had I been more careful, I would have noticed the end of the report where the author meticulously differentiated between the two. As written, the post below is mostly useless now as I criticize claims that weren’t made. The phrases ‘laughably naive’ and ‘willfull ignorance’ would seem to be more appropriately directed towards my own writing in this case. I apologize to the authors, and thank them for politely pointing out my error in a personal e-mail. Mea culpa.
Unedited, original post below:
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So says The Checks & Balances Project.
As evidence for a shale oil boom being science fiction, the report cites a bunch of newspaper articles in the past (seriously, some from the early 20th century) where oil shale is mentioned as a potential future energy source. So, because analysts or politicians (or journalists) thought shale oil would come around sooner than it did, present day shale oil production is apparently science fiction. How about a current newspaper article that actually shows companies using fracturing techniques to get shale oil out of the ground, wouldn’t that disprove the whole ‘science fiction’ notion? The New York Times, Oil in Shale Sets Off a Boom in Texas, from late May: [click to continue…]
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