Earlier this week the House Appropriations Committee passed a $27 billion budget for the Department of Energy. You might think that the DOE already has enough trouble trying to spend the $39 billion it received in the federal stimulus act enacted earlier this year (that’s almost twice the DOE’s entire budget for 2007), but you’d be wrong-when it comes to taxpayer dollars, the money pit otherwise known as the DOE can’t get enough.
There are many problems with the DOE’s bloated…
President Barack Obama rode into the White House promising open and honest government. So why did his administration bully a career official at the Environmental Protection Agency into silence?
Last week, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released a 98 page report written by Alan Carlin, a 38 year veteran of the EPA, on the shaky science employed by global warming alarmists. Mr. Carlin had submitted the report to his superiors for the EPA to consider as it deliberated whether or not carbon…
There are only seven months until the global community plans to adopt a successor climate treaty to the failed Kyoto Protocol in Copenhagen, but negotiators are far apart on the most important issues-binding emissions cuts and paying for a global green energy revolution. Here’s a quick run down of the stakeholders bargaining positions.
On binding emissions reductions:
Developing countries refuse to reduce emissions. They want developed countries to commit to 40% cuts by 2020.
The European Union wants developed countries to commit…
Yesterday DeSmogBlog added 7 more entries to its Global Warming Denier Database, which is touted as “an extensive database of individuals involved in the global warming denial industry.”
I took a look at the Database, and I am outraged. Why I am I not on the list!!??
Not only am I an unabashed global warming denier*, I personally contribute almost as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as mega-emitter Al Gore, alarmist hypocrite.
I understand that I might be too small a fish to…
Over at the Center for American Progress, Brad Johnson, my sometimes interlocutor, takes issue with a recent Gallup poll for giving a “false choice between environmental protection and economic growth.” The subject of Johnson’s analysis is a report on the Gallup website that says,
“For the first time in Gallup’s 25-year history of asking Americans about the trade-off between environmental protection and economic growth, a majority of Americans say economic growth should be given the priority”
Mr. Johnson asserts that the Gallup’s poll…
A month ago, I coined the term “envoy of disappointment” to described Todd Stern, who had been chosen to become the State Department’s roving ambassador on climate change, a new position created by the Obama administration. The label reflected the reality that the U.S. will remain unwilling to put its economy at a competitive disadvantage by signing an international treaty to fight the supposed threat of climate change*, no matter what kind of “hope” and “change” Obama brings to Washington.
Recent…
Why is the Chicago Tribune again allowing its editorial page to shill for T Boone Pickens? For the second time in 5 months, the Tribune has published a self-serving opinion piece by Mr. Pickens (Our Energy Future, 16 November 2008; Solving Our Nation’s Energy Predicament, 24 February 2009).
Remove the rhetoric, and T Boone’s plan is quite simple. He wants the government to (1) force taxpayers to subsidize his wind power; (2) force taxpayers to pay for the transmission lines to…
A cap-and-trade scheme is a lobbyist’s dream. For those of you unacquainted with how these boondoggles work, it goes something like this: (1) regulators assign an emissions quota to tens of thousands of individual industrial suppliers and users of energy (because emissions are synonymous with conventional energy use, an emissions “cap” is the same as energy rationing); (2) these businesses then purchase the right to emit their allotment in the form of permits disbursed by a government-run auction; (3) these…
“A Matter of Fact,” a new report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund, challenges the Washington Post to correct George F. Will’s “Dark Green Doomsayers” column, published February 15th. The report, by CAP’s Brad Johnson, asserts that George Will made three factual errors:
Current “global sea ice levels” equals those of 1979
There hasn’t been warming in “more than a decade”
“Global cooling” joins a list of well publicized “planetary calamities that did not happen.”
Will’s column is not perfect,…
The ultra powerful enviro-lobby has a big problem: So far, it hasn’t been able to convince the Congress to enact energy-rationing policies to fight “global warming” (I am using quotation marks because it hasn’t warmed in 7 years, despite a steady increase in global greenhouse gas emissions).
Last year, a bi-partisan group of Senators spurned a cap-and-trade scheme written by California Senator Barbara Boxer’s staff because they couldn’t countenance imposing higher energy costs on their constituents at a time when gas…
I have been a steak snob ever since I apprenticed under a master butcher in Ojai Valley, California a few years back. Indeed, I’m the kind of guy who orders his steak so rare that the people dining at the table next to me get uncomfortable.
So it is with rising dread that I witness the greenies’ assault on the beef industry. Enviro-types have long hated cattlemen for treating cows like animals, but recently, they’ve found a new motive to attack…
Yesterday’s edition of the Internet news juggernaut, The Huffington Post, ran an ethanol love song written by Bob Dinneen, who is identified in his HuffPo biography as “the ethanol industry’s lead lobbyist before the Congress and Administration.”
Given that Mr. Dinneen is a professional shill, there’s no need to repeat his self-serving argument. Whatever is his case for ethanol, the bottom line is his bottom line. But it is worth saying a few things about the reality of ethanol.
Ethanol is touted as a…
When is it OK for an oil slick to coat a pristine beach?
When it’s a “natural occurrence,” of course!
My boss stayed at a hotel in Santa Barbara, and on the bed stand of his room, a pamphlet read:
“Tar found along local beaches is the result of natural seeps in the ocean that leak oil and natural gas into the Santa Barbara Channel. Like the La Brea tar pits on land, natural cracks and faults caused by ancient earthquakes allow oil…
Last week the House of Representatives passed HR 1, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which allocates $816 billion to stimulate the economy. Environmental policy figures prominently in the House’s stimulus package, including $72 in direct spending for green energy and $20 billion in clean energy tax incentives. According to the liberal Center for American Progress, this $92 billion will create 459,000 green jobs by 2010, at a cost of $196,000 per job. What a deal!
The Senate will soon begin…
The Obama/Pelosi green stimulus is taking shape as it winds two paths through the House and the Senate. Both chambers agree with President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s staff that the government should shower winners in the renewable energy industry with about $30 billion in taxpayer money.
The well paid lobbyists for wind and solar energy producers deserve a round of applause—they did a great job.
There is, however, one small kink: The House and Senate disagree on how to…
Dr. Stephen Chu, President-elect Barack Obama’s selection to head the Department of Energy, is a vocal proponent of wasting taxpayer money on research & development for alternative energy. Dr. Chu prefers to think of state r&d as an “investment,” but “waste” is the appropriate terminology.
The fundamental shortcoming of government funded R&D is government’s inability to successfully perform the development part. That’s the process by which an innovation (itself a product of the research component) is brought to the market and…
Our individual carbon footprints are a function of consumption, which, in turn, is a derivative of individual wealth. Accordingly, my carbon footprint should be small, because I am poor. As an adult, I’ve never lived in a space larger than a room, and I don’t drive.
Despite my inconspicuous consumption, I have an enormous carbon footprint. Indeed my carbon footprint is so big that it rivals that of a mega-consumer like Leonardo de Caprio, or even a super-mega consumer like Al…
This is “Green Week,” NBC’s annual effort to show you how to “green your routine.” It sounds innocuous enough, but “Green Week” is actually part of a manipulative business strategy employed by General Electric (GE), the owner of NBC.
GE is a world leader in the production of clean energy goods and services that people don’t want to buy, like compact fluorescent light bulbs. That’s why it spends millions every year to convince the Congress to pass laws like last year’s…
First, it was called “global warming.” But then it stopped warming, so alarmists changed it to “climate change.” But that’s insufficiently scary: The much more ominous sounding “financial crisis” has relegated global warming/climate change to the backburner.
Obviously, a new, more frightening label was needed. Cue Al Gore, who wrote an oped in the Sunday New York Times in which he never referred to global warming/climate change, but instead to the “climate crisis.”
Still, that’s pretty weak. After all, earth supposedly hangs in the…
Public transportation is often wearisome. Today, for example, I missed my metro train from Northern Virginia to Washington, DC because a portly tourist took ten minutes to pump a roll of nickels into the ticket machine. Yesterday, the bus I take from outside my residence to the metro station failed to arrive altogether, which left me sweating in the mid-Atlantic July heat and humidity for forty minutes. And last weekend, engineers were performing track work on both the metro lines…
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