By Joel Kotkin
The West is turning away from COP28’s green agenda
The middle and working classes are tiring of draconian climate policies
Showing posts with label green agenda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label green agenda. Show all posts
Thursday, November 30, 2023
Friday, April 20, 2012
Move Earth Day To Dec. 7 To Highlight The EPA's Victory Over Liberty
This op-ed appeared in today's Investor's Business Daily:
By BILL WILSON
Posted 04/19/2012 06:29 PM ET
Like the day Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, Dec. 7, 2009, might too be recalled by history as a day that shall live in infamy.
That was the day Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson issued the carbon endangerment finding, a rule defining carbon dioxide, a gas necessary for the existence of life itself, as a harmful pollutant under the terms of the Clean Air Act.
While Earth Day marks the April 22 celebration worldwide of the radical environmentalist agenda, Dec. 7, 2009, was the day the greens scored their most significant victory to date over free markets and, indeed, over liberty itself. As a result, it would only be fitting if Earth Day were moved to Dec. 7.
The nation has to hope a future Congress and president will undo this rule, because the alarmist decision greatly understates the impact of restricting CO2 emissions on global population sustainability and economic growth.
The fact is, the modern world depends on petroleum, gasoline, diesel, coal and natural gas to do just about everything, including getting to work, delivering goods and services, heating and cooling homes, and providing hot water.
But it goes deeper than that.
The population explosion over the past 200 years has been entirely predicated on the Industrial Revolution that was fueled in large part by increased energy output. The necessary consequence of dramatically reducing energy consumption — and the food production, medical advancement and economic expansion that depends on it — will be a commensurate, significant decrease in the human population.
Really, it all depends on just how draconian the agency's restrictions of carbon emissions are. How much of a price will be placed on CO2 emissions? If it's too high, the impact could be devastating, resulting in the means of sustaining the world's population being suddenly restricted or gradually reduced. Either way, people will die.
Ironically, in its finding, the agency claimed that it was the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and not government regulation, that "threaten(s) the public health and welfare of current and future generations" if carbon emissions were not reduced.
It promised increased heat waves, more intense hurricanes, floods, storm surges, rising sea levels, erosion, wildfires, drought and even allergens and pathogens. The EPA also predicts the displacement of indigenous populations, the eventual decrease of food production and agriculture, and the reduction of forest productivity if we do not commit to their economic suicide pact.
With predictions that dire, one expects that the finding will soon become the foundation for the EPA to incrementally regulate, restrict, and eventually prohibit every aspect of modern life. Emissions of carbon dioxide by motor vehicles and industry will just be the beginning.
Perhaps, if the people are very lucky, the air we all exhale shall remain unregulated, although given the broad nature of the finding, unless things change in Washington, D.C., there certainly would be nothing to stop regulation in that arena.
Making matters worse, in its finding the EPA disregarded the downward trend in global temperatures over the past decade despite higher CO2 emissions, as documented by APS Physics' Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.
It ignored the failed projections of increased temperatures by the International Panel on Climate Change and other proponents of the man-made global warming hypothesis. It suppressed internal dissent at the agency, as when Dr. Alan Carlin submitted comments against the EPA's finding.
The EPA even overlooked the impact of the Climategate scandal where it was revealed that global temperature data were manipulated and exaggerated by climatologists.
That alone should be cause for Congress to rescind the EPA's endangerment finding, but Congress won't act unless the people demand it.
In the end, the finding — and whatever tyrannical restrictions on energy use result from it — will ultimately prove more dangerous than man-made global warming ever could have been. As Lord Monckton wrote, "The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing."
But that does not mean the country should sit by idly now. That is why Americans for Limited Government is launching FreeMarketAmerica.org on the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day to combat this and other incursions by the radical environmentalist agenda.
The EPA and its environmental extremist cohorts are serious in their attack on our capitalist system. The question is will they be allowed to hide their agenda behind green eyeshades? For the sake of our nation, let's hope not.
By BILL WILSON
Posted 04/19/2012 06:29 PM ET
Like the day Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, Dec. 7, 2009, might too be recalled by history as a day that shall live in infamy.
That was the day Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson issued the carbon endangerment finding, a rule defining carbon dioxide, a gas necessary for the existence of life itself, as a harmful pollutant under the terms of the Clean Air Act.
While Earth Day marks the April 22 celebration worldwide of the radical environmentalist agenda, Dec. 7, 2009, was the day the greens scored their most significant victory to date over free markets and, indeed, over liberty itself. As a result, it would only be fitting if Earth Day were moved to Dec. 7.
The nation has to hope a future Congress and president will undo this rule, because the alarmist decision greatly understates the impact of restricting CO2 emissions on global population sustainability and economic growth.
The fact is, the modern world depends on petroleum, gasoline, diesel, coal and natural gas to do just about everything, including getting to work, delivering goods and services, heating and cooling homes, and providing hot water.
But it goes deeper than that.
The population explosion over the past 200 years has been entirely predicated on the Industrial Revolution that was fueled in large part by increased energy output. The necessary consequence of dramatically reducing energy consumption — and the food production, medical advancement and economic expansion that depends on it — will be a commensurate, significant decrease in the human population.
Really, it all depends on just how draconian the agency's restrictions of carbon emissions are. How much of a price will be placed on CO2 emissions? If it's too high, the impact could be devastating, resulting in the means of sustaining the world's population being suddenly restricted or gradually reduced. Either way, people will die.
Ironically, in its finding, the agency claimed that it was the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and not government regulation, that "threaten(s) the public health and welfare of current and future generations" if carbon emissions were not reduced.
It promised increased heat waves, more intense hurricanes, floods, storm surges, rising sea levels, erosion, wildfires, drought and even allergens and pathogens. The EPA also predicts the displacement of indigenous populations, the eventual decrease of food production and agriculture, and the reduction of forest productivity if we do not commit to their economic suicide pact.
With predictions that dire, one expects that the finding will soon become the foundation for the EPA to incrementally regulate, restrict, and eventually prohibit every aspect of modern life. Emissions of carbon dioxide by motor vehicles and industry will just be the beginning.
Perhaps, if the people are very lucky, the air we all exhale shall remain unregulated, although given the broad nature of the finding, unless things change in Washington, D.C., there certainly would be nothing to stop regulation in that arena.
Making matters worse, in its finding the EPA disregarded the downward trend in global temperatures over the past decade despite higher CO2 emissions, as documented by APS Physics' Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.
It ignored the failed projections of increased temperatures by the International Panel on Climate Change and other proponents of the man-made global warming hypothesis. It suppressed internal dissent at the agency, as when Dr. Alan Carlin submitted comments against the EPA's finding.
The EPA even overlooked the impact of the Climategate scandal where it was revealed that global temperature data were manipulated and exaggerated by climatologists.
That alone should be cause for Congress to rescind the EPA's endangerment finding, but Congress won't act unless the people demand it.
In the end, the finding — and whatever tyrannical restrictions on energy use result from it — will ultimately prove more dangerous than man-made global warming ever could have been. As Lord Monckton wrote, "The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing."
But that does not mean the country should sit by idly now. That is why Americans for Limited Government is launching FreeMarketAmerica.org on the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day to combat this and other incursions by the radical environmentalist agenda.
The EPA and its environmental extremist cohorts are serious in their attack on our capitalist system. The question is will they be allowed to hide their agenda behind green eyeshades? For the sake of our nation, let's hope not.
• Wilson is the president of Americans for Limited Government
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
How Green Became Obama's Albatross
A must read article from the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday:
The president is trapped by his own rhetoric amid America's energy boom.
by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Barack Obama may believe a lot of things, but he probably doesn't believe the Sierra Club is key to his re-election. His decision to nix the Keystone XL pipeline will cost him votes but he did it anyway.
We'll admit that Mr. Obama's global warming talk has often seemed to us perfunctory. Perhaps we mistook his lack of heat for a lack of conviction. He just released his first 2012 campaign ad and it's a paean to green energy. Maybe he's no less a believer than Al Gore, for all the problems this might seem to pose for what we thought we knew about our president.
For one thing, he's not given to unrealistic goals. He knows China and India are opening a new coal plant every week. He knows the huge amounts of fossil energy lying at humanity's feet won't be abandoned just because an American president says so. He can't fail to notice that Canada's oil sands won't remain undeveloped; the oil will go to the Far East.
Mr. Obama also seems enough of a free thinker to entertain the possibility at least that global warming theory may be wrong. In a telling exchange with interviewer Charlie Rose a few years ago, Al Gore was asked to describe the evidence of man's role in climate change. Each time Mr. Gore recurred to some version of a "consensus of scientists" or "the most respected scientists whose judgment I think is the best."
The truth is, the theory may be popular, but the evidence has thus far eluded the tens of billions spent on climate science. The temperature data are so noisy that they reveal no pattern connecting rising CO2 in the industrial age with temperature trends. Some say because CO2 is a "greenhouse" gas, shut up, case closed. But the known relationship between carbon and climate doesn't actually indicate a big reason to worry.
To produce worrisome scenarios, climate models must posit "feedbacks" that magnify the impact of CO2 by 300% to 500%. A cynic notices that these models became especially popular in the '90s, when measured warming exceeded what could be attributed to CO2, so new fudge was needed to preserve CO2 as the culprit.
Mr. Gore is not smart (no matter what the Nobel committee thinks) whereas Mr. Obama is smart and all these things have likely occurred to him. But he's also a political operator and an acolyte of radical theorist Saul Alinksy. He understands politics as a matter of power, and democratic politics as a matter of powerful coalitions cultivated and maintained with self-interest (aka money, money, money).
Oil, in Mr. Obama's world, is a "Republican" interest group; anything that's good for the oil industry is bad for the alternate power structure he's been trying to build with handouts and mandates for green energy.
Mr. Obama's relationship with global warming may indeed be perfunctory, but he understands the necessity of shibboleths to rationalize and justify the "investments" he's dishing out to manufacture a support base whose need for subsidies and regulatory favors jibes with the Democratic Party's need for donations. Oil sands are the "dirtiest" fossil energy, requiring great releases of CO2. To approve Keystone, then, not only would undermine his side's crucial shibboleths. It would compromise his own credibility as a leader who can be trusted to deny advantage to "Republican" industries and deliver it to "Democratic" ones.
Not for nothing did Canadian Resources Minister Joe Oliver, after Mr. Obama's Keystone decision, gripe about the influence of "billionaire socialists from the United States." Not for nothing did Mr. Obama's own supporters crow about Mr. Obama's ruling as a triumph over the industrialist Koch brothers, an allusion to whom even opens the new Obama campaign spot.
Presidents make traps for themselves: Signature initiatives cannot fail; they can only be doubled down on, as Mr. Obama was expected to do in Tuesday's State of the Union even as he also tried to make peace with the natural-gas fracking boom. Only fresh waves of rhetoric praising electric cars will suffice when taxpayers are figuring out that Obama policy has them subsidizing electric playthings for the affluent. Solyndra must be defended all the more fiercely now that solar is collapsing globally as countries repent of foolish subsidies. Green energy must be hugged to Mr. Obama's breast all the more tightly as the shale revolution renders hopeless any chance of wind and solar becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels.
Mr. Obama is engaged in a "long game," says Andrew Sullivan, writing in Newsweek, making a point that no one doubted. But there's a difference between playing the long game and playing it well. The Obama long game is exactly how green energy metamorphosed from a policy notion into a political strategy and then into a dead weight his campaign must lug to November.
Still, let us admire the high-rolling political risk Mr. Obama takes in spurning affordable, strategically convenient energy from Canada. That risk includes, between now and Election Day, looking like a chump if oil prices surge because of the world's vulnerability to the narrowness of the Strait of Hormuz.
The president is trapped by his own rhetoric amid America's energy boom.
by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Barack Obama may believe a lot of things, but he probably doesn't believe the Sierra Club is key to his re-election. His decision to nix the Keystone XL pipeline will cost him votes but he did it anyway.
We'll admit that Mr. Obama's global warming talk has often seemed to us perfunctory. Perhaps we mistook his lack of heat for a lack of conviction. He just released his first 2012 campaign ad and it's a paean to green energy. Maybe he's no less a believer than Al Gore, for all the problems this might seem to pose for what we thought we knew about our president.
For one thing, he's not given to unrealistic goals. He knows China and India are opening a new coal plant every week. He knows the huge amounts of fossil energy lying at humanity's feet won't be abandoned just because an American president says so. He can't fail to notice that Canada's oil sands won't remain undeveloped; the oil will go to the Far East.
Mr. Obama also seems enough of a free thinker to entertain the possibility at least that global warming theory may be wrong. In a telling exchange with interviewer Charlie Rose a few years ago, Al Gore was asked to describe the evidence of man's role in climate change. Each time Mr. Gore recurred to some version of a "consensus of scientists" or "the most respected scientists whose judgment I think is the best."
The truth is, the theory may be popular, but the evidence has thus far eluded the tens of billions spent on climate science. The temperature data are so noisy that they reveal no pattern connecting rising CO2 in the industrial age with temperature trends. Some say because CO2 is a "greenhouse" gas, shut up, case closed. But the known relationship between carbon and climate doesn't actually indicate a big reason to worry.
To produce worrisome scenarios, climate models must posit "feedbacks" that magnify the impact of CO2 by 300% to 500%. A cynic notices that these models became especially popular in the '90s, when measured warming exceeded what could be attributed to CO2, so new fudge was needed to preserve CO2 as the culprit.
Mr. Gore is not smart (no matter what the Nobel committee thinks) whereas Mr. Obama is smart and all these things have likely occurred to him. But he's also a political operator and an acolyte of radical theorist Saul Alinksy. He understands politics as a matter of power, and democratic politics as a matter of powerful coalitions cultivated and maintained with self-interest (aka money, money, money).
Oil, in Mr. Obama's world, is a "Republican" interest group; anything that's good for the oil industry is bad for the alternate power structure he's been trying to build with handouts and mandates for green energy.
Mr. Obama's relationship with global warming may indeed be perfunctory, but he understands the necessity of shibboleths to rationalize and justify the "investments" he's dishing out to manufacture a support base whose need for subsidies and regulatory favors jibes with the Democratic Party's need for donations. Oil sands are the "dirtiest" fossil energy, requiring great releases of CO2. To approve Keystone, then, not only would undermine his side's crucial shibboleths. It would compromise his own credibility as a leader who can be trusted to deny advantage to "Republican" industries and deliver it to "Democratic" ones.
Not for nothing did Canadian Resources Minister Joe Oliver, after Mr. Obama's Keystone decision, gripe about the influence of "billionaire socialists from the United States." Not for nothing did Mr. Obama's own supporters crow about Mr. Obama's ruling as a triumph over the industrialist Koch brothers, an allusion to whom even opens the new Obama campaign spot.
Presidents make traps for themselves: Signature initiatives cannot fail; they can only be doubled down on, as Mr. Obama was expected to do in Tuesday's State of the Union even as he also tried to make peace with the natural-gas fracking boom. Only fresh waves of rhetoric praising electric cars will suffice when taxpayers are figuring out that Obama policy has them subsidizing electric playthings for the affluent. Solyndra must be defended all the more fiercely now that solar is collapsing globally as countries repent of foolish subsidies. Green energy must be hugged to Mr. Obama's breast all the more tightly as the shale revolution renders hopeless any chance of wind and solar becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels.
Mr. Obama is engaged in a "long game," says Andrew Sullivan, writing in Newsweek, making a point that no one doubted. But there's a difference between playing the long game and playing it well. The Obama long game is exactly how green energy metamorphosed from a policy notion into a political strategy and then into a dead weight his campaign must lug to November.
Still, let us admire the high-rolling political risk Mr. Obama takes in spurning affordable, strategically convenient energy from Canada. That risk includes, between now and Election Day, looking like a chump if oil prices surge because of the world's vulnerability to the narrowness of the Strait of Hormuz.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Thursday, December 22, 2011
WSJ: Lisa Jackson's Power Play
Harming the economy, degrading the U.S. grid: another day at the EPA.
At an unusual gala ceremony on the release of a major new Environmental Protection Agency rule yesterday, chief Lisa Jackson called it “historic” and “a great victory.” And she’s right: The rule may be the most expensive the agency has ever issued, and it represents the triumph of the Obama Administration’s green agenda over economic growth and job creation. Congratulations.
The so-called utility rule requires power plants to install “maximum achievable control technology” to reduce mercury emissions and other trace gases. But the true goal of the rule’s 1,117 pages is to harm coal-fired power plants and force large parts of the fleet—the U.S. power system workhorse—to shut down in the name of climate change. The EPA figures the rule will cost $9.6 billion, which is a gross, deliberate underestimate.
In return Ms. Jackson says the public will get billions of dollars of health benefits like less asthma if not a cure for cancer. Those credulous enough to believe her should understand that the total benefits of mercury reduction amount to all of $6 million. That’s total present value, not benefits per year—oh, and that’s an -illion with an “m,” which is not normally how things work out in President Obama’s Washington.
The rest of the purported benefits—to be precise, 99.99%—come by double-counting pollution reductions like soot that the EPA regulates through separate programs and therefore most will happen anyway. Using such “co-benefits” is an abuse of the cost-benefit process and shows that Cass Sunstein’s team at the White House regulatory office—many of whom opposed the rule—got steamrolled.
As baseload coal power is retired or idled, the reliability of the electrical grid will be compromised, as every neutral analyst expects. Some utilities like Calpine Corp. and PSEG have claimed in these pages that the reliability concerns are overblown, but the Alfred E. Newman crowd has a vested interest in profiting from the higher wholesale electricity clearing prices that the EPA wants to cause.
Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is charged with protecting reliability, abnegated its statutory responsibilities as the rule was being written.
One FERC economist wrote in a March email that “I don’t think there is any value in continuing to engage EPA on the issues. EPA has indicated that these are their assumptions and have made it clear that are not changed [sic] anything on reliability . . . [EPA] does not directly answer anything associated with local reliability.” The EPA repeatedly told Congress that it had “very frequent substantive contact and consultation with FERC.”
The EPA also took the extraordinary step of issuing a pre-emptive “enforcement memorandum,” which is typically issued only after the EPA determines its rules are being broken. The memo tells utilities that they must admit to violating clean air laws if they can’t retrofit their plants within the EPA’s timeframe at any cost or if shutting down a plant will lead to regional blackouts. Such legal admissions force companies into a de facto EPA receivership and expose them to lawsuits and other liabilities.
Original column here.
At an unusual gala ceremony on the release of a major new Environmental Protection Agency rule yesterday, chief Lisa Jackson called it “historic” and “a great victory.” And she’s right: The rule may be the most expensive the agency has ever issued, and it represents the triumph of the Obama Administration’s green agenda over economic growth and job creation. Congratulations.
The so-called utility rule requires power plants to install “maximum achievable control technology” to reduce mercury emissions and other trace gases. But the true goal of the rule’s 1,117 pages is to harm coal-fired power plants and force large parts of the fleet—the U.S. power system workhorse—to shut down in the name of climate change. The EPA figures the rule will cost $9.6 billion, which is a gross, deliberate underestimate.
In return Ms. Jackson says the public will get billions of dollars of health benefits like less asthma if not a cure for cancer. Those credulous enough to believe her should understand that the total benefits of mercury reduction amount to all of $6 million. That’s total present value, not benefits per year—oh, and that’s an -illion with an “m,” which is not normally how things work out in President Obama’s Washington.
The rest of the purported benefits—to be precise, 99.99%—come by double-counting pollution reductions like soot that the EPA regulates through separate programs and therefore most will happen anyway. Using such “co-benefits” is an abuse of the cost-benefit process and shows that Cass Sunstein’s team at the White House regulatory office—many of whom opposed the rule—got steamrolled.
As baseload coal power is retired or idled, the reliability of the electrical grid will be compromised, as every neutral analyst expects. Some utilities like Calpine Corp. and PSEG have claimed in these pages that the reliability concerns are overblown, but the Alfred E. Newman crowd has a vested interest in profiting from the higher wholesale electricity clearing prices that the EPA wants to cause.
Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is charged with protecting reliability, abnegated its statutory responsibilities as the rule was being written.
One FERC economist wrote in a March email that “I don’t think there is any value in continuing to engage EPA on the issues. EPA has indicated that these are their assumptions and have made it clear that are not changed [sic] anything on reliability . . . [EPA] does not directly answer anything associated with local reliability.” The EPA repeatedly told Congress that it had “very frequent substantive contact and consultation with FERC.”
The EPA also took the extraordinary step of issuing a pre-emptive “enforcement memorandum,” which is typically issued only after the EPA determines its rules are being broken. The memo tells utilities that they must admit to violating clean air laws if they can’t retrofit their plants within the EPA’s timeframe at any cost or if shutting down a plant will lead to regional blackouts. Such legal admissions force companies into a de facto EPA receivership and expose them to lawsuits and other liabilities.
Original column here.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Today's Reading
The Green Agenda is Green With Envy
Senator Inhofe Dances On the Climate Change Grave (Includes Video)
A farewell to alarms.
Senator Inhofe Dances On the Climate Change Grave (Includes Video)
A farewell to alarms.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Making Colorado less competitive
The Colorado Renewable Energy Standard requires that investor-owned power companies must produce 30 percent of their power from "renewable energy" in fewer than nine years. Not to be outdone, some "clean energy" advocates assert Boulder can have 80 percent renewable by 2025. Trying to legislate such fantasies has real world consequences: Renewable energy is expensive -- more than double the cost of using natural gas or coal. It is available only intermittently -- Germany, an aggressive wind energy jurisdiction, reports a capacity utilization rate of just 15.5 percent during 2010. Making energy more expensive and less reliable will hurt Colorado`s economy.
Read the rest of the column here.
Read the rest of the column here.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Thursday, October 7, 2010
China, the rare earth metals crisis & Obama’s green agenda
By Michelle Malkin
President Obama is pushing solar panels and other green technology pet projects as a way to create jobs and promote energy independence.
What his eco-radical bureaucrats won’t mention is that they are simply trading one type of foreign dependence for another: From Saudi oil…to Chinese rare earth metals.
President Obama is pushing solar panels and other green technology pet projects as a way to create jobs and promote energy independence.
What his eco-radical bureaucrats won’t mention is that they are simply trading one type of foreign dependence for another: From Saudi oil…to Chinese rare earth metals.
Read the rest of the column here.
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