Category Archives: Global Warming

December 8, 2008 · 7:44 am

Stupid is as Stupid Does

The great American philosopher, Forest Gump uttered those memorable words. He also said, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you will get.” I can’t help but think of these two gems when I ponder what the new Obama Administration and the new solidly Democrat Congress will do in the coming year.

From the appointments we’ve seen so far it seems the “Change We Can Believe In” amounts to rehiring all the guys from the Clinton team. If memory serves Clinton was quite radical in his first two years… until the alarmed electorate voted in a Republican Congress in 1996. Clinton then got religion and governed more like the centrist he claimed to be.

Observers have tried to be optimistic that BHO, Pelosi and Reid would show some restraint with the economy in a shambles, but recent comments from the anointed ones do not inspire confidence. On the economic front it looks like the only idea anyone has is to throw more and more money at the problem. Damn the torpedoes of inflation or the ice burgs of government ownership of major industries. Don’t worry about the distant shoals of debt. Open the valves of spending. Full speed ahead!

Once the new Congress gets sworn in and get their furniture rearranged we should expect quick action on two Democrat pet projects: the Employee Free Choice Act and the Fairness Doctrine. These two turkeys could only have been named by Orwell’s Ministry of Truth for there is no “free choice” in the former or “fairness” in the latter.

The EFC Act is a sop to the unions who love the Democrats unconditionally and give them millions. Better known as the Card Check bill it makes it substantially easier to organize a union shop. Less than 10% of the US workforce is currently unionized, mostly government employees and workers in major industries. Union shops like automobile manufacturers and airlines have been falling like flies lately and entrenched unions rightly deserve a lot of the blame. Government unions produce no measurable product and even if they do (like the teachers unions) and the product is crap, they persist. This does not suggest greater unionization is a wonderful idea in this time of economic trouble.

The Fairness Doctrine is only designed to put conservative talk radio out of business. The left already controls the mainstream media…. TV, Hollywood and the major newspapers. This violation of the 1st Amendment would silence any dissent of the left wing agenda.

While some of Obama’s economic team may have convinced him that raising taxes during a recession is a formula for financial disaster, he seems determined to push ahead with his fight against global warming with his Cap and Trade program. He said recently, “[we] will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80% by 2050.” Remember, Obama promised during the campaign to bankrupt anyone who attempted to build a coal fired power plant.

VP candidate Biden in one of his memorable gaffs said, “We’re not supporting clean coal” and “…no coal plants here in America.” Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader and dipshit buffoon, once said, “That is, coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick; it’s global warming. It’s ruining our country; it’s ruining our World. We’ve got to stop using fossil fuel.” Harry and BHO probably never bothered to check, but the US gets 85% of its energy needs from fossil fuels and 50% of the US electrical power is supplied by coal plants. Do they really believe that they can replace fossil fuel with solar and wind power? Does anyone believe that the radical environmentalists will ever allow the Democrats to build a single nuclear plant? Their only hope of replacing coal is nuclear and they can’t go there.

The significant phrase in Obama’s quote above is “strong annual targets”. That suggests to me that he plans to use the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and implement his Cap and Trade dreams through that behemoth. The EPA has already prepared an 18,000-page Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) document regulating every emitting source from coal plants to lawn mowers. It amounts to a tax on energy, will cost trillions and wipe out jobs by the millions. Estimates from the Heritage Foundation suggest net job losses (that’s after you add in the “green” jobs created) at 500,000 per year and a cost of $5000 per household. American companies will be leaving the country in droves.

While this madness continues to rumble down the tracks we get this update on global warming from the US National Climatic Data Center. Seems the global temperature went DOWN in 2008 with some parts of the world seeing snow for the first time in memory. 2008 saw record snowfalls in China and Canada (Toronto’s Feb. snowfall the most since 1950). Sea ice build up in Antarctica was the largest in 30 years and even the much-discussed Artic saw increases of 10 to 20cm of ice. Nothing in yet from the polar bears.

[Editor’s note: In April 2007, the news release about the dire situation of the Polar Bear was exposed by an Australian journalist as a hoax. The photo was not taken by Canadian environmentalists, but taken by a marine biology student more than two years before in the month of August–when ice caps are naturally melting–and the bear was within easy swimming distance of larger chunks of land; it was released by the AP along with the introduction of the UN’s Global Warming Report.]

[Also, there are more reports from a group of international scientists on the global warming nonsense.]

According to Kenneth Tapping of the Canadian National Research Council, solar activity is way down. “The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted five centuries and ended in 1850.” Gee, maybe the sun has something to do with global warming? OK, one winter does not an ice age make. But, it should give everyone a reason to look a little more critically at the absurd contortions of the global warming fanatics. More importantly, it should give our politicians pause before imposing an economy destroying policy on North America. You’d think, but I’m not betting on it.

Don’t count on the Democrats allowing any more drilling for oil or gas either. That’s way too logical.

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Filed under Cap and Trade, Clinton, Fairness Doctrine, Global Warming, Politics

August 7, 2008 · 7:14 am

This an’ That

Nancy Pelosi decided to send Congress home on a five-week vacation rather than allow a vote on a bill to allow drilling offshore. She feared the House might pass the bill. She was also mindful of the 70%+ of Americans who now want drilling and instructed her Democrat colleagues to tell their constituents they actually favored drilling. Cynical? Or, just politics as usual? Both me thinks.

The Democrats find themselves in a box. After years of opposing looking for oil in likely places and to stay in the good graces of the environmental movement (and keep the cash flowing), they are now facing an electorate pissed off at $4.00 per gallon gasoline. Pelosi and her associates have been spinning a lot of BS to attempt to confuse the issue.
· Drilling won’t give us any oil for ten years.
· The oil companies have plenty of leases to drill on and they are not drilling on them.
· The GOP favors the big bad oil companies and won’t consider alternative fuels or technologies.
· And, the most laughable of all: Nancy wants to “save the planet”.

First of all, I am grateful that God has granted the power to Nancy to save the planet. But, before she tackles the global warming problem, I wish she would use these considerable powers to get rid of Iran’s nukes. They pose a more immediate threat to civilization than global warming, which, if it exists at all, is not likely to trouble us much until the end of the century.

The other Democrat excuses don’t hold much water. If the leases currently held by oil companies had oil, does any sane person believe that at $120-140 per barrel they would not be drilling like crazy? The ten-year excuse is simply smoke. Numerous reports indicate several deposits could come on line quickly. More importantly, some of the speculation in the market would diminish with the prospect of new supplies becoming available. (Note: I believe that the current fallback in oil prices reflects the oil producing countries pulling back from buying oil futures and bidding up prices. I suspect they fear killing the goose that lays the golden egg if prices stay at $140pb.)

Nowhere in the anti-drilling propaganda is there any mention of the $700 billion dollars sent annually to purchase oil from countries unfriendly to the US. “The largest wealth transfer in history” as many have described it. Not a word from Nancy. On second thought, perhaps she should concern herself with saving the US economy before devoting herself to saving the planet. Just a thought.

T. Boone Pickens, famous oilman, has been running expensive ads touting wind power. No one has questioned how big an investment T. Bone has in wind power and if his public relations campaign may be self serving. Studies I have read recently suggest that it would take an investment of several trillion dollars over the next decade to achieve even 20% of the USA’s electricity needs via wind and solar. And, the wind does not always blow, nor does the sun always shine. Backup conventional sources of electricity will need to be in place to cover shortfalls. So, why not just build nuclear plants? No carbon gases and it’s the least expensive solution. It would take solar panels covering roughly the area of New Mexico to generate the power produced from one 4000kw nuclear facility. Nah. Greens don’t like nuclear. Too risky.

Obama has been slipping in the polls since his triumphal visit to Europe and the collective pants-wetting of the MSM. Cooler heads dissected his lofty rhetoric and found a lack of substance in his speeches. Some objected to his presumptive attitude of having already won the Presidency. (Is that the Presidential Seal on the podium there Obie?) Back home he continued to tack to the middle on some issues, a not unusual approach by left-leaning candidates. However, his flip-flopping on critical issues leaves many Americans wondering what he really stands for and what he would actually do as President. This uncertainty, I think, explains his lack of success against what can only be described as a weak and confused McCain campaign. About the only thing of which we can be certain: Taxes under Mr. Obama will go up….. a lot.

I listened to BHO’s Michigan speech on energy. Of course, he proposed massive government spending to help displaced Michigan autoworkers. No surprise there. He’s got to carry Michigan to get elected. His big proposal is to take away ALL of the profits of oil companies and give every family a $1000 gift to offset high energy prices. Demonizing the oil companies has been a traditional approach of the anti-drilling Democrats. Exxon did report record profits for the quarter. However, if you actually look at the numbers you will see that they paid $10.5 billion in taxes and their profits were only 9%. Does Obama suggest we confiscate the entire profit margin of every company that makes a 9% profit? For the record… that would cover just about every major corporation in the US, most of which make substantially more than that. Insanity or socialism? Hmm… same thing.

Obama’s only mention of nuclear was to say we needed to investigate ways to make it safe and to safely store the waste. IOW, forget about it during his administration. More insanity. He did also mention encouraging fuel-efficient cars through subsidies. If inexpensive fuel-efficient cars are available, people will buy them. But first, they will have to run the old gas-guzzler that sits in the driveway into the ground since it is now worthless as a trade in. He also mentioned keeping your tires inflated as an important piece of his plan. Key the laugh track.

“Bush Lied, Thousands Died”: An update. Recently the US quietly shipped 550 tons (I say tons) of yellow cake uranium found in Iraq to Canada. Much has been made of the lack of WMDs in Iraq. If Saddam had no aspirations for nuclear weapons, why the yellow cake? This piece of news was widely ignored, as were previous discoveries of artillery shells filled with chemical weapons. No one seemed particularly concerned that Saddam had previously gassed 5000 Kurds or used chemical weapons on the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War. Never understood how liberals could claim he didn’t have them when he had previously used them. Nor do I understand the claim the Iraq war was “all about oil”. If we invaded Iraq for the oil, how come it’s now at $130 bucks a barrel? Oh, I get it. We went after Iraq’s oil so there would be a shortage and therefore high prices and Dick Cheney and his pals would all get rich. Gee, sometimes I’m so dumb.

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Filed under Congress, Drilling, Economy, Environmentalism, Global Warming, Obama, Wind Power