Obama's Eco-Lies

Editor's Note: All this week in the run-up to Earth Day, this blog will post commentaries exposing environmentalism as the totalitarian ideology it has always been.

By Alan Caruba

As the nation and the world closes in on Earth Day, April 22nd, a tsunami of Green propaganda will overwhelm us with all the usual lies about global warming—now called climate change—and calls to reduce the use of all fossil fuels in order to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions.

This Big Lie ignores the fact that there is no relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) and the climate. CO2 reacts to climate change. It does not drive it. The Big Lie ignores the fact that the Earth has been cooling for fourteen years.

The past three and a half years of the having Barack Obama as President have been filled with constant crisis, not the least of which was the nation’s financial crisis which he constantly reminds us he “inherited.” He has not, however, solved it with proven ways to put millions back to work and turn around a stagnant economy.

Instead he devoted his best efforts to a takeover of one-sixth of the nation’s economy, the healthcare industry. His administration has waged a steady war on access to energy reserves vital to the nation’s economy. The result of these policies are being felt at the gas pump as prices rise to historic highs while billions of barrels of oil in the U.S. remain underground.

His devotion to all the eco-lies was seen in the millions wasted on “green jobs” with his failed “stimulus” and loans to “green industries”, primarily wind and solar power. Other schemes included high-speed trains where none are needed or wanted. To this day Amtrak has never made a profit. And electric cars remain impractical and unaffordable.

His environmental commitment was perhaps best seen and heard when Obama attended a United Nations Conference of Parties in Copenhagen in March 2010. His speech to the delegates and world press contained all the lies associated with “climate change” and the failed policies he was pursuing two years ago and earlier.

“We come together here in Copenhagen because climate change poses a grave and growing danger to our people. You would not be here unless you—like me—were convinced that this danger is real. This is not fiction, this is science," said Obama.

Aside from the fact that the climate has always been in a state of change for Earth’s 4.5 billion years, the science employed to frighten people about such change does not bear any resemblance to real science which is an impartial blend of data based on replicable experiments.

Real science does not have a political agenda. The bogus science of global warming was revealed in November 2009 when the world learned that a handful of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “scientists” had systematically distorted the scientific process, conjuring up false computer models that ignored significant elements of climate history. The revelations would be dubbed “Climategate.”

Never one to not criticize America, Obama reminded the delegates that America was “the world’s second largest emitter” of greenhouse gases even though such gases do not function as a greenhouse, trapping and holding heat. If they did, how would one explain the fact that the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle since around 1998?

What is the mark of a developing or successful economy? It is the use of energy!

Obama promised that the U.S. would work “to phase out fossil fuel subsidies” and promised “historic investments in renewable energy” and his intention to put Americans “to work increasing efficiency in our homes and buildings; and by pursuing comprehensive legislation to transform to a clean energy economy.”

Such a transformation is ludicrous. America runs on oil, on coal, on natural gas, on hydroelectric and nuclear power. The investments in wind and, in particular, solar power, have wasted millions of taxpayer dollars. Combined, wind and solar provide less than two percent of the nation’s electrical power while coal provides nearly half. It has been the use of coal that the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has been determined to reduce or end, falsely claiming CO2 is a "pollutant."

Typically, Obama said “There is no time to waste.” In reality the Obama administration has wasted every opportunity to increase access to America’s vast energy reserves. Even when bragging about oil production, Obama never admits that it is occurring on private land. His administration has virtually shut down access to exploration and extraction on federally owned and managed land.

Environmentalism is the mask of communism, concentrating ownership of all property and productivity in the hands of the government. Even when addressing the need to ensure clean air and water, it has been used as a blunt instrument of power to limit economic development.

These are well established environmental lies and they are Obama’s environmental lies.

The Copenhagen conference came to a hasty end as the world’s leaders fled the city to avoid being trapped there by a massive blizzard. The global warming they all warned against in 2010 was not occurring and is not occurring.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Grand Panjandrum of Pundits

By Alan Caruba

It’s a little known event, perhaps because its participants want it that way, but as the new year is poised to begin, the Grand Panjandrum of Pundits gathered at an undisclosed location for their annual review of all the predictions they made regarding things that did not occur, all the events that did occur—taking them by complete surprise, and to exchange notes on their thoughts regarding 2012.

The philosopher Aristotle had it right when he said “Stuff happens.”

This particularly applied to the third year of Barack Hussein Obama’s extended vacation as President of the United States of America. He ended the year comparing himself to previous presidents whose shoes he is not fit to shine and whose bathwater he is ill equipped to draw.

On January 2, 2010, I wrote that I thought Obama’s life, at least in the chronology and facts that were presented to the public, was a pure fiction, make believe.  By then Americans had experienced a year’s worth of ineptitude that left anyone paying any attention astonished. It was just one blunder after another.

Even more astonishing is that no court, no one in Congress, and no one in the Republican Party has dared to say that the man was and remains ineligible to be President. Plenty of other people have said it. My friend, Dr. Jerome Corsi, wrote a whole book about it; two in fact.

The glaring truth that no one wants to address is the fact that his father was a citizen of Kenya and, as such, the terms of the U.S. Constitution which require that only “natural born” citizens—those whose both parents are U.S. citizens—can hold the office of President.

When you add in the serious doubts over the authenticity of his birth certificate—declared a fake by document experts and the dubious authenticity of his Social Security number, issued in Connecticut where he never worked a day in his life, and you have enough evidence to send him packing in less than 24-hours.

Even so, the Democratic Party will put him on the ballot again to run for office in 2012. The legality of this is no more likely to be challenged than it was in 2008, though some are trying. The Grand Panjandrum of Pundits was left to scratch their heads and mumble about the strangeness of this.

There was one thing they agreed upon. Barack Hussein Obama is the worst President the nation has ever had to endure.

No other president even comes close. He is the first to preside over the first U.S. sovereign debt downgrade in American history.

He has been responsible for the highest level of federal spending (25% of GDP) since World War Two and, in a comparable fashion, the highest level of federal debt (67% of GDP) since then as well.

Employment is the lowest since 1983 and long-term unemployment (45.9%) is the highest since the 1930s, the years of the Great Depression.

The rate of home ownership (59.7%) is the lowest since 1965 and the percentage of taxpayers paying income tax is the lowest in the modern era. At the same time, the level of government dependency (47%), those persons receiving one ore more federal benefit payments, is the highest in American history.

Obama and his economic advisors have achieved this in just three years while others in his administration were authorizing millions in loan guarantees to “Green” companies going bankrupt with alarming predictability or producing heavily subsidized products that no one wanted to purchase. Others we’re told were unaware of a Department of Justice program to run guns to drug cartels in Mexico. Plans to shut down Gitmo were quietly shelved. The Bush-Cheney policies were quietly extended.

Within twenty-four hours of the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, Baghdad was besieged by bombings while the prime minister was busy trying to arrest and indict the vice president. You cannot make up stuff like this.

We are now mere months away from the Supreme Court hearing a case regarding the constitutionality of Obamacare. It is normal for judges who have had any previous involvement in a case or those close to it to recuse themselves from participating, but the Obama administration is so marked by a lack of ethics that his former Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now an Associate Justice, has still not announced her decision.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Obamacare, the federal government can require you to spend your money on things you do not want and may not need.

This is why the Grand Panjandrum of Pundits ended in a state of mass confusion and despair. Just like it did in 2010.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Wind Power Pipe Dream

By Alan Caruba

Imagine if you will America’s mountain ranges topped by row upon row of wind turbines and America’s deserts and plains covered by solar panels. How ugly is that?

A recent Wall Street Journal article, “Wildlife Slows Wind Power”, took note of the slaughter of birds and bats by these Cuisinarts of the countryside. The problem has reached such proportions that “New federal rules on how wind-power operators must manage threats to wildlife could create another challenge for the fast-growing industry as it seeks more footholds in the U.S. energy landscape.”

The wind-power industry is heavily subsidized by loan guarantees and mandates, and like solar power is turning out to be a vast pit of wasted funding that also raises the cost of electricity to communities whose utilities have been required to purchase its output.

It is another environmental pipe dream and one intended to enrich those who go into this dubious business.

Not only uneconomical, it utterly fails to produce sufficient electrical energy to meet the demand of America’s homes, businesses and industry. As the article noted, “The U.S. now has more than 43,000 megawatts of wind capacity, double the level three years ago, generating roughly 3% of the nation’s electricity.”

Three percent!

Try to imagine how many wind turbines it would require to produce anywhere near the nation’s needs. Now consider that the wind does not blow in a constant stream and often does not blow at all.

Consider also that the increase in wind power has occurred within the last three years, precisely the time in which the Obama administration has been in office, throwing taxpayer money at this pathetically inadequate means of generating electricity while doing all it can to shut down coal-fired plants currently responsible for fifty percent of all the electricity generated. Concurrent with this have been attacks on the coal mining industry.

In early 2011 a study sponsored by the John Muir trust of the wind turbines in California found that wind farms are much less efficient than claimed, producing below 20% of capacity more than half the time and below 10% of capacity for more than a third of the time. The report found that the suggested output was particularly low during the times of highest demand.

Unknown to most Americans is the fact that wind power generation requires 100% backup. To maintain electrical grid capacity, the ability to supply customer demand for continuous electricity, every wind farm must have a backup generating facility. Thus, it is coal-fired, gas-powered, nuclear and hydroelectric power generation that ensures a reliable supply of electricity to consumers.

This means that the backup facility must have twice the real rated capacity of the wind farm. The result is more capital is required to ensure this, along with operating and maintenance costs when a traditional power company is forced to include wind power in its inventory. This is a global phenomenon wherever wind power is part of the mix.

The noise generated by wind turbines is such that, especially in rural areas, lawsuits and complaints, also noting lost property value. Such lawsuits have cropped up in Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, among other states. Increasingly, direct physiological impacts that include rapid heartbeat, nausea and blurred vision have been attributed to the turbine’s ultra-low-frequency sound and vibrations.

An expert on the detrimental aspects of wind power, John Droz, Jr., has created a website for those interested in the facts. Droz notes that “wind energy was abandoned well over a hundred years ago as it was totally inconsistent with our burgeoning, more modern needs of power, even in the late 1800s.” It is an outmoded source of power comparable to plowing farmland using oxen.

Due to intensive lobbying based on the discredited notion that carbon dioxide emissions from traditional power generation plants (with the exception of nuclear power and natural gas) cause “global warming”, this bogus justification is the basis for the wind power industry. Another idiotic rationale is “energy diversity.”

The demand from wind (and solar) power executives for a federal “national renewable electricity standard” would inflict this ridiculous form of power generation upon consumers and it is entirely one of their self-interest. It ignores the nation’s growing population and the need for more electricity generation by means that have a long-established record of efficiency, low cost, and predictability.

Like so much that is based on environmental schemes, it should be abandoned at the earliest possible time.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Green Jobs, Clean Energy Scam

By Alan Caruba

There will probably never be a definitive calculation of how much money the United States (and other nations) has wasted on Green programs, litigation, grants, research, and projects such as those involving “renewable” or "clean" energy. It will surely add up to several trillion because it has been going on for a very long time through administrations reaching back to Jimmy Carter’s and Richard Nixon’s.

A recent article in Washington Examiner.com revealed the amount of money taxpayers pay out to Green organizations that sue the EPA and other government agencies. In point of fact the EPA encourages such law suits in order to use the court system to affirm regulatory efforts that might otherwise by stopped by Congress.

As this is being written, there are several pieces of proposed legislation in Congress to keep the EPA from utterly and completely destroying the economy and the ability to provide Americans with electricity.

Following an request from Republican Sens. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and David Vitter of Louisiana, the Government Accountability Office undertook an investigation regarding the cost of environmental litigation and while it proved daunting, the GAO reported that “the Department of Justice spent at least $43 million from 1998 to 2010 defending the Environmental Protection Agency in court, while the Department of Treasury paid about $14.2 million from 2003 through 2010 to successful plaintiffs for attorney’s’ fees and associated costs. The EPA paid about $1.4 million from 2006 and 2010 to plaintiffs”

Earlier, in a special report, the Washington Examiner noted that “the major players in the environmental movement are lavishly funded by private contributions from individuals and foundations. And many of them also receive hundreds of millions more dollars in government grants and contracts, so it’s not as if these groups are unable to pay their legal legions out of their own coffers.”

But no, the taxpayers are stuck with the bill.

The cost of Green “solutions” to non-existant environmental problems is proving particularly evident as reports reveal that “renewable energy” companies rapidly fail when federal subsidies are ended or spent. A case in point was the Senate vote in June to end billions of dollars in subsidites for the U.S. ethanol industry.

Ethanol, also known as “moonshine” had been ordered by the government to be added to every gallon of gasoline consumers use despite the fact that it produces less energy, reducing mileage, and adds to the cost at the pump. It was, of course, another Green lie about reducing “greenhouse gas emissions” said to be the source of a “global warming” that was not occurring. Ethanol producers have been closing their doors in droves now that the tap has been shut off. In a world afloat on billions of barrels of oil, the need for ethanol never existed.

In a similar fashion U.S. manufacturers of solar panels are also closing their doors, sustained initially by U.S. subsidies and loan guarantees. The latest is Solyndra, a California firm that just declared bankruptcy.

President Obama had touted Solyndra as a shining example of Green jobs and technology, offering $535 million in loan guarantees. China, however, has captured much of the market for solar panels. Touted as a way to help reduce electricity costs, left unsaid is that they are expansive to purchase and install. The average homeowner would have to wait ten or twenty years to amortise their investment.

Without similar subsidies and mandates, the wind power industry would rapidly collapse as well.

The impact of Green initiatives and mandates has been particularly onerous at the state level. As I noted in an earlier commentary, “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.

The President has been touting Green jobs since he took office and, if he does so in the course of his speech to a joint session of Congress, you will know that this Big Green Lie is still part of his continuing failure to address the real causes of unemployment in America, taxation, regulation, and a general assault on the energy industry and others..

Word is that Obama still hasn’t installed solar panels on the roof of the White House despite promises to do so. The last President to do that was Jimmy Carter and they were removed by President Reagan.

Green Lies have cost Americans trillions of dollars since the environmental movement began in earnest in the 1970s.

This is written prior to President Obama’s address, but if you hear him speak of “Green jobs” or “clean energy” or “renewable energy”, feel free to turn the channel to anything else because this is the most duplicitous and incompetent President to ever hold the office.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

An Ill Wind (Power) in New Jersey

By Alan Caruba

Since his election, New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie has been remarkably successful in dealing with the Democrat controlled state legislature and has rocketed to national fame for simply being the real deal when it comes to conservative politics and policies.

That is, until he signed a bill on August 19 that one columnist described as touting “the idea of raising your electric rates to place windmills in the ocean off New Jersey.” In this case the windmill would be 75 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty! None of the residents of Union Beach want a windmill no matter how far out in the Atlantic it’s built.

So-called alternative or renewable energy is always far more expensive than the kind generated by nuclear or coal-fired plants.

It is always more unreliable insofar as the wind does not blow all the time, thus requiring a traditional plant to be online to back up those ugly insults to the natural beauty of land and sea when they fail to feed the grid.

Few people know that, even without wind, the windmills must be kept turning, using electricity to avoid mechanical failures.

Gov. Christie signed a bill that would put the windmill so far out at sea it could not be seen from the land, but that ignores the fact that it will cost taxpayers $7 million to construct it, half of which will be paid by a federal grant, and the result will be an increase in consumer rates. Why would any sensible person want to spend that kind of money on a single windmill?

Part of the answer is something called the Renewable Electricity Standards (RES) that the U.S. Senate is contemplating. As Dr. S. Fred Singer noted in an August American Thinker.com commentary, “It would force electric utilities to generate a large and increasing percentage of their power from wind and solar—rising to 15% by 2021.” In other words, the U.S. Senate is about to select winners and losers in the energy marketplace by requiring utilities to use expensive and inefficient wind and solar power.

If wind and solar were so wonderful, why can’t either of these energy producers even exist without a federal mandate?

Even worse, these two bogus forms of energy exist on the basis of a complete lie; that they reduce carbon dioxide emissions and thus will save the planet from global warming. Only there never was a threat of global warming and the planet has been in a natural cooling cycle for a decade!

The whole wind and solar business is a gigantic rip-off and will inevitably cause consumer rates to rise for all the reasons cited above. Just as Obamacare is already causing insurance rates to skyrocket, so will the implementation of Renewable Electricity Standards.

In France, Germany and Italy they are already in the process of backing away from subsidizing this idiotic form of energy production.

According to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), only 700 MW (megawatts) were added to the nation’s electricity grid in the second quarter of 2010 and wind power installation to date this year has dropped by 57% and 71% from 2008 and 2009 levels.

Little wonder AWEA is “calling on Congress with an urgent appeal to put in place a strong national renewable electricity standard to spur demand for renewable energy...”

Spur demand? That’s not going to happen without the coercion of federal intervention.

No one except the manufacturers and owners of the windmills like windmills. This includes environmentalists! In June environmental and watchdog groups filed a lawsuit in Boston to stop a windmill farm off Cape Cod charging that it would violate federal law by endangering protected migratory birds. The suit says that “science was manipulated and suppressed for political reasons.”

The entire alternative, renewable, and green energy scam is based on “science” that is utterly false, beginning with the claim that CO2 has any effect on the climate and that emissions must be reduced.

I do not know how long it will take to ultimately return this nation to the sanity of producing electricity with cheap, abundant coal, with natural gas or, best of all, with nuclear plants, but unless we do that the nation can look forward to rolling brownouts and blackouts because the population keeps growing and the need for more electricity increases with them.

© Alan Caruba, 2010