America's Green Enemies

By Alan Caruba

It was good news that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the nation’s first nuclear power plants on February 9th, clearing the way for the construction of two reactors by Southern Company at its Plant Vogtle site near Atlanta, Georgia. The bad news is that these are the first new nuclear plants since 1978!

In a nation with a growing population and increasing need for electricity to power homes and businesses, it is nothing less than insane to not include nuclear energy in the mix of providers. Environmentalists immediately attacked the announcement using the usual scare campaigns.

Equally insane is the failure to provide the means to safely store the radioactive materials that result. Highly contested by environmentalists, the Nevada-based Yucca Mountain deep geological repository storage facility for spent reactor fuel was cancelled in 2009. Nevada’s Senator Harry Reid, Majority Leader in the Senate, played a major role in this disgraceful decision. The Obama administration terminated funding for the development of the site in 2011, leaving the nation with no long-term storage site.

In a similar fashion, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has waged a long war on the provision of energy; most recently with the imposition of its Utility MACT rule on plant carbon dioxide (CO2) and mercury emissions, neither of which pose any threat. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, decried the rule as one “intended to undermine the viability of coal, one of our country’s most abundant and reliable energy sources.”

Despite having spent billions to meet the demand for upgrades of the technology to trap such emissions, coal-fired plants all over the nation are in the process of being closed as a result of the MACT rule. These “greenhouse gas” rules are baseless insofar as CO2 is not a pollutant and is vital to the growth of all vegetation on the planet. There is no proof that minor mercury emissions represent any threat to public health.

The EPA use of bogus “computer models” to support wild health claims argues for an end to this agency and the return of its responsibilities to state environmental agencies.

In January, the American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), the leading authority, warned that “environmental regulations are shown to be the number one risk to reliability over the next one to five years.”

The Institute for Energy Research has stated that “Beyond the 38 gigawatts of electricity capacity that has already been announced to retire, NERC estimates that another 36 to 59 gigawatts of capacity will come off-line by 2018, depending on the ‘scope and timing’ of EPA regulations. Together, nearly a quarter of our coal-fired capacity could be off-line by 2018, marking the first time in energy history that installed coal-fired capacity has declined.”

This is a threat to the viability and security of a nation that sits atop the largest deposits of coal in the world! It is a nation in which coal provides 50% of its electricity.

In a similar fashion, environmentalists, after a long propaganda war against coal, have launched an equally massive campaign against natural gas, attacking the use of “fracking”, a technology that has been safely used for the last fifty years or more to access equally vast reserves of natural gas.

Likewise the cost of automobiles has been systematically driven up by the wholly false EPA assertion that their CO2 emissions represent a threat to clean air. The imposition of a mandate to mix gasoline with ethanol has resulted in greater CO2 emissions while, at the same time, reducing the mileage of cars. In addition, the use of food crops like corn for the production of ethanol, have driven up food prices.

Anyone who has lost electricity due to a blizzard or a hurricane knows how totally dependent the nation is on reliable and affordable electricity, and knows how totally dependent they are on is provision.

The simple fact is that the present and prior administration’s EPA, the Department of Transportation, and others have been lying to Congress and the American public for years regarding their claims about air pollution and energy provision. The Interior Department just put uranium-rich acres of land off-limits to mining.

Environmental organizations and special interest groups like the American lung Association are a fifth column of enemies within the nation.

The global warming hoax—now called climate change—is on its last legs. Nations around the world that have wasted billions on the claims made for “renewable” energy, solar and wind, are pulling back from further support. The “science” behind these claims has been totally and utterly refuted.

Even the United Nations, the source of the global warming hoax, is now switching its debased claims to a new hoax based on so-called endangered species.

The loss of tens of thousands of jobs in the energy and transportation sectors, as well as energy-intensive industries, is incalculable. EPA demands and mandates are deliberately undermining the nation’s economy.

The lives and safety of Americans are under attack by environmental organizations and, if they are successful, the only outcome would be the deaths of millions here and around the world from hunger and the lack of power to turn on the lights, heat and cool homes, and power industries.

The planet is not running out of oil, coal, or natural gas. It can use more nuclear power, not less.

We are witnessing an environmental attack on American energy and, ultimately, on America.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Green Pillage and Plunder

By Alan Caruba

To understand what is behind all the talk, the legislation, the protests in support of “global warming”, now commonly called “climate change”, you have to understand the millions, if not billions, at stake for the liars who dreamed up this greatest hoax of the modern era.

The basics:

There is no dramatic warming of the Earth. There never was though it has passed through periods of warming. The most recent mini-ice age lasted from around 1300 and ended around 1850; the Earth began to warm again to normal levels. Warming and cooling cycles, like Ice Ages, are well documented and warm is better because it produces greater crop yields, increased forest growth, whereas cooling endangers life.

The Earth entered a normal cooling cycle around 1998 and is still in that cycle. The Earth is at the end of an interglacial period between Ice Ages and it will enter a new one. The Earth is not heating up. It will get very cold and stay that way for thousands of years.

During the last Ice Age more than a third of the Earth was covered in ice and the air had less, not more, carbon dioxide (CO2). Carbon dioxide correlates with periods of warmth and the most recent such period saw the rise of human civilization and expansion of the human population during the current interglacial period.

Carbon dioxide plays no role whatever in “heating up” the Earth. In terms of the Earth’s atmosphere, it is a miniscule 0.038%. The rest is mostly water vapor. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is equivalent to one penny out of $100.00.

Volcanic eruptions produce more CO2 than human-related activity and there are at least twenty such eruptions from active volcanoes occurring as you read this.

If you shut down all the power plants, all the factories, all the bakeries, all commerce, the only result would be the destruction of the economy. Similarly, if you thwarted all coal, natural gas, and oil production, the agenda of the current administration, the only effect would be to render millions without jobs and without the capacity to turn on the lights or heat their homes.

Carbon dioxide is vital to all life on Earth because no vegetation can exist without it.

The UN and Green Organizations:

The global warming hoax is the creation of the United Nations and, in particular, its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the agency responsible for the Kyoto Protocols of December 11, 1997 intended to reduce CO2 production worldwide. What purpose is served by this? One answer is the weakening of the economies of industrialized nations. It is a little known fact that both China and India were exempt from the Protocols.

It has taken some nations a while to wake up to the suicidal effects of the IPCC program. In early November, Canada slashed the budget of its environmental program; in particular the ozone monitoring costs that were the result of the Montreal Protocol. If the U.S. was to follow suit, the savings would be billions. The EPA and NOAA budgets for 2010 were $10.3 billion and $5.5 billion dollars, respectively.

As recently as November 1st, the IPCC was claiming that weather events from the October snowstorm that hit northeastern U.S. and the record floods in Thailand were the result of—you guess it—global warming. It’s latest report asserts that it is “virtually certain” that the world would have more extreme spells of heat and fewer of cold. Thus, by this warped logic, warming causes blizzards.

The perpetrators of the “climate models” produced by the IPCC over the years were exposed in 2009 in what has since been called “Climategate.” Emails between them revealed the deliberate deception. It is estimated that the U.S. has spent over $50 billion on “climate research” since the late 1990s.

Support for the global warming hoax came from science journals and the mainstream media. The IPCC received a Nobel Prize. Al Gore’s documentary on global warming received an Oscars. It was all a lie, but the sale of bogus “carbon credits” reaped millions for those engaged until the exchanges offering them were forced to close their doors.

Much of the regulation being forced upon the American economy by the Environmental Protection Agency is predicated on the “control” of carbon dioxide and is directed at plants that generate fifty percent of all the electricity used daily and coal mines that provide that energy.

On November 8th, the Obama administration announced its intention to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants. On November 10th, it announced a delay in the authorization of a new oil pipeline from Canada. Environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth were jubilant despite the estimated 20,000 jobs that were lost from the delay. There are some 50,000 pipelines in the U.S. that provide the energy we use daily.

We are witnessing the strangulation of the American economy by the United Nations, the Obama administration, U.S. and international environmental organizations, and much of the mainstream media that continues to report on “greenhouse gas emissions.”

We are long since passed the time for U.S. withdrawal from the UN and the shutdown of the EPA. Every day that passes is a nail in the nation’s coffin.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Great Renewable Energy Scam Continues

By Alan Caruba

I recently received a news release from The Council of State Governments headlined “New Report: Renewable Energy Worth Investment for Southern States” that touted “job creation, environment and public health” as benefits. It was filled with lies.

I had never heard of the CSG before, but a visit to its website was notable for its lack of specific information about its funding, its affiliates, and its programs, though it does mention three Governors on its "leadership" page out of only four leaders. They were from Montana, Puerto Rico, and Alaska. Other than its Washington, DC office, it did not specifically identify its regional offices. It does have an extensive staff and it appears to be yet another lobbying organization, one of thousands in the nation’s capitol.

“Atlanta—Renewable energy has the long-term potential to leader to greater energy independence for the United States, but Southern states are looking to that sector for job creation, as well as environmental and public health reasons. Those states also believe renewable fuels have the potential to produce lower utility rates for consumers.” Not one southern governor was cited as supporting renewable energy.

The United States does have the capacity to become more energy independent because it is home to vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. The policy of the Obama administration has been to attack existing coal-fired utilities and coal producers despite the fact that it accounts for fifty percent of all electricity generated. As for oil, literally billions of barrels remain untapped and unused because successive administrations have limited or banned access to it.

Renewable energy for the pupose of this discussion will be wind and solar power. They provides less than three percent of the electricity American consumers use daily. In December 2010, an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, “The Wind Subsidy Bubble”, noted that the industry received a $3 billion grant from the Obama administration despite or because the American Wind Energy Association is on record saying that without the extension of the federal 1603 investment credit, the outlook for the wind industry was grim and had the potential for the loss of 20,000 jobs, one quarter of the industry’s total.

“According to an analysis by Chris Horner, an energy expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the stimulus bill’s subsidies for renewable energy cost taxpayers about $475,000 for every job created.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an environmental lawyer and president of the environmental group, Water-keeper Alliance, in a July Wall Street Journal commentary, argued against a huge wind power project, Cape Wind. “The price of Cape Wind power comes in at well over $1 billion above market averages” based on information filed by Cape Wind regarding its contract with National Grid, the utility company that has agreed to buy half its power. “The fact is this project makes no sense for ratepayers and taxpayers. Vastly cheaper forms of energy, and not just wind, are now available.”

It may come as a surprise that environment groups who one might think would favor electricity generation from the wind and sun have rejected specific projects such as Brightsource Energy’s massive Invanpah Solar Generating System in the Mojave Desert that would cover 5.6 square miles of desert to produce 370 megawatts of energy, about the same as a small coal-fired plant. “It would destroy the entire Mojave Desert ecosystem said the southern California group called the Wildlands Conservancy.

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, of roughly 300 projects delayed or killed over the last few years, 65 were for renewables. The assault on the “dirty” energy, coal, continues unabated by environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club.

Wind and solar projects are hugely expensive, require massive taxpayer subsidies, while producing few real jobs. They are astonishingly stupid and unreliable way to generate electricity when one considers that wind power, for example, requires a constant backup supply of electricity from traditional generating facilities.

To add insult to injury, virtually all of the components of wind and solar energy production are manufactured in China where U.S. companies have exported the jobs involved, focusing on assembling the parts instead.

The Institute for Energy Research found that electricity prices are almost 40% higher in states with mandates for their use.

In July, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie pulled out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a consortium that would have required renewable energy use for the provision of electricity. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Corbett has been aggressively de-emphasizing renewable energy use and energy conservation. He has shut down the state department of environmental protection’s office of energy and technology development.

Support for “green energy” and “green jobs” by the Obama administration is just one more way to further bankrupt the nation. If its attacks on traditional generating facilities continue, America will become a third-world nation with rolling blackouts and brownouts.

Like everything else with the word “green” attached to it, renewable energy is just another massive scam like the all the lies that kept global warming going until that enormous and costly hoax was finally discredited.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

It Doesn't Matter What Obama Says About the Oil Spill

By Alan Caruba

It doesn’t matter what President Obama says from the Oval Office Tuesday evening. He can lay out all manner of things that BP must do in the wake of what is shaping up to be a major ecological disaster, but he and Congress are also working to put a cap on BP’s financial liability. Both know that this leak will ultimately cost upwards of a trillion dollars or more to ameliorate.

It’s not that BP isn’t liable for the leak, but rather that it had the great, good fortune to tap what in the oil industry are called “elephants”, discoveries of huge multi-million barrel reserves. It had the bad fortune to have the huge rig blow up and a leak so far down only robots can attempt to shut it off.

What one rarely hears about are the “dry” holes that oil companies drill. They don’t make news, but they spell disaster for an oil company that does it too many times. As Tom Bower says in his timely new book, “Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century”, “In recent years, dry holes had wrecked major oil companies. The skeletons of Gulf, Texaco, Arco and other past icons mercilessly testified that only the fittest and bravest survived.”

The amount of investment in a single hole is significant. When that hole is in deep water, a billion dollars can be spent at a rate of hundreds of thousands a day to rent a rig. Naturally, the oil companies use every form of technology available to geologists to decide where to drill, but even then it is a high risk gamble.

To cite one BP gamble, when in 1969 Arco drilled in Alaska it only found non-commercial gas. BP geologist, Jim Spence, concluded the oil was closer to the rim of a potential reservoir instead of its “sweet spot.” The result saved BP. The company then put its chips on the Gulf of Mexico. It became the largest acreage-holder and owned a third of all the oil discovered there.

All the major oil companies knew that the Gulf of Mexico represented a treasure of oil, but it was BP that rolled the dice the most. In 2005, one deep water rig called Thunder Horse was nearly ready when Hurricane Dennis hit the Gulf and it had to be abandoned. When the engineers returned, they found flaws in some of its valves. In hindsight, it foretold the problems encountered by the Deepwater Horizon.

The irony was that BP’s latest discovery was the mother lode of oil reservoirs. Vladimir Kutcherov is a Russian specialist in the theory of the abiogenic deep origin of oil, the view that it is not created from the activity of living organisms; that oil is the result of dead dinosaurs.

Oil, it would appear, is created deep within the Earth. Kutcherov believes that BP drilled into “a migration channel”, a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of the planet migrate to the crust.

The other irony is that the BP disaster should put an end to the widely disseminated “peak oil” theory that says the Earth is running out of oil. If Kutcherov is right—and I think he is—that means the “hole” that President Obama and BP wants “plugged” is comparable to trying to plug a volcano. The effort could take months, if not years.

That is why whatever President Obama tells Americans and the rest of the world is probably going to be something far less than the truth. Obama faces some fearful political consequences no matter what he says. BP is heavily invested in America. It employs several thousand. It pays huge royalties. Many British pensioners depend on its dividends as do other investors.

The unions to which Obama owes much for his election are resistant to allowing non-union workers to help protect against the growing spill affecting Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The spill also threatens to reveal how closely associated BP was with many leading environmental organizations.

As F. William Engdahl, the author of “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, points out in a June 11th Global Research commentary, “”The deafening silence of leading green or ecology organizations such as Greenpeace, Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club and others may well be tied to a money trail that leads right back to the oil industry, notably to BP.”

“Leading environmental organizations have gotten significant financial payoffs in recent years from BP in order that the oil company could remake itself with an ‘environmentally friendly face’, as in ‘beyond petroleum’, the company’s new branding.”

Among those groups have been the Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, the Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, and Audubon.

The drive to drill in deep waters off shore was in part driven by the resistance by environmental organizations to doing so far more safely on land. The refusal to allow drilling in Alaska’s ANWR is a glaring example. The fact that oil companies began decades ago to look far afield of the U.S. and its forbidden offshore reserves of oil is another.

A president who has already managed to destroy whatever popularity he had when he took office a scant year and a half ago is not likely to survive the BP disaster no matter what he says or does.

All Americans must be especially watchful for an effort by Obama to impose what was called “Cap-and-Trade”, then called a “climate” bill, and now is touted as a “Jobs” bill. It will require a major effort to thwart the Senate from signing yet another suicidal piece of legislation that would impose huge taxes on all energy use.

As always, Mother Nature will have the final word.

© Alan Caruba, 2010