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

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

Germany's Nuclear Panic

By Alan Caruba

The likelihood of a major earthquake in Germany is slim. The possibility that it would be followed by a catastrophic tsunami is unlikely. These are the events that caused the failure of the Fukushima plant in Japan, but that has not deterred Germany from its recent announcement that it would close all 17 of its nuclear reactors by 2022.

This is pure panic and not something one would expect from Germans who have always excelled at the development and use of new technologies. Other than Japan that has good reason to close Fukushima and reconsider its use of nuclear energy, few other nations have indicated any change in their policies regarding it.

The world is in desperate need of real grownups to run its various nations and, instead, the only growth industry to which one can reliably point is stupidity.

The endless blather about “alternative” or “renewable” energy sources has led to the waste of billions on wind and solar power, neither of which would exist if governments did not lavish subsidies or issue mandates for its unpredictable and unproductive delivery of electricity.

Germany has long had a Green Party and its Chancellor, Angela Merkel, heads of Social Democrat-Green coalition. In general, environmentalists worldwide hate the generation of energy by any source, but particularly if it is nuclear or coal. Ironically, by shutting its nuclear plants, Germany will have to use coal, dubbed “dirty” by mindless opponents of anything that might let you turn on a light bulb.

If you Google “nuclear energy” you will learn that nuclear power provides about six percent of the world’s energy and an estimated fifteen percent of its electricity. The U.S., France, and Japan account for about fifty percent of the electricity generated by nuclear power.

There have been nuclear and radiation accidents. Fukushima was the result of unprecedented geological events, something no amount of planning and caution can prevent. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster was largely the result of its staff manually overriding its safety control systems. The Three-Mile Island accident in 1979 did not endanger anyone. It coincided with a film “The China Syndrome” that had no basis in fact.

Simply stated, nuclear power plants are not atomic bombs that go off when a “meltdown” occurs. Under normal circumstances plants can be shut down in the event of a malfunction.

Germany’s over-reaction to the Fukushima accident has nothing to do with reality, science, economics or any other sensible response. Nuclear power provides about 23% of its electrical energy and, despite that, Germany’s electricity prices have “more than doubled in the past decade” according to a Wall Street Journal report. The decision to phase out nuclear power will affect Germany’s ability to remain competitive in the global marketplace, particularly as regards its heavy industries that require large amounts of electricity.

The decision was part environmental, part political. It is entirely idiotic as is always the case when these two factors come together. To no one’s surprise, one of its largest utilities, E.ON, announced it would sue the pants off the government to compensate for its financial losses. Others are likely to join it.

Environmentalism in all its many forms is opposed to any and all forms of energy generation and use with the exception of wind, solar, and the so-called biofuels. Here in the U.S. Greens have fought any expansion of the use of coal, despite the fact that just over half of all electricity generated depends on it. The Obama administration has waged a public war on the extraction, refining, and use of oil. Nuclear power generates about twenty percent of the electricity in the U.S.

It is the growth of government that lies at the heart of so many of the problems the West has encountered. Coupled with the environmental movement’s insanity, we get bans on the incandescent light bulb, insane requirements for increased mileage from a gallon of gasoline that is required to include ethanol, a chemical element that actually reduces mileage!

We have all just escaped the ravages of a massive, global campaign to convince everyone that the Earth was rapidly heating as the result of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is still insisting that it be regulated as a “pollutant” even though all life on Earth depends upon it as the “food” that generates every piece of vegetation, crops, forests, and beautiful flowers.

It is stupid to shut down perfectly good nuclear plants as Germany plans to do. It is stupid to insist on covering areas the size of several states to generate solar energy or spoil the landscape with wind turbines that kill hundreds of thousands of birds and bats every year while, combined with solar, contribute barely three percent to our electrical supply.

Ordinary people know that stupid people are in charge of making decisions like Germany’s nuclear energy panic or the moratorium on drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ordinary people understand the need for more energy based on traditional sources.

Ordinary Americans know it is stupid to require an environmental impact study in order to shoot off some fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Ordinary Americans know that there are some very bad, even evil, decisions being made that will undermine our future.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Give the Peace Prize Back, Barack

By Alan Caruba

As the Middle East begets one insurrection after another against the oppression that has been endemic to the region for centuries and as Japan faces the worst nuclear energy disaster since Chernobyl, the President of America and Commander-in-Chief is Absent Without a Leave (AWOL).

Barack Hussein Obama is the first President of the United States who received a Nobel Peace Prize just for showing up. It is a mark of how debased this once prestigious international prize has become. He should give it up.

In the past, the Peace Prize went to Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 for negotiating an end to a Russian-Japanese conflict and to Woodrow Wilson in 1919 for his efforts to create the League of Nations. Its value began to fall off the cliff when it was given to Jimmy Carter in 2002 and Obama in 2009. In between, it was awarded to former Vice President Al Gore and the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

It is an ancient axiom that power is lost when power is not exercised. Osama bin Laden seriously misread the U.S. when he referred to it as “a weak horse”, an Arab way of saying it could be attacked with impunity. George W. Bush responded by bombing the hell out of Tora Bora in Afghanistan and then by invading Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein. Bin Laden has been in hiding ever since and his top lieutenants keep getting whacked.

Obama’s approach to foreign affairs has been to misunderstand and denigrate the role of America in a dangerous world. Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal calls it “The Collapse of Internationalism” because the failure to lead has demonstrated the uselessness of the United Nations, its Security Council, NATO, the European Union, and the Arab League when it comes to facing down a psychopathic despot like Libya’s Quadaffi and, of course, the same was true regarding Saddam Hussein.

This is how big wars occur.

Recent history bears out the failure to take action against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, against Adolf Hitler prior to his invasion of Poland, to anticipate the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and now the inevitable acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran.

This is what happens when an administration’s policy makers are all “intellectuals” who have spun out hypothetical views of the world that have no relationship to history or present realities.

This is what happens when, despite our present financial woes, the most powerful nation on Earth has reduced its naval and air power, and asks its military to engage in nation-building while fighting our enemies. What is needed are entirely separate, highly trained units devoted to that task.

This is what happens when “foreign policy” involves wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on the United Nations and billions more in so-called “foreign aid” to nations that do not like us, nor support us in times of crisis and need.

Libya, said Henninger, “was a test case, and what we have seen is that a world in which the U.S. doesn’t unmistakably lead is a world that spins its wheel, and eventually the wheels start to come off.”

The U.S. is not, as Obama believes, just one more nation among others or that it is not the single most exceptional experiment in democracy and freedom.

Just as Americans must organize to resist and survive Barack Hussein Obama over the next two years, having come to realize how utterly incompetent he is, other nations are wondering what will occur without the leadership the U.S. has always provided in the past, including two world wars, several smaller ones, and the containment of the former Soviet menace.

The presidency is much more than frequent trips to the golf course, predicting the outcome of the NCAA tournament, and an ill-timed visit to Rio. It is a dangerous place filled with people like Quadaffi and others of his ilk.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Japan is the Worst Case Scenario

By Alan Caruba

Japan is now the global example of the worst case scenario in which everything that can go wrong has gone wrong.

When a nuclear plant servicing an equivalent area of a U.S. state blows up and moves toward meltdown, even Russia’s Chernobyl begins to shrink by comparison. For the nuclear energy sector, it’s a meltdown of another kind as few people will want to see another one built any time soon.

One astonishing side note to the disaster is the way Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada forced the shut-down of a multi-billion dollar Yucca Mountain repository for U.S. nuclear waste.

In the age when television cameras are everywhere, the people of the world got a firsthand look at what it looks like when a tsunami hits. As it plowed down buildings and everything else in its way, the devastation is so vast that the mind struggles to comprehend it.

You can rebuild buildings, roads, bridges, railroads and such, but restoring confidence in the future will take a generation or two for Japan. Meanwhile, the economic losses defy calculation.

What Japan tells us is that all the early warning systems are no match for the sheer power of natural forces. If the Yellowstone Park caldera, the largest potential volcano in the U.S. should explode, it would have a comparable affect and there isn’t a damn thing that can be done about it.

At the heart of the Japanese disaster is the loss of man-made power, the electricity that allows a modern nation to function, to keep its lights on and everything else that requires electricity. Not all the solar farms and wind turbines in the world could ever begin to provide the vast amounts of power generated by coal, natural gas, or—yes—nuclear facilities. And don’t forget the hydroelectric power that literally transformed the West.

There is a stark contrast between President Obama’s pledge to assist Japan in every way and his failure to assist the Libyan forces battling one of the worst dictators in northern Africa, a man with a forty-year history of oppression and even terrorism that was directed against America.

Largely unnoted is the way the Pacific Rim is demonstrating the primacy of geological events. From Christchurch in New Zealand to northern Japan, the Earth is literally moving under the feet of millions. The prospect of volcanic eruptions increases. The likelihood of more earthquakes increases. Tsunamis threaten.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. an economic earthquake looms. A $14 trillion deficit threatens to sink the nation and probably take a few others with it. Why does it always take a death or two at a dangerous intersection before the town installs a stop signal?

If you want a worst case scenario in America, you need only wait and watch as neither the White House, nor the Congress does anything serious to address this fate.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Oil Drilling Moratorium is an Act of Treason

By Alan Caruba

If you had any doubt that Barack Obama’s agenda is to destroy the United States of America, but still want more proof, I offer you the announcement that his administration will not provide any offshore oil leases in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, Pacific, or Atlantic coasts...for at least seven years!

In October, a study by the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University concluded that the reduction of shallow water oil drilling permits that followed the BP oil spill would put as many as 40,000 jobs at risk and cost the region $4.3 billion in lost wages and revenues.

At the same time, a consortium of foreign oil companies led by the Spanish firm, Repsol, working with India’s state-run Oil & Natural Gas Company and Norway’s StatoilHydro are exploring for oil off the coast of Cuba where drilling in its waters will proceed even while American and other oil companies will be denied access to vast reserves off the coasts of all of the Gulf States.

From Alaska to Florida, offshore of California or any of the East Coast States, Obama is destroying America’s energy future in the same fashion his administration has done everything in its power to shut down the nation’s coal mining industry.

Here are the statistics that demonstrate how dependent we are on fossil fuels: In total they provide 84.9% of the energy Americans use. Of that, coal provides 22.4% and oil represents 39.2%, while natural gas accounts for 23.2%. Other energy sources include nuclear power at 8.3%, hydroelectric at 2.4% and the least efficient and dependable, wind at 0.3% and solar at 0.08%. (Data source: the Institute for Energy Research)

In March, Gov. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, said, “President Obama has made his intentions to bankrupt the coal industry clear. EPA’s actions this week demonstrate that he will wage a war against the energy source that generates half of America’s electricity and is our nation’s most abundant, reliable, and affordable energy sources.”

Gov. Manchin said that estimates were that the administration’s actions would affect 65,000 members of the Appalachian workforce who would lose some of the highest-paying jobs available in the region. At least $12 billion in lost economic development was forecast.

Nor is the Obama attack on the nation’s energy supply restricted to coal and oil.

In October, the Obama administration demanded $880 million in exchange for a $7.5 billion loan guarantee necessary to the construction of a Maryland nuclear facility. The plant would have generated thousands of jobs as well as needed megawatts of electricity for that State’s residents. The project was cancelled.

State by State as America ceases to mine its own coal and loses access its own oil reserves, the prices of energy which will have to be imported will rise while thousands of jobs related to these industries disappear, wrecking the economies of entire communities and delaying the recovery of energy-rich States.

These are acts of treason against the nation, if not in the narrow legalistic definition, but in the larger context of the harm being done to a nation for which affordable, abundant energy has been at the core of its economy and well-being.

The moratorium is the equivalent of an act of war on the ability of Americans to have the energy they need to recover from the present economy, to provide the jobs necessary to that recovery, and to fuel everything from the utilities that generate electricity and the nation’s fleet of trucks that transport the vast bulk of all goods.

This agenda of economic destruction has been carried out since Obama took office in 2009. It is the reason Obamacare was inflicted on the nation, asserting control over one sixth of the nation’s economy. It is the reason the government took over General Motors and Chrysler. It is the reason Obama failed to come back from South Korea with a trade treaty and has stalled others in the pipeline.

In countless ways, the engine of the federal government is being used to betray and impoverish Americans.

Cry treason! For that is what it is.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Energy Policy? What Energy Policy?

By Alan Caruba

When the government controls the provision of energy, it controls the lives of all citizens and the growth or failure of the nation’s economy. Everything else, including national defense, runs second when it comes to this single factor.

Recently the fourth annual survey of more than a hundred executives in the U.S. and Canadian electric and natural gas industries was released by Platts and Capgemini. Platts is a global provider of energy and metals information and Capgemini is a leading provider of consulting, technology and outsourcing services. The objective of the survey was to determine the opinion of energy industry executives regarding the first year and a half of the Obama administration’s energy policies.

The Obama administration’s energy policy is to have as little as possible.

The administration is bent on reducing access to national energy resources, coal, oil and natural gas, combined with a bizarre emphasis on “alternative” or “renewable” sources in the form of wind and solar energy. European nations that went this course ended up with fewer jobs, insufficient energy for the money invested, and massive fraud in its carbon credits exchanges.

It is essential to understand that the nation’s utilities have all signed onto the bogus “global warming” theory that carbon dioxide emissions threaten all life on Earth because they can make gobs of money raising the rates they currently charge for electricity. They expect to do so via the bogus selling and trade of “carbon credits”, a key element of the Cap-and-Tax bill currently in the Senate. It is a massive robbery of all energy consumers and that means everyone.

Under intense pressure from the government and from environmental organizations, many utilities have wasted millions on the installation of wind and solar farms, none of which provide enough electricity to even begin to meet their consumer’s needs. Moreover, they must all maintain traditional coal-burning, nuclear, and other forms of energy generation plants because neither wind or solar provide a reliable source of electricity.

This is the big, dirty secret of the so-called “sustainable” energy from wind and solar. It is not sustainable if the wind is not blowing and the sun is obscured by clouds. Wind energy provides about one percent of all the electricity used daily in America. In 2006 solar power provided 0.1 percent! By contrast, nuclear provides about 20 percent and coal provides just over 50 percent!

The alternative energy suppliers are sustained by a combination of taxpayer subsidies (your money) and mandates imposed on the utilities to include them with nuclear, coal and other energy sources. One way the government makes so-called sustainable energy appear to be a greater source is to include conventional hydroelectric energy.

According to the survey, “some 80% are dissatisfied with the U.S. government’s energy policy performance following the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration and amid a slowly rebounding economy,” adding, “there is considerable dissatisfaction in the lack of tangible and actionable policy and legislation.”

John Christens, vice president of Smart Energy Services for Capgemini, says, “Few utility executives consider the current solutions as satisfactory either in scale or feasibility.” That’s because there are NO current “solutions” to America’s growing needs for additional energy provision and the nation’s electrical grid is aging daily and in need of major upgrades.

Not surprisingly, since they stand to make billions if the Cap-and-Tax bill is passed, many utility executives were unhappy with the progress “on CO2 legislation and action, regulations which will increase the cost of power without addressing the root issue of atmospheric carbon…”

There is no “root issue” because carbon dioxide plays NO role whatever in climate change. The bloviations of Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are a huge package of lies based on flawed and deliberately spurious computer model projections.

In November 2009, the Climategate revelations that a handful of IPCC scientists had been misrepresenting the truth should have ended the global warming fraud, but it has only intensified the effort of those behind it to impose it on the world. At some point, having taken millions in government funding for research, particularly here in the U.S. and in England, some of these IPCC scientists should be on their way to jail if there is any justice to be had.

The survey is barely useful to the public because it was taken among the very utility executives who are guilty of supporting the global warming fraud in anticipation of reaping obscene profits. The cost of energy will soar if the Cap-and-Tax bill waiting a vote in the Senate is passed and signed into law by the president.

Meanwhile, the real energy policy of the Obama administration is to do everything in its immense power to thwart the building of any new coal-burning or nuclear plants while deceiving the public into believing that wind or solar has any real potential of meeting present and future needs. Dangling promises of “green jobs” is perhaps the cruelest lie of all. Virtually all of the technology required for wind or solar is manufactured overseas.

The Obama energy policy can be summed up as no new energy, no new jobs, and a very dark future for America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Energy Suicide: Unplugging America

By Alan Caruba

What was that most homeowners and apartment dwellers most feared in the recent record-breaking blizzard that hit the northeast?

The answer is losing electricity and that is why the news of the event was always filled with reports of what towns had lost electricity due to downed tree limbs. This was followed by news of how quickly the utilities were making repairs.

Simply stated, when you lose electricity, you lose light and warmth, and you are instantly back to the dark ages before magical power flowed into your home through outlets throughout your house or apartment. No power leaves people searching for flashlights or, if they have planned for it, firing up a generator.

That is why energy is so critical, not just to our everyday lives, but to the future of the nation. It is, in many respects, life itself.

On March 4, yet another environmental organization, this one called Natural Capitalism Solutions, will hold a teleconference, the purpose of which is to demonstrate “how utilities can benefit financially by shifting power generation from existing coal-burning plants to a combination of efficiency and renewable energy technologies.”

Let’s put this in context. Currently, coal-burning plants provide just over half of all the electricity generated in the nation. Coal is abundant and cheap. Wind and solar energy is neither. It is expensive by almost comparison and, worse, it is unreliable. Unlike the other energy sources, it provides few jobs.

Under the cold conditions of recent winter events, some wind turbines simply froze and ceased to function. In more temperate conditions, there is always the likelihood that the wind will not blow, thus necessitating the constant maintenance of back-up facilities that require coal or natural gas. This raises the obvious question, why bother with wind?

Solar energy is subject to the same inconveniences if the sun is obscured by cloud cover and must constantly be monitored to remove dust on the panels that interferes with efficiency.

So-called renewable or clean energy currently represents about one percent of all the energy produced nationwide. If it weren’t for massive amounts of government cash and subsidies, there would be little or no renewable energy.

The U.S. is home to huge reserves of coal. It is often called the Saudi Arabia of coal. The same applies to oil. For all the talk of “energy independence”, the U.S. through its energy policies has been embarked since around the 1970s on something I call energy suicide.

If there is one thing the Greens truly hate it is the fuels we use to maintain our economy and our lifestyle. High on the list is coal, but it is essential to understand that the Greens are at war with oil and nuclear power as well. While fifty-five nuclear plants are being built worldwide, the U.S. lags behind the rest of the world thanks to the opposition of the Greens.

The purpose of cap-and-trade legislation, the next horror the Obama administration wants to foists on us, is to make the use of coal very expensive by claiming that it generates so much “greenhouse gas” that global warming is always just around the corner. This is no global warming and those greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide, vital to all life on Earth as plant food.

Nevertheless, reports are seeping out of the festering wound we call Congress that thirteen U.S. Senators are urging the Majority Leader and the authors of cap-and-trade “to specifically grant the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired plants.”

Without legitimate scientific justification, EPA should not be able regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but that is not likely to stop it from trying since real science or facts of any kind have rarely deterred its destructive agenda.

This is just another example of the Greens incessant and relentless attack on a major source of America’s vital source of life, its electrical power, and a major fuel source to generate it.

To return to the teleconference, those charged with the management of utilities would have to be mentally impaired or stupid beyond belief to give serious consideration to wind or solar power.

It will be argued that those advocating this idiocy are naïve or just seeking energy alternatives for whatever noble notions they claim to have, but there is no such thing as “natural” capitalism. There is just capitalism and, the last time I checked, it operates on the basis of profit achieved in the most cost efficient and productive way to be competitive in the interest of its investors, its employees, and its consumers.

I think those in Congress and involved in the mind-boggling matrix of thousands of Green groups are engaged in doing as much harm as they can, as swiftly as they can, to the American economy and our future as a nation.

© Alan Caruba

The Yucca Mountain Blues

By Alan Caruba

Are you worried about your “carbon footprint”?

Still think “global warming” is real despite the fact that one of its leading advocates, a climatologist, recently said that there’s no significant data to demonstrate any warming since 1995?

Can’t figure out why the White House is still trying desperately to pass the “Cap-and-Trade” bill based on the totally discredited claim that carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere are “causing” the non-existent “global warming”?

Do you increasingly think that you are Alice in Wonderland and now living in a nation where the White House and Congress keep telling you things that are totally absurd?

Let’s put aside the claim that we have to borrow and borrow in order to keep on spending and spending to save the economy when common sense says that is the worst way to end the economic death spiral they have created.

The latest ploy by the White House was a move in the direction of nuclear power to generate the electricity the nation needs for its current and future needs. Since the 1970s, for reasons that defy understanding, several administrations, Democrat and Republican, have done little to encourage nuclear power despite the fact that a nation like France derives most of its electricity from it.

Even so, nuclear provides about twenty percent of the electricity we use while coal provides just over fifty percent. In both cases, neither has anything to do with “greenhouse gases” because the gases play no role in climate change. Indeed, more carbon dioxide, being plant food, would greatly enhance the growth of crops and forests.

“Cap-and-Trade” is nothing more than a tax on energy use. Simply put, it has been cheap, abundant energy that has fueled the economy of the United States since it was founded. The discovery of oil in 1859 also played a major role and, despite the lies, the U.S. has an abundance of oil.

Like nuclear power, however, successive administrations since the 1970s have ensured that U.S. oil companies were kept from exploring for it, extracting it, refining it and selling it to us at affordable prices.

This is in sharp contrast to the endless babble about the need to be “energy independent.”

The talk about support for the nuclear energy industry is welcome, but what the White House is not saying is that his proposed budget has no funding for the nuclear waste facility in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.

Congress passed a Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982 and amended it in 1987. Yucca Mountain is the only permanent nuclear waste repository in the nation. I repeat, the only one. Why isn’t it in operation? Glad you asked. Sen. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, has blocked its completion and use.

So we could build two or a dozen new nuclear plants—a very good idea—but there would still be no place to put the waste despite the fact that the U.S. has spent $9 billion on the first phase to build the Yucca Mountain site. A $13 million tunnel boring machine sits idle at the site.

That has not stopped the White House from wanting to put U.S. taxpayers on the hook for $8 billion in loan guarantees for two new reactors in Georgia.

The purpose of all this is to get a few senators to sign on to the passage of Cap-and-Trade, a bill based on a non-existent threat from “greenhouse gases” in order to avoid a non-existent “global warming.” There are two fears; one that the Senate might pass the bill and, two, that the White House might impose it by executive order.

What we are witnessing is yet another really big, really bad idea out of the White House that continues to lie to everyone and anyone who thinks the problem is “global warming” when the problem really is a mad desire to destroy of the nation’s economy.

This has always been the single goal of the environmental movement when the global warming fraud began in the late 1980s. It accelerated with the UN Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The U.S. has never accepted the Protocol and those nations that did have since discovered that it’s been a very costly fraud.

Cap-and-Trade is a fraud. Let your senators know you oppose their vote for it. Any senator that does vote for it should be replaced if they are running for reelection in the November midterm elections.

Crazy Nancy, Cunning Barry

By Alan Caruba

When President Obama announced he would commit the nation to reduce “greenhouse gas emissions” in accordance with the failed UN Copenhagen Climate Change Conference goals, Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, issued yet another utterly crazed statement on January 29th.

“President Obama’s announcement marks a critical step forward in our effort to reduce the carbon footprint of the federal government—the largest consumer of energy in the U.S. economy.” For the record, the Capitol building’s electric power is provided by a coal-fired plant. And, for the record, the Speaker’s use of an executive jet to travel back and forth from her home in California every week has burned through $2.1 million while producing tons of greenhouse gases.

“With the President’s renewed call to complete work on a clean energy bill this year we look forward to putting people to work building up the industries of tomorrow, reducing our dangerous dependence on foreign oil, and preserving our natural resources for generations to come.”

Allowing large and small oil companies to explore and extract our national reserves of oil would reduce our dependency, but from the late 1970s onward, it has been government policy to prohibit this, despite the role it plays in our national security and, of course, the cost of a gallon of gas at the pump. There’s a reason much of our military power is deployed to protect Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States in the Middle East. We get 40% of our oil from there.

The so-called clean energy bill is “Cap-and-Trade”, a piece of legislation that would tax the use of energy by all Americans, thus raising their energy bills and reducing their ability to spend their money on consumer goods and services. The alleged “industries of tomorrow” include wind and solar energy companies, along with biofuel companies, all of which are totally dependent on government subsidies and mandates for their use. Remove the subsidies and they would go out of business.

In a February 2nd letter from the National Biodiesel Board to leaders in Congress says that the expiration of the biodiesel tax incentive that expired on December 31, 2009 “has essentially caused the production and use of biodiesel in the U.S. to cease…” No kidding!

Speaker Pelosi’s idea of “preserving our natural resources” is to restrict access to the billions of barrels of oil locked up in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve and to continue the ban on all off-shore exploration and extraction of countless billions of barrels of oil and cubic feet of natural gas estimated to exist in the 85% of the continental shelf that remain off limits.

While Congress continues on its wild borrowing and spending spree, Speaker Pelosi brags that the Congressional Record will be printed on “100 percent recycled paper” and that Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulbs will be replaced with “energy-efficient alternatives”; light bulbs that all contain mercury.

What justification can be made for denying consumers the right to purchase incandescent light bulbs? None!

President Obama has announced that, as soon as “Cap-and-Trade” is enacted, the U.S. will begin to “cut carbon emissions by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020.” To achieve this, we will all return to the practice of riding horses and using oxen to plow the fields for the planting of crops.

The fact that global warming is being discredited daily with new revelations about the bogus “science” used to justify it by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).seems to have escaped the notice of Speaker Pelosi, the President, and others in Congress.

What Americans are witnessing is a calculated agenda to undermine access to the energy the nation requires for present and future generations and thus undermines the economy of the nation that is totally dependent on the sufficient provision of electrical energy and the ability to utilize the nation’s vast oil, coal, and natural gas reserves, a policy that has been in place since the 1970s.

In his State of the Union speech, the President did call for more nuclear plants, but the government has stalled the building of all but two new nuclear plants since the 1970s and, thanks to Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, is unable to utilize the multi-billion dollar Yukka Mountain facility in Nevada for the storage of nuclear waste.

This and other proposals are a direct threat to the economy of the nation, diverting billions (of borrowed money) to phony “green jobs” and “clean energy.” It is bad news for America.

In September of last year, nearly a million Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. to protest healthcare reform and it is a wonder of civility that they and others have not returned to the nation’s capitol with pitchforks and torches to drive out the likes of Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress.

Obama: Repeating the Same Mistakes (and Lies)

By Alan Caruba

It is the duty of being a “pundit” to have an opinion on the events of the day and, of course, everyone has an opinion about President Obama’s State of the Union speech.

My most distinct impression while listening to it was that I had heard it all before.

It was a repeat of Obama’s 2008 campaign and a repeat of the past year’s failure to gain support for healthcare “reform” and the stalled “Cap-and-Tax” bill. It was a siren call to his fellow Democrats in Congress to continue supporting policies that will surely get them thrown out of office in October.

Some sage said that repeating the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results is a definition of insanity. I am no psychiatrist, but the narcissism that so defines Obama was on display. I kept count and he said “I” or some version of it at least 100 times in the course of the speech. He used the word “we” a lot, but that was a rhetorical “we”, not the one where we all pull together.

And we shall surely all pull together in November when we pull the lever in the voting machine for any candidate not on the Democrat Party line.

There is little to be added to the analysis of other pundits, but I did notice one particularly disturbing, albeit brief, reference to “climate change.” He wants the United States “to be a leader in the fight against climate change.”

If you recall, during the campaign Obama promised that, if elected, the seas would begin to recede. One of the more absurd claims of global warming was the massive melting of the North and South Poles, thus causing the oceans of the world to rise and swamp the coastlines of nations.

You may also recall that the President went to the Copenhagen UN Conference on Climate Change that happily resulted in nothing at all. This was a good outcome and it occurred in the wake of the release of emails between a handful of rogue climate scientists who had labored for years to distort the actual data on climate in order to further the vast global warming hoax.

The President actually said there was “overwhelming evidence” of climate change. No, but there is growing evidence that Al Gore and everyone else who said that global warming was occurring was lying or seriously misinformed.

How the President of the United States could continue to assert that global warming was or is real is beyond any rational explanation.

The President also repeated the falsehood that “investment”, i.e., taxpayer subsidies and “stimulus” cash, in “green jobs” and “clean energy” was the way out of the nation’s current economic difficulties. This is so absurd as to constitute willful deception.

About the only thing that made any sense was his passing reference to the need for more nuclear plants to generate electricity for the nation’s growing population and the need to open up exploration of the nation’s offshore reserves of oil and natural gas. The Institute for Energy Research projects that developing oil and gas reserves has the potential to create 1.2 million jobs and provide an additional $70 billion in annual wages.

Everywhere around the world, nations are cutting back on their investments in wind and solar power. It is inefficient and impractical. In a nation that has several hundred years of coal reserves, it makes sense to build some more coal-fired plants as well, given the fact that coal provides fifty percent of all the electricity we use daily.

Beyond the environmental and energy issues the President touched upon, his favorite theme was an attack on the nation’s banking and insurance industries. This no doubt derives from his Marxist outlook that sees any form of capitalism as wrong.

Finally, in an administration overflowing with former and future lobbyists, the hypocrisy of blaming them for the failure of a Congress that for decades has been mostly controlled by the Democrat Party is yet another absurdity. Lobbyists have been part of the nation’s political structure almost from the first session of Congress in 1789.

In sum, President Obama has learned virtually nothing from his first year in office. He will not be a “great one term President”, but he will be a one-term President in 2012.

Liars and the Global Warming Lies They're Telling

By Alan Caruba

It must be that the believers in “global warming” all live in caves and do not wander out to discover what is really happening on the planet.

The constant and hysterical cries from the global warming crowd claim that we have merely months, weeks and days before we’re toast.

Of course, the “solution” they offer is the appalling “Cap-and-Trade” bill that the Obama gang is trying to rush through Congress. We are supposed to believe that a huge tax on all use of electricity will “solve” the peril of global warming by cutting “greenhouse gas emissions.”

We are supposed to believe it is wise policy to slow or stop the building of coal-fired or nuclear plants to generate electricity.

We are supposed to believe that the vast coal, oil, and natural gas resources throughout the nation are not to be extracted to keep us warm in the coming years of cold weather or to fuel the nation’s vast fleet of cars and trucks.

For many throughout the nation and the world, a walk outside tells them a very different story.

Over at ClimateDepot.com the headlines read: “Baltimore: ‘Record low temp tied, another on the way—a summer without much heat.’” And “Not so peachy: Ohio cold snap takes bite out of local peach crop.” Remember, it’s JULY.

At IceAgeNow.com you will find notices of cold spells in Peru, the coldest May in New Zealand, reports of frost in Canada, and of temperature records shattered in northern Michigan and throughout New England.

AccuWeather.com’s Chief Meteorologist, Joe Bastardi, an expert on long range forecasting, is predicting that “cooler-than-normal weather this summer in the Northeast could point to a cold, snowy winter for the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states.”

Ironically, Bastardi predicts that the cold weather will be “centered over the area from Boston to Washington, D.C.” On September 8, the “climate bill”, aka “Cap-and-Trade” is scheduled for a vote and who knows, the snow could be several feet thick in the streets outside the Capitol? Last year when protesters gathered to demand the coal-fired plant providing energy to the Capitol Building be shut down did so in a snow storm!

Is the Earth cooling? Yes and it has been for a decade. The cooling is likely to continue for several more decades and you better pray it doesn’t turn into a full-fledged new ice age because the planet is at the end of a 11,500 year interglacial period similar to previous cycles that preceded ice ages.

Bastardi attributes his forecast to factors that include “a combination of El Nino and worldwide volcanic activity over the past six to nine months” which he says “may have played a role in causing this trend.”

Not mentioned is the present inactivity of sunspots, solar storms on the Sun that has been ongoing for quite some while. For an explanation of why this is bad news relative to the planet’s overall climate, click here.

The purpose of this exercise is, of course, to point out the obvious. The climate of the Earth, wherever one happens to be is cooling and is likely to continue.

That is why anyone and everyone citing “global warming” is a liar and deserves the contempt, derision, and acrimony of the Earth’s entire population.

Reasons to Distrust Your Government

By Alan Caruba

In the normal course of events, when voters no longer have confidence in the President, their Senators and their Representatives, they vote them out of office, but there are whole agencies of government that continue on no matter who is in office and, since their budgets and existence depend on the politics of whoever holds power, they bend to serve their policies.

A democracy is most in peril when citizens conclude they can no longer trust their government and there is no better example of that than a recent report, “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States”, issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It is sheer rubbish.

It is typical of the deliberate distortions and outright lies that have been put forth to an increasingly doubting public regarding “global warming.” It is part and parcel of the deceptions perpetrated for decades now by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all of which feature tortured data of dubious quality and, since 1998, have ignored the Earth’s cooling trend.

The increasing reports from around the nation of “freaky” weather, of snow in June, and other anomalies are, in fact, a reflection of this cooling trend and it is likely to last at least thirty years or more.

John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President on Science and Technology, and a man who holds some of the most outlandish and baseless views on climate change, said “This new report integrates the most up-to-date scientific findings into a comprehensive picture of ongoing as well as expected future impacts of heat-trapping pollution on the climate experience of Americans, region by region and sector by sector.”

No it doesn’t. For one thing, the “heat-trapping pollution” to which he obliquely refers is mostly carbon dioxide, a gas vital to all life on Earth and a gas which, in the days when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, could be found in concentrations five times or more higher than today. If CO2 was the great Earth destroyer that Holden, Gore, and others insist, there should be no Earth at all as we know it today.

To call CO2 “pollution” is to immediately invalidate the entire report, but to further insist, as the report does, that it is “primarily human-induced” is not just quite wrong, but a great big LIE. Human activity plays virtually no role whatever in the production of CO2.

This product of the interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program is a 190-page piece of loathsome propaganda that predicts more frequent heat waves, more flooding and waterborne diseases, rising water temperatures, more insect infestations and wildfires, and that old standby, rising sea levels with coastal flooding that will no doubt drown Manhattan and other coastal cities.

Hollywood does a better job with such fantasy than the minions of Washington, D.C.

Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, said of the NOAA report “This is not a work of science, but an embarrassing episode for the authors and NOAA.”

This report and the hours of effort that went into it is pure science fiction, predicting outcomes, as all such “global warming” does (now called “climate change”), fifty to a hundred years from now.

Global warming propagandists always focus on a distant and unknowable far horizon, safe in the knowledge that only a future generation will discover their lies. By then, the horrid “environmental” legislation they wish to impose on America will have destroyed its economy and ruined our lives.

It is no accident this report has arrived just in time for a debate on the “Cap-and-Trade” legislation that is nothing more than a huge TAX on all energy use and one that will increase the cost of all energy to everyone by thousands of dollars individually. It will drive industries dependent on large quantities of energy to foreign nations. It is a huge job-killer.

Duke Energy of North Carolina, based on the spurious science of global warming, has asked the regulators of that State for permission to raise electricity prices 12.6 percent. The requested price hike would cost North Carolina ratepayers $496 million. They should change their name to Enron. It’s not being used any more.

Utilities required to include a mix of solar and wind energy, the least efficient and most impractical producers of energy because of Renewable Energy Mandates will be forced to ask for similar increases. America is the Saudi Arabia of coal. It is the most affordable way of generating energy. More coal-fired and nuclear plants would ensure that rates would remain stable for many decades to come.

Naturally “Crazy Eyes” Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, was quick to weigh in on news of the NOAA report. “The impact of the climate crisis on the United states and around the world is becoming increasingly severe.” Nonsense! More lies from the Speaker.

The climate is always in a state of change and that change is determine primarily by the Sun, as well as other natural factures such as the oceans, volcanic activity, and the greatest meteorological mystery of all, why clouds behave the way clouds do.

The NOAA report has already been torn to shreds by many of the leading meteorologists and climatologists throughout the nation. It is pure scaremongering and it is intended to further an environmental agenda that is determined to deprive Americans of the energy sources we will need to power our way out of this government-induced Recession and meet the needs of an expanding population.

It is yet another Obama-driven “crisis” and Americans have good and grave reasons to reject the massive global warming deception, “Cap-and-Trade”, and all those seeking to drive us like lemmings over the cliff of an insolvent, bankrupt nation.

Not a Word About Oil, Coal or Natural Gas!

By Alan Caruba

If you visited WhiteHouse.gov on the second day of the new administration, you would find a lengthy document about “The President’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.” You will not find a single word about oil, coal, or natural gas in it, nor nuclear power.

To put matters in context, coal provides just over 50% of our nation’s current electricity. Nuclear provides an additional 20%. The remainder comes from sources that include hydroelectricity and natural gas. Combined, solar and wind energy sources provide 1% and for the fundamental reason that solar and wind farms are unreliable sources of constant energy and must be positioned far from the urban centers that require it. This means adding miles of lines to our electrical grid. That grid, much in need of upgrade and expansion, is not mentioned either. Nor is there any reference to all the gasoline and diesel we need for the nation's cars and trucks.

Instead, President Obama’s plan to “jumpstart job creation and long-term growth” begins with a proposal to “(double) the production of alternative energy in the next three years.” It does not say a word about exploration and extraction of the vast, known oil deposits in ANWR and there have already been hints that the ban on the nation’s coastal continental shelf may be reinstated. It would shut off access to potential new reserves of oil or natural gas in the thousands of miles of the nation’s coastal continental.

This resistance to utilizing any oil found anywhere in the United States continues while President Obama and his administration keep complaining about the billions of U.S. dollars that flow to countries that are “unfriendly” to our values. The same resistance to mining any of the extraordinarily vast reserves of the nation’s coal deposits continues as well.

Second on Obama’s plan is the “modernizing (of) more than 75% of federal buildings and (improving) the energy efficiency of two million American homes, saving consumers and taxpayers billions on our energy bills.” It’s hard to be against energy efficiency, but when it includes a ban on the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs, it represents a level of stupidity that has been the only product of Congress in recent years. Energy that is not available cannot be made more efficient no matter what you do.

This reminds us of the Congressional mandates for the production and use of ethanol to be combined with gasoline. Ethanol production drove up the cost of food at home and around the world. Indeed, the cost of corn rose so steeply that many ethanol producers went out of business because they could not afford it! Add to that the fact that ethanol in combination with gasoline actually reduces mileage per gallon and you have no efficiency whatever.

Third on the list of recovery objectives are investments to ensure that “all of America’s medical records are computerized.” The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution states that “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” How secure will you feel if anyone in the U.S. government, any insurance company or a potential employer can access your personal, private medical records?

The Obama administration plan goes on to urge the equipping of “tens of thousands of schools, community colleges, and public universities with 21st century classrooms, labs, and libraries. It wants to expand broadband across America, and finally to invest in “the science, research, and technology that will lead to new medical breakthroughs, new discoveries, and entire new industries.”

May I respectfully suggest that this is not the job of the federal government? That research and development has a long history in America of being the province of private industry and entrepreneurs, competing to produce the best, new products and services?

To return to my original theme, the failure to make any mention of accessing America’s vast resources of energy production bespeaks the years of environmental agitation against the energy America needs to function as a society and as a thriving economy.

America will not recover from its financial crisis by throwing billions at the most inefficient and untrustworthy means of producing electricity, solar and wind.

Americans will not be more secure if their medical records can be accessed by any government clerk or are available to any industry or employer who wants to avoid hiring anyone with a pre-existing medical condition. Millions of Americans have encountered sexually transmitted diseases and surely this is not the kind of information anyone wants known.

This is George Orwell’s “Big Brother” approach to government combined with a willful ignorance and resistance to the production of the vast new amounts of energy the nation will need by 2030.

But then, this is the President who said, “We can’t drive our SUV’s and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times…and expect that other countries are going to say OK…”

Why not? And who will decide what we can drive and how much we can eat? Who will determine how much we can heat or cool our homes? If it’s the government, then we will have exchanged our freedoms for totalitarian control.

This proposed recovery and reinvestment plan reflects the future that President Obama has in mind for all of us and for the nation.

The Nation's Governors Sleepover Party

By Alan Caruba

Take heart, America! Your nation’s governors have been meeting in Philadelphia this weekend for the National Governors Association centennial meeting. From Friday through Monday they are attending various sessions that are almost all devoted to the environment.

On Saturday, America’s most famous former philanderer-in-chief, William Jefferson Clinton, gave the keynote address. When he was the Governor of Arkansas, he also had served as chairman of the NGA. I am sure it was a stirring address on one of the great mysteries of our times, why Hillary lost the nomination and how many speeches he will have to give to retire her campaign debt.

Sunday had sessions such as “Creating a Diverse Energy Portfolio” and “Options for a Secure and Affordable Energy Future.” Visions of endless windmills and acres of solar panels must sure have been the highlight of these sessions, but I doubt that a word was spoken about building any nuclear or coal-fired plants to generate electricity or the possibility of actually drilling anywhere in the United States for oil or natural gas. Well, the Governor of Alaska probably was thinking about this, but few others.

At $4-a-gallon for gasoline, I suspect there was a big banner in the conference hall that said, “We can’t drill our way out of this!” I’m not a governor, but even I know we can and we must begin to drill.

Monday’s plenary session is devoted, of course, to “Clean Energy Technology: What’s here and What’s Coming.” What's here is $4-a-gallon gasoline and what's coming is $5-a-gallon gasoline.

What’s here are some heavily subsidized wind farms that only provide a small among of electricity when the wind is blowing, and must be backed up at all times with standard generation facilities powered by coal, gas or water/hydro sources. There may even be some solar farms contributing, but their combined contribution is less than 5% of all the electricity the nation uses. The subsidies are a form of hidden taxation on consumers.

You have a choice between so-called “clean energy” or no energy if the governors don’t start endorsing the construction of a lot more plants. These plants will use either the cheapest, most abundant energy source in America, coal, or they will use nuclear energy. Thanks to Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid (D-NV), the nation’s nuclear plants still cannot get rid of their waste despite the fact the U.S. government has spent $7 billion for a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, that is still not yet permitted to operate.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with providing affordable fuel for the nation’s 300 million autos, trucks, tractors, and other vehicles.

Minnesota Governor, Tim Pawlenty, this year’s chair, says, “America is ready for bold, innovative energy policies that will make us safer, more independent, and better stewards of the planet. We’ve been asleep at the switch for too long—the time for action is now.”

America’s governors are not elected to be “better stewards of the planet.” They are elected mostly to tend to matters in their own states such as appallingly bad schools, crumbling highways and bridges, attracting business and industry, and overseeing insanely bloated budgets. The occasional natural disaster gets their attention.

A word in your shell-like ear, Gov. Pawlenty; America’s governors, in addition to Congress and the White House, have been and still are a very big part of the nation’s energy problems since the 1980s.

Resisting the building of coal-fired or nuclear plants has been part of the problem. Not demanding that congressional mandates for ethanol use be rescinded is part of the problem. Opposing offshore exploration and drilling is part of the problem for governors of our coastal states and not encouraging mining and drilling for those in between is part of the problem.

Talking for three days about “clean energy” while ignoring America’s real energy problems will not solve those problems. At what point will the rest of us hear any of you discuss and act upon some real solutions?

Learning to Love Nuclear Energy

By Alan Caruba

For those of us who have been warning that America is going to start running out of electricity soon if the governors of our various states do not permit the construction of either or both coal-fired and nuclear plants, the news that Republican candidate, John McCain, says he wants a crash program to build nuclear plants should be greeted with joy.

So let’s at least give a hurrah to a politician who says something, anything, nice about more energy.

McCain has proposed at least 45 nuclear plants be built by 2030, twenty-two years from now. Considering how difficult it is to fund and build a single nuclear plant in the year 2008, the likelihood that anywhere near this goal will be achieved is small.

Happily, nuclear energy now produces about 20% of the electricity Americans use. In Europe, France famously gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear so maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to make fun of the French.

The U.S. got off to a start in the 1970s, but a phony scare generated by Three Mile Island, plus a history of delays and overruns combined to virtually kill the industryfor a decade or two. Today it is making a return with off-the-shelf designs for standardized reactors, along with a much more streamlined federal licensing process.

Still, you don’t put up one of these babies overnight. A 1,500 megawatt reactor used to cost $2 or $3 billion dollars not long ago, but the rising cost of everything, including concrete, steel, other construction materials, and labor now peg the price at closer to $7 billion.

When you throw in the Not-In-My-Backyard crowd, plus the usual environmental groups eager to sue for any reason, you have other factors that slow down McCain’s dream to a crawl. If a migratory bird happens to fly over the area where a plant is sited, you can be sure that the bird will get the first priority from the Greens while the rest of us get another kind of bird.

Naturally, the industry that builds such plants is not going to take on that kind of debt or lay out that kind of cash without federal guarantees that it will receive a certain amount of money per kilowatt hour of electricity and loan guarantees in order to raise the cash in the first place. So, in effect, the public will end up footing the bill and, frankly, if that is the only way to ensure sufficient electrical power, so be it.

There is, however, a much cheaper alternative. It’s coal. The U.S. has centuries’ worth of coal and, since coal-fired plants provide just over half of all the electrical power we use, the obvious question is why not build more?

The answer, in part, is that Greens like Friends of the Earth are waging a huge propaganda campaign against “dirty fuels” and, for several years now, state governors have been resistant to giving their blessing to this common sense answer.

The less obvious answer is that these politicians have thrown in their lot with the Greens and McCain is one of them, a true believer in a global warming that isn’t happening. It is to his credit, however, that he has begun to talk about drilling for oil in the U.S. continental shelf and even that he is proposing nuclear energy.

Unless more politicians begin to respond to America’s growing need for electrical power at some point their refusal to do anything is going to leave you in the dark.

Defending America on the BBC!

By Alan Caruba

When you’re internationally famous or, in my case, just available to do an hour of radio, occasionally the BBC, Great Britain’s famed radio outlet, calls you and asks that you be interviewed or participate in an on-air discussion.

This happened today and, by 1 PM Eastern time and 6 PM London time, I found myself on the air with someone described as “an Iranian blogger”, someone with—I think—the Foreign Relations Council or some such distinguished diplomatic group, and a few others who called in from India, Somalia, and one of the Gulf oil states.

The point of discussion was whether every nation had a right to nuclear power for electricity as well as for the manufacturer of weapons capable of obliterating thousands of people in the name of Allah or Mohamed, peace be upon him.

Everyone agreed that electricity was a good thing and blowing up people with nukes was a bad thing. So far, so good, but of course the fellow defending Iran was so full of crap that it quickly became apparent to everyone that letting the ayatollahs get their hands on these weapons of mass destruction was a very bad idea.

What ensued for an hour was a discussion focused on two themes. The ayatollahs and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, should be taken at their word when they keep saying they want to blow Israel off the map and nuke anyone else they don’t like. Ignoring such threats always leads to worse things.

Dragged into the conversation was poor Syria whose secret nuclear facility was destroyed by the Israelis some seven months ago and the Syrians not only denied it was a nuclear facility, but astonishingly had nothing to say about what Israel did. They actually seemed surprised even though the Israelis had blown up a similar facility in Iraq back in the 1980s. Turns out those wonderful kids from North Korea were helping them build it.

It was left to me to remind everyone that Syria is a dictatorship and a bunch of thugs who go around assassinating Lebanese and supporting Hezbollah for the purpose of attacking Israel because they lack the guts to do so themselves.

The other main thrust of the discussion apparently was to determine how many callers and emailers could blame (1) America and (2) Israel for all the problems of the world. Apparently the mayhem that passes for intergovernmental relations in the Middle East, nor the fact that there isn’t a single functioning democracy (except Israel) to be found in the region hadn’t occurred to anyone but me.

Anyway, I pointed out that Pakistan and India had acquired nuclear weapons years ago and did so without mentioning it to the United Nations or anyone else until it came time to test them. I reminded listeners that when these two enemies reached a point in a fairly recent shouting match that threatened the use of nukes, both became so frightened they immediately started peace talks!

It turned out that I was pretty much the only participant who was both willing and happy to defend America and didn’t much care what the others thought. We’re not perfect, but we don’t go around threatening to blow up other nations…unless, of course, they are practically begging to be blown up.

This was the case of Japan in 1945. The Arab and Persian participants kept saying that the U.S. was the only nation to have used atomic weapons and I rather aggressively reminded them that it was Japan that had attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 and after getting its ass kicked from one end of the Pacific to the other, still refused to surrender. After we obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki they reconsidered their position. Now we are the best of pals.

I also pointed out that the U.S. having engaged in any number of wars since then, Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq, has never used nuclear weapons, ever. And we have a lot of them.

The difference between the former Soviet Union and the lunatics running Iran these days is that the Soviets were not suicidal. When it collapsed in 1991, they were greatly relieved they didn’t have to keep pretending that communism actually works. Even the Chinese, except for their government, are fervent capitalists.

Suffice it to say, I really enjoyed kicking butt on international radio and can’t wait to do it again.

Harsh Realities

By Alan Caruba

Sooner or later reality catches up with all kinds of really bad ideas.

I was thinking about this in the midst of the breathless news coverage of Hillary Clinton’s win in Pennsylvania. The Democrats have managed to paint themselves into a corner with two candidates, neither of whom has a hope in hell of winning the White House in November. Since the 1960s Americans have rid themselves of the uglier aspects of racism and have opened doors for women who want careers. The result is a Black candidate and a woman candidate.

Here’s where reality steps in. Raising children is a fulltime job if you want to do it right. There’s much to be said for utilizing the talents of half the population, but life in America has become so expensive that now both parents must work just to have the basics and a few extras. To put it another way, we consume a lot because we have to. Two cars for starters, child care, and the list just gets longer after that.

Being Black is turning out to be a greater liability than Sen. Obama or any other Democrat has wanted to admit. Being Black and belonging to a church with a pastor who says bad things about America is a bigger liability, but being Black and being a crazed liberal for whom government is the answer to all our problems and needs is popular only with a younger generation.

Young voters buy that nonsense because they don’t know any better. Most don’t even know why America fought a Cold War from 1945 until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, followed not long after by the collapse of the Soviet Union from its own dead weight. Today Russia is making a comeback, due almost entirely to oil and natural gas, but has essentially opted for a new form of czarist government.

Another harsh reality is that America has been going down the Socialist path now since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. All manner of “safety net” programs were put in place and added to, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. These “entitlement” programs are just flat running out of money and the flood of illegal aliens, many with “anchor babies” born here, are going to suck them dry even faster than anticipated. America is aging.

Worse to come will be the complete collapse of our public and private pension funds. The government is obligated to make up any losses and there isn’t enough money to do that. What money that’s still in circulation is rapidly losing its value against the Euro and other currencies. I wonder why? Could profligate spending and a huge deficit have anything to do with it?

More reality intrudes as a worldwide food shortage is occurring thanks to the bonehead notion that America should turn corn and soy into fuel instead of eating it, feeding it to livestock, or exporting it to help the economy. What do you expect from a nation that pays farmers not to plant crops?

Our wheat stocks are at the lowest ebb in years, so a loaf of bread or a pizza is going to become a luxury item pretty soon. Don’t look to the rest of the world because it’s suffering shortages of rice and other grains too. It’s not that there isn’t arable land in places like Africa, but when it’s too costly to buy seeds, fertilizer and the pesticides and herbicides to protect crops, farming is a losing proposition in such places.

The population die-off is going to be horrendous. A billion people live on $1.00 a day or less. The level of corruption worldwide will insure that the warehouses will run out of food. Remember, even if the wealthy nations send money, you can’t eat money.

You can thank the environmentalists for trying to get every pesticide and herbicide banned from use. They have also fought genetically modified seeds whose crops are protected against insect predation, the use of herbicides to rid the field of weeds, and even drought. This accounts for why the Earth has been able to feed over six billion human beings.

The whole world runs on oil in case you haven’t noticed. Aside from the obvious use as fuel, oil is the basis for all plastics and we all use lots of plastic. The uses of oil are too vast to number, but suffice it to say that all machinery requires it in some fashion or other. The speculators have bid up the “oil futures” out of pure human greed and now the price of a barrel is going to the moon.

Meanwhile, the world is not running out of oil. It’s not a supply problem. There are enormous amounts of known reserves and more to be discovered. Part of the problem is that there are not enough refineries worldwide. None have been built in the U.S. since the 1970s. They cost over a billion and, in the meantime, environmental groups and the EPA will amuse themselves suing to protect the environment.

A nation that requires 45 different blends of gasoline in the name of clean air increases the cost of each gallon. Then it requires that the laws of thermodynamics be ignored as it demands more mileage from each gallon while requiring an ethanol additive that reduces mileage.

Meanwhile Congress is contemplating implementing a “cap and trade” program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to fight a global warming that isn’t happening. The sun’s radiation has decreased now for several years. The oceans that normally retain 80% to 90% of the Earth’s heat are cooling too. Bundle up!

These are a few harsh realities that all coming due in unpleasant ways. You can thank to a lot of liberal policies and beliefs that just don’t work in the real world or, when implemented, make life in the real world very expensive and even dangerous.

Earth Day 2008. Get Over It!

By Alan Caruba

Of the many things most people do not know about Earth Day is that it is also the anniversary of the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union. Coincidence? I doubt it.

These days most people know little of history. We are witnessing a new generation who know little or nothing about the Soviet Union and the Cold War it waged against America and the world for the supremacy of Communism in the latter half of the last century. These are kids who don't even known when we fought our Civil War and for whom Korea and Vietnam are just names of places where there were wars, the latter of which we lost.

When we finally left Vietnam, we lost something else too. We lost the willingness to wage war the only way it can be waged, by killing as many of the enemy as possible to make them lose the will to continue. That includes destroying as much of the enemy’s homeland too. It involves overwhelming force and that involves a massive military presence. You can't do that with just volunteers.

The actual financial cost of the war in Iraq has been small compared to the size of our gross domestic product that is measured in trillions of dollars. It’s small, too, in terms of the casualties of the war. In World War Two, we lost more than 4,000 men taking a single Pacific island. Truman dropped two atom bombs on Japan because it was estimated we’d lose a million men to take the main island. He was right to do it.

Americans have grown soft. That’s one of the reasons Osama bin Laden thought he could destroy the Twin Towers, drain a trillion dollars out of our economy, and disappear into the hills of the border country between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He expected the U.S. to respond, but he also knew he had time on his side. We would grow tired of chasing Taliban around. Our allies would grow tired, too.

So we come to Earth Day 2008 and, despite the many good things to be said of America, we have let ourselves be trapped by the many lies of the Greens, incrementally allowing them to decide everything from how much water we can have in our toilet tanks to whether we can buy an incandescent light bulb. Like bin Laden, they knew they could wait us out.

They also know how pliable our politicians are. All three of the candidates for president believe global warming is happening even though a kid in Meteorology 101 can cite the data since 1998 that documents a cooling trend. It’s going to get a lot colder because we are all on the forward edge of a new Ice Age. We’re due one. Any climatologist will tell you that.

So Americans will blindly go along, not understanding why the food costs more and the cost of gasoline and other energy like natural gas keep climbing even though common sense says that if the government does not permit access to our own reserves—for all the blather about energy independence—the price will go up in ways beyond our control.

Americans will blame Big Oil whose combined ownership of worldwide oil reserves represents a scant 4% of the world’s known reserves. That’s right, ExxonMobil, Shell, Conoco Phillips, BP and the rest own very little of the world’s oil.

One of the many nations who does own oil is Russia, our former adversary in the Cold War. Now they have so many oil billions they want to buy American businesses with the surplus. There's something very wrong with that! Under Putin, they have returned to a dictatorship. The Russians seem to prefer that.

Americans will blame our farmers—the 2% of the population that feeds the rest of us and whose exports represent a significant part of economy—but why blame people who the government literally pays to not plant crops? Why blame people whose own costs of planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and transporting their crops to the market cost more thanks to a crazed government mandate to turn 40% to 60% of the corn crop into moonshine and then requires oil refineries to add that moonshine to every gallon of gasoline you buy? And then taxes us for every gallon of that inefficient blend!

Earth Day. What an absolutely idiotic notion.

Anyone who has ever traveled around the planet will tell you that it’s filled with forests, jungles, deserts, mountains,and mostly oceans. We have pretty much used every bit of arable land we can to feed the population. Only the Green Revolution of genetically modified seeds has made it possible to get greater yields per acre of farmland. Otherwise people would have died off in the millions in recent times.

They are likely to do so now if this artificial food shortage created by an idiotic “biofuels” program isn’t junked as fast as possible.

The Greens will just have to be content with killing millions of Africans by denying them DDT to protect against malaria or millions more around the world from dengue fever. Add to that the third of the world’s food supplies that are lost every year to insect and rodent predation because the Greens cannot ban pesticides fast enough.

Then there's that problem of refrigeration to preserve foodstuffs since the Greens got Freon, the cheapest and best refrigerant every invented, banned.

Earth Day makes me want to puke.

Everyone who runs around complaining about plastic supermarket bags makes me want to puke.

Everyone who thinks we should all crowd onto trains and buses and not drive when we want and where we want makes me want to puke.

Everyone who cries about endangered species when 95% of all the species that ever existed on Earth are extinct make me want to puke.

People who don’t care that a billion people on Earth live on about $1 a day or that a billion people do not have electricity make me want to puke.

People that won’t let Americans build more coal-fired or nuclear plants to generate the electricity we need make me want to puke.

A government that throws billions at studies of climate change makes me want to puke.

The climate is changing. The climate has always changed. The climate will continue to change. Get over it!