Thomas L. Friedman’s op-ed in the NYT today could have been written by Paul Krugman. And that’s not a compliment.
Friedman, like Krugman, waxes hysterical about those who are opposing the cap-and-trade energy bill - those “deniers.” And, also like Krugman, he sets up those opponents as straw men that he can readily knock down. In today’s article, Friedman worries about U.S. dependence on foreign oil supplied by ”petro-dictators” and he fears ever-rising prices for increasingly scarce fossil fuels.
So either the opponents…
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Oh dear! Staunch trade proponent Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute is in bed with radical trade opponent Lori Wallach of Public Citizen in a joint op-ed in the Washington Post today. It seems Bergsten thinks there’s no chance of a legislative cap on CO2 emissions unless the U.S. does something to address the competitiveness issues, and he’s against “border tax adjustments” because of its potentially devastating effect on the world trading system.
That’s the good part. The bad part is…
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Uh-oh. Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana) is raising the stakes on a U.S. climate bill by endorsing the idea of some sort of tariff on goods from countries that haven’t taken steps to suppress fossil fuel use. According to Reuters, Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, yesterday said:
“We must push our trading partners to do their part to curb harmful emissions and we must devise a border measure, consistent with our international obligations, to prevent the carbon leakage that would occur…
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Unemployment is now higher in the U.S. than in Europe, reports the Washington Post. “The official U.S. unemployment rate, reported last Friday, now stands at 10.2 percent,” compared to “9.7 percent” in Europe. This is the highest rate in more than 26 years, and marks a huge change from the recent past, in which unemployment was double the American rate in much of Europe, such as in France.
Unemployment is at 10 percent in France, which refused to adopt a U.S.-style stimulus…
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by Fred Smith
November 09, 2009 @ 5:58 pm
Warren Buffet, one of the most respected investors in America, recently purchased Burlington Northern, one of the nation’s largest railroads with some 32,000 miles of track. BN like almost all railroads carries coal - lots of it from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming to the nation’s electrical power plants. But President Obama and his Green allies are trying to end the use of coal in America. If they succeed, the rail sector will collapse.
Buffet, according to the Wall Street…
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In recent testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, energy secretary Steven Chu makes a convoluted case for S. 1733, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, a.k.a. the Kerry-Boxer cap-and-trade bill.
Chu argues roughly as follows. Global investment in wind turbines and solar panels could reach $3.6 trillion by 2030. China is investing heavily. If we don’t ramp up our investment in “clean tech” products, we’ll be left behind, become increasingly dependent on foreign producers, and China will eat our…
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Jonathan Pershing, head of the U.S. delegation at the UN climate talks in Barcelona, says China should cut its CO2 emissions 50% by 2050.
Reuters reports:
BARCELONA, Spain, Nov 5 (Reuters) - China should roughly halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to keep the world on a safe climate path, the head of the U.S. delegation at U.N. climate talks in Barcelona said on Thursday.
Leading industrialised countries say that the world must halve greenhouse gases by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of…
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It’s been a year since the president was elected, and he’s already piled up an impressive list of lies and broken promises.
The broken promises include his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, and his promise not to sign bills without first giving the public five days of notice.
The Congressional Budget Office says that Obama’s proposed budgets will explode the national debt through massive spending increases, increasing the already large deficits…
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Some people want to cure malaria by reducing carbon emissions. Others want to cure it with mosquito nets, better health care and sanitation. Which is a more effective use of our limited resources? The answer is important; malaria kills about one million people every year. Getting it wrong costs lives.
According to Bjørn Lomborg, “For the money it takes to save one life with carbon cuts, smarter policies could save 78,000 lives. ”
Let’s pursue those smarter policies, then.
…
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Two EPA lawyers criticized the cap-and-trade energy bill passed by the House as a scam, noting in The Washington Post that it will be manipulated to profit politically connected corporations and reward certain kinds of pollution, while not cutting greenhouse gas emissions. A similar scheme enacted in Europe in the name of fighting global warming enriched polluters, while not reducing emissions, which actually rose faster in most of Europe than in the U.S.
The Washington Examiner explains how the bill will lead to deforestation, and thus increase greenhouse gas…
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I pay my power bill online, so whenever I get something from Dominion Virginia Power over snail mail it catches my attention. Usually, it’s some notice about utility work nearby. However, the mailing I got today was unusual. It was an appeal to sign up for Dominion’s Green Power initiative.
The scheme appears simple enough. The mailer says, “When you sign up for Dominion Green Power, you add a little extra to your monthly bill which Dominion will use to purchase…
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Revised 10/28/09
At the first Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on S. 1733, the Kerry-Boxer “Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act,” Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu explained the economic rationale for adopting a Kyoto-style cap-and-trade program.
His argument, in a nutshell, goes like this:
Reducing emissions globally will require a massive investment in “clean technologies” — an estimated $2.1 trillion in wind turbines and $1.5 trillion in solar voltaic panels by 2030. These investments will create many green jobs.
“The only question is…
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Today, on MasterResource.Org, the free-market energy blog, I examine the Kerry-Boxer bill’s not-so-hidden fangs.
Like its House companion bill, Waxman-Markey, Title VII, Part A of Kerry-Boxer contains language that will:
encourage CO2 tort litigation against businesses smaller than those subject to the cap-and-trade program, and
pressure policymakers to “move the goal posts” (amend the legislation to tighten the caps).
Bottom Line: The costs of climate legislation may greatly exceed the most pessimistic estimates of recent modeling studies. Those looking for “regulatory certainty”…
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A few years ago, environmental guru, Merry Prankster, and Whole Earth Catalog author Stewart Brand caused a minor stir with an article he wrote in the MIT publication, Technology Review. Brand, who was an early advocate of the “back to the land” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, had done some re-thinking, and concluded that environmentalist opposition to things like urbanization, population growth, biotechnology, and nuclear power generation, was wrong and needed to change.
Now, Brand has written a new book, called Whole Earth Discipline:…
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A quick point to add to Fran Smith’s excellent post on Sweden’s experiment in labeling food and menus for their carbon footprints: don’t read too much into the labels.
The New York Times notes that “the emissions impact of, say, a carrot, can vary by a factor of 10, depending how and where it is grown.” With that much imprecision built in, if the labels change consumer behavior as much as supporters hope, it’s entirely possible that eco-concsious diets could result in more…
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Next week, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold three hearings on S. 1733, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act,” also known as Kerry-Boxer after its co-sponsors Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA). Kerry-Boxer is the Senate companion bill to H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), also known as Waxman-Markey after its co-sponsors Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA).
Part A of Title VII of Kerry-Boxer sets forth the emission reduction targets…
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A new poll shows a sharp decline over the last year in the percentage of Americans who see solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. According to the survey by the highly-reputable Pew Research Center, while 44% of respondents saw global warming as a very serious problem in April 2008, that’s down to just 35% now.
Of course, all things are relative. With the economy and unemployment such as it is, despite that miraculous stimulus bill, you can see how a problem…
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Bjørn Lomborg, head of the Copenhagen Consensus, brings some much-needed common sense to the global warming debate. Reporting from Vanuatu, he finds that many of the locals haven’t even heard of global warming.
Torethy Frank is one of them. She has other priorities, such as escaping crushing poverty: “Torethy and her family of six live in a small house made of concrete and brick with no running water. As a toilet, they use a hole dug in the ground. They have no…
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Senators Kit Bond (R-MO) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) have just released a report, Climate Change Legislation: A $3.6 Trillion Gas Tax, which estimates how much additional pain at the pump the Waxman-Markey would inflict on U.S. consumers.
The Waxman-Markey bill (like its Senate companion, Kerry-Boxer) aims to cap U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from 2012 to 2050. Bond and Hutchison estimate the bill’s impacts on motor fuel prices during 2015 to 2050. Of course, their study depends on assumptions regarding population growth, GDP growth,…
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“Climate change is a threat multiplier” is the new trendy rationale for Kyoto-style energy rationing. One hears little these days about Al Gore’s nightmare vision of death and destruction from ever more powerful and frequent hurricanes, catastrophic sea-level rise, or a warming-induced climate shift into a new ice age. This story line is too implausible for most grownups to swallow or patronize, no matter how desperate they are to look green.
The new, more ‘nuanced’ rationale for energy rationing is that global warming will…
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