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

Obama's Green Energy Fail

By Alan Caruba

Watching Secretary of Energy Steven Chu face nearly five hours of grilling by a congressional committee seeking answers to the multi-billion dollar loss taxpayers have taken after the department dispensed their money in pursuit of its Green energy program was a reminder that ideology is not a substitute for reality.

Dr. Chu received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 for his work at Bell Labs, shared with colleagues, on cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. At the time he was appointed to head the Department of Energy, he was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkley. He also had gained notice as an environmental enthusiast advocating a shift away from fossil fuels—coal, natural gas and oil—to combat “climate change.”

At one point Dr. Chu thought that painting roofs and other structures white would help reflect the sun’s radiation and save the nation and the world from global warming. Another nutty idea of his was a global “glucose economy” to create a “low-carbon economy” by shipping glucose from tropical plants would replace oil, the energy source that fuels transportation worldwide and serves a multitude of other uses.

Why any of this nonsense qualified him to be the chief administrator of the Department of Energy defies understanding. A footnote to this is the fact that the Department was the creation of the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter whose “windfall profits” legislation drove much of the oil industry out of America despite the fact that the U.S. sits atop some of the greatest deposits of oil in the world.

The loan guarantees of grants made by the Department of Energy are turning out to be a huge scandal for the Obama administration, rivaling the Department of Justice’s “Fast and Furious” gun-running program to the drug cartels of Mexico. When you toss in an unemployment rate that rivals that of the Great Depression, it is hard to understand why anyone would suggest that Obama will be reelected.

As reported in The Washington Post in September, “A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.”

This works out to $5,077.574 per job created.

We are now familiar with the Solyndra scandal, one of the companies that received loan guarantees despite grave misgivings of DOE staff members. It declared a very predictable bankruptcy as a manufacturer of solar panels. Its failure was blamed on competition from China, also a major producer of wind turbines.

Between solar and wind technology, the failure of these two Green energy producers touted by the Obama administration, is beginning to be noticed at the same time the Environmental Protection Agency is hell-bent on closing down coal-fired electrical power plants and the companies that mine coal.

Another DOE beneficiary was BrightSource, another solar firm which received a $1.4 billion bailout. It turns out that the DOE officials involved was Sanjay Wagle, formerly a principal in Robert Kennedy, Jr’s firm. In 2010, BrightSource whose largest shareholder was Kennedy’s VantagePoint Partners, had $1.8 billion of debt obligations and had lost $71.6 million.

Just how many billions the Obama administration’s Green energy program will have lost by the time they are eventually calculated will be testimony to the general failure of solar and wind power. Meanwhile, the Sierra Club is celebrating Obama’s decision to delay approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, estimated to generate 20,000 jobs.

The Department of the Interior has just delayed shale gas drilling in Ohio “for up to six months” and an industry group estimates that drilling in the Utica shale affected by the delay would produce 204,500 jobs by 2015.

In mid-November, Lisa Murkowski, a Senator from Alaska, wrote an opinion published in The Wall Street Journal, noting that the Obama administration’s proposed expansion of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico are its first concession since its moratorium on drilling in the Gulf. The administration still opposes offshore drilling on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

Sen. Murkowski pointed out that “Cuba, Mexico, the Bahamas, Canada and Russia are all moving ahead on offshore development adjacent to our borders,” noting that according to the Department of Interior, “our offshore areas hold more than 86 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Artic Oceans is projected to hold 20% of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas.”

Why anyone thought Dr. Chu was qualified in any fashion to run the Department of Energy defies the imagination. Why anyone still believes that solar and wind energy can replace traditional proven sources of energy is testimony to environmental propaganda and myth-making.

Green energy is simply one more way the Obama administration has set about destroying America’s capacity to generate the energy needed for everything requiring electricity. It is one more way to impoverish the nation. And he is running for reelection in 2012.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Nutty Professors and Nutty New Taxes

By Alan Caruba

Alan S. Blinder is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. All of which might explain why the nation is broke and why “intellectuals” like Blinder are responsible for some of the most stupid ideas ever imposed on citizens who lack their credentials.

In the January 31st edition of The Wall Street Journal, Blinder had a commentary titled, “The Carbon Tax Miracle Cure.” It is a masterpiece of ignorance.

Blinder claimed that “Everyone knows that CO2 emissions are the major cause of global climate change, that climate change poses a clear and present danger to our planet, and that the U.S. contributes a huge share of global emissions.”

One can only conclude that Blinder is among the last of Al Gore’s acolytes who has not heard that the only “climate change” occurring is the same that has been going on for 4.5 billion years on planet Earth.

Blinder’s miracle tax is “a carbon tax—really, a carbon dioxide tax—but one that starts at zero and ramps up gradually over time.” Will someone please tell Binder that the scheme to sell “carbon credits” for the right to emit carbon dioxide (CO2) has gone bust? Even the Chicago Exchange created to foster this “global warming” fraud has closed its doors.

The idiocy of Blinder’s “miracle tax” is that, if you can tax CO2, what is to prevent government from taxing oxygen too? Or nitrogen? Hell, just tax the entirety of the Earth’s atmosphere because, obviously, we are just using too much of it.

Blinder’s justification is that “the U.S. contributes a huge share of global emissions.” So, naturally, Americans should be taxed for exhaling six pounds of CO2 every day, along with every other activity from manufacturing to transportation, as well as heating and cooling our homes and all other structures. Every living creature and most all human activity emits CO2 along with the earth’s numerous active volcanoes.

It probably never occurred to Blinder that all other nations also “contribute” global emissions.

For the record the Earth’s atmosphere is composed of 76.55% nitrogen, 20.54% oxygen, and 0.91% argon. Of the remaining 2% of the atmosphere, water vapor constitutes 1.95%, while carbon dioxide is 0.0389%. Let me repeat that, 0.0389%.

Despite what the liars at the Environmental Protection Agency are loudly shouting these days, carbon dioxide is not a “pollutant.” In earlier eras there was far more CO2 in the atmosphere than now, providing the dinosaurs vast amounts of vegetation on which to dine and something to eat for those dinosaurs with a taste for other dinosaurs.

The only “global warming” in recent times has been the one degree of warming that began to occur at the merciful end of the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. The Earth has, since 1998, entered a new cycle of completely natural cooling due to a solar cycle called the Maunder Minimum when the Sun’s radiation is reduced.

Acknowledging that “this is a terrible time to hit (the nation) with some big new tax”, Blinder nonetheless advocates a carbon tax that “should be set at zero for 2011 and 2012. After that, it would ramp up gradually.”

“The tax might start at something like $8 per ton of CO2 in 2013 (that’s roughly eight cents per gallon of gasoline), reach $25 a ton by 2015 (still just 26 cents per gallon), $40 a ton by 2020, and keep on rising. I’d like to see it top out at more than $300 a ton in, say 2040.”

This would lead, says Blinder, to “lucrative opportunities from carbon-saving devices and technologies.” He envisions “80% of our electricity being generated by clean energy sources in 2035.”

By clean energy Blinder means wind and solar energy which, together, barely produce one percent of the electricity America uses daily. It is unreliable and would not exist were it not for government subsidies and mandates requiring its use.

Meanwhile, the vast bulk of our electricity comes from coal, just over 50%, and a combination of natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectricity (dams). Even if we blanketed several States with solar mirrors and wind turbines, we could never match the cost effectiveness and efficiency of fossil fuels.

Blinder notes that “No one likes to pay higher taxes” and dismisses value-added taxes (a favorite form of extortion in Europe), but in his view “A CO2 tax trumps them all”, concluding that a carbon tax would reduce oil imports.”

Apparently, it has not occurred to Blinder that extracting some of America’s vast oil reserves, billions of barrels worth, might also reduce oil imports, but what is one to expect from a professor of economics who thinks taxing a minor component of the atmosphere would solve our present economic problems?

Only morons want to turn America’s corn into “biofuels.” Only charlatans want to “reduce” greenhouse gas emissions. And only those locked in academic ivory towers keep insisting that man-made “climate change” is “a clear and present danger.”

You end recessions by reducing taxes, not inventing new ones. You end recessions by encouraging access to the nation’s reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil because that generates real jobs, not “green” ones. And you end recessions by not listening to the likes of Alan S. Blinder.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Denying Americans Their Own Energy

By Alan Caruba

What kind of government deliberately denies its citizens access to the energy they need to live, to conduct business, to transport goods, to travel, and to just turn on the lights? Answer: The United States of America.

In a letter to members of the G-20, the finance ministers and central bankers of leading industrial nations, President Obama said, “We should make sustained effort to carry through with our groundbreaking Pittsburgh commitment to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.”

The result of such action would give international energy companies in other nations a large competitive advantage while penalizing U.S. oil and natural gas companies.

As Dr. Richard Swier noted recently, “In the U.S., support for the oil and gas industry is largely about investment depreciation rules which are available to many industries.” Energy companies routinely put huge amounts of money at risk to explore, discover, and extract the so-called fossil fuels. Take away the subsidies and the cost of all energy use in the U.S. goes up.

Meanwhile, CNN Money reported on November 12 that “President Obama lifted his moratorium on deepwater oil drilling nearly a month ago, but the government still hasn’t issued any new permits in the Gulf of Mexico. And most analysts say permits will be slow in coming through 2011.” (emphasis added)

This is great news for Saudi Arabia and bad news for Americans who think we should be accessing our own vast oil reserves. This failure to revive the oil drilling industry in the Gulf comes at a time when the price of a barrel of oil is rising while leaving thousands of oil industry workers in the Gulf States out of work.

A day earlier in an editorial in The Wall Street Journal it was revealed that while “President Obama continues to advertise the $814 billion stimulus and its green energy subsidy programs in particular as unqualified successes” an eight-page memo from his chief economic advisor, Larry Summers, environment and energy “czar”, Carol Browner, and policy aide, Ron Klain reveals that a $6 billion Department of Energy guarantee of loans and other disbursements was being resisted by the House budget office (OMB) and Treasury had found severe problems with “the economy integrity of government support for renewables.” (emphasis added)

Renewables is a code word for wind and solar energy projects. Loan guarantees, block grants, and government mandates often benefit large administration supporters such as General Electric and other political donors engaged in such projects.

One such project in Oregon would tap taxpayers for $1.2 billion while GE and Caithness Energy LLC would only put in about 11% of the project cost. It is corporate welfare that leaves the public with one of the two worst ways of generating electricity, as opposed to coal-fired and nuclear plants. Even hydroelectric power (generated by dams) is more reliable and less costly.

Back in October, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved a 50-megawatt Silver State Solar Project for Clark County, Nevada and three large solar power projects in California, all to be sited on federal land. This is not exactly what conservationists had in mind when such land was set aside. It diverts and wastes billions.

While all this is going on, the Environmental Protection Agency is still demanding that greenhouse gas emissions be reduced, the best known of which is carbon dioxide. They are referred to as “heat-trapping” gas and identified as the source of “global warming.” Only there is NO global warming and hasn’t been for a decade as the Earth’s overall temperatures have slid into a perfectly natural cooling cycle.

Thanks to Climategate, we now know that “global warming” was a complete fiction put forth by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The question no one at EPA wants to answer is this: if greenhouse gases trap heat, why don’t they do it in the winter? If they are so powerful that they can trap heat, how come it gets cold as winter arrives in either the northern or southern hemispheres? Carbon dioxide does not trap heat, but more CO2 would in fact increase crop yields and aid forest and jungle growth worldwide.

According to CNSnews.com, “Tough new rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency restricting greenhouse gas emissions would reduce the global mean temperature by only 0.006 to 0.0015 of a degree Celsius by the year 2100 according to the EPA’s analysis.” In plain terms, no reduction whatever and none needed!

Greenhouse gas restrictions are nothing less than a criminal act against the citizens of the United States. It is utterly baseless, a fraud no less than “global warming.”

There are many other examples of what the government, under the present and preceding administrations going back to Jimmy Carter’s, have been doing to choke off the acquisition of American’s vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil.

This isn’t a energy policy. It’s a suicide pact to drive up the cost of energy for all Americans, diminishing our competitiveness, and making our lives harsher.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Cartoon Round Up

GE's Really Big, Bad Ideas

By Alan Caruba

Why would General Electric abandon the incandescent light bulb? In 1890 Thomas Edison established General Electric after having achieved fame with it and other inventions. Not only will this iconic invention no longer be manufactured in the United States by next year, but the government has ruled that it cannot even be purchased here.

That is a level of stupidity that defines much of U.S. manufacturing and energy policy these days and explains why so many jobs have been out-sourced to other nations. It demonstrates what harm can be done by a government that has interfered so much in the industrial and financial marketplace that the nation totters on economic ruin.

It goes without saying that you don’t become the chief executive of GE without having demonstrated a lot of smarts and managerial ability, but a recent Wall Street Journal article, “GE Chief Slams U.S. on Energy” made me wonder if Jeff Immelt shares the same nation with me, if not the same planet.

Immelt is all about new sources of energy like wind and solar even though, combined, they produce about three percent of the electricity Americans use every day and, without government subsidies and other government-granted credits, they would barely exist. The reason is obvious. The wind does not blow all the time and the sun is often either behind clouds or it is night time.

In a speech to the Gridwise Global Forum on September 23, Immelt got a lot of facts backward. For example, he reportedly “praised China’s approach to energy and criticized what he called a stalled effort to revamp U.S. energy policy.”

China is building a new coal-fired plant almost weekly in order to ramp up its ability to compete internationally. It is no accident that the nations that use the most energy are also the most successful. It has been U.S. energy policy to slow the building of coal-fired plants even though the U.S. is estimated to have several hundred years of coal with which to supply their needs and ours.

Immelt worried that GE was facing tougher competition around the world selling “equipment to produce renewable (wind and solar) and nuclear energy. GE believes its rivals receive more help from their governments.”

He neglected to mention an effort in the U.S. Senate that would “impose a Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) that would force electric utilities to generate a large and increasing percentage of their power from wind and solar—rising to 15% by 2021”, according to Dr. S. Fred Singer of the Science & Environmental Policy Project.

The RES would give so-called renewable or “clean” energy producers an economic advantage that ignores the obvious. Coal, gas, and nuclear energy are cheaper and more plentiful. Consumers will see their energy bills soar if the RES becomes law.

Immelt noted that the electric grid system in America needs an upgrade and in this he is right. Left unsaid is that both solar and wind require heavy investment to transmit the energy generated, usually in places far from urban or suburban centers, to the grid. Also left unsaid is that most of the wind turbines and solar panels in use today in America are made in China.

Immelt was correct, too, in noting the failure to get behind the production of nuclear energy in the U.S. Most of the plants operating today were built in the 1970s and, for reasons I have never understood, a multi-billion dollar repository for nuclear waste, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, has been closed to use. Meanwhile, nations like India have embarked on an aggressive program to increase and integrate nuclear power for electricity production.

Jack Welch was famous for instilling new life and vitality into GE before his retirement and replacement by Jeff Immelt. In April, Businessweek magazine devoted its cover to a story, “Can GE Gets Its Juice Back? A company renowned for innovation and talent development has lost its way. Inside Jeff Immelt’s quest to find the light.”

GE’s earnings from continuing operations were described as “ho-hum”, having sunk 38% in 2009” and expected to stay flat this year. In an annual shareholder letter, Immelt spoke of a “decade from hell.” You won’t find many corporate leaders or financial analysts that have much good to say of GE these days.

And perhaps that might have something to do with GE’s failure to support the best, proven ways to generate electricity? Or to have failed to protect the American consumer from a government-imposed ban on incandescent light bulbs?

© Alan Caruba, 2010

When Idiots Join Hands

By Alan Caruba

After the June 23 Cabinet meeting, President Obama said:

“We talked about energy. In the context of the oil spill, as I said last week during my Oval Office address, this has to be a wakeup call to the country that we are prepared and ready to move forward on a new energy strategy that the American people desperately want but for which there has been insufficient political will.”

“It is time for us to move to a clean energy future.”

First, let it be said that the American people do not desperately want “a new energy strategy.” They did not want Obamacare. They do not want Cap-and-Trade. They do not want amnesty for an estimated ten to twenty million illegal aliens.

Along with the totally discredited global warming hoax, this has got to be the biggest lie Obama keeps repeating, along with promises of thousands of “green jobs.”

What is Clean Energy?

Obama is referring to solar and wind energy. Neither of these enterprises would last longer than an episode of “So You Think You Can Dance” were it not for the billions of taxpayer’s dollars provided as subsidies to producers who, once the subsidies end, will abandon these most useless of all ways to generate electricity.

When the government mandates that part of the electricity you purchase must be supplied by wind or solar, they are forcing utilities to invest in means of generation that must always be backed up by coal-fired, natural gas, hydroelectric, or nuclear plants. Neither wind, nor solar can be depended upon to produce sufficient electricity, particularly during times of peak uses.

When you see those windmills turning even when there is no wind, there is a plant somewhere providing them with electricity because, unless they constantly turn, their mechanisms famously break down. Solar farms are even less efficient, particularly since the sun does not shine all the time and cloud cover often reduces their capacity.

This, however, will not deter the hoped-for thousands of people who will turn out on Saturday, June 26, to participate in some 700 events across the nation and, we’re told, worldwide in a mega-event called “Hands Across the Sand.” It is intended to encourage more “clean energy.”

“This simple, but powerful human expression of unity will send a clear message to our leaders that more offshore drilling is not the answer and now is the time to create our clean energy future,” said event founder, David Rauschkolb, described as a restaurant owner in Seaside, Florida.

That’s who we want making energy policy, a restaurant owner!

Among the sponsors of the event are Audubon, the Alaska Wilderness League, the Center for Biological Diversity, Clean Water Action, Defenders of Wildlife, Earth Day Network, Endangered Species Coalition, Energy Action Coalition, Environment America, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, MoveOn.org, Ocean Conservancy, Rainforest Action Network, and the Sierra Club.

In other words, the most mendacious environmental groups, all devoted to impeding the development and access to the huge quantities of energy needed to maintain industry, agriculture, and an economy that, despite their constant interference and obstruction, is still the world’s leader in value of goods produced.

To them, the Gulf oil spill is the best thing that ever happened. One well out of hundreds in the Gulf of Mexico has suffered a horrible failure, but these are the people who want to shut down all of them despite a fifty-year history of safety.

No doubt the mainstream media will have a field day showing us coverage of countless idiots holding hands on beaches, near waterways, and wherever else they will gather in the name of not having any gasoline to fill the tanks of the cars that brought them there, not having the electricity to power the air conditioners in their homes, not having anything made from plastic, not even having asphalt on the highways and streets they will drive upon after the event.

It is not likely to occur to any of them that deepwater oil wells are the result of the bans environmental organizations continue to demand as they oppose drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or anywhere along the 85% of U.S. coastal areas where huge amounts of untapped oil and natural gas exist.

This nation faces many hazards, but the greatest hazard of all is a President who wants to pass the biggest tax in U.S. history, Cap-and-Trade, on energy use. It is not a climate bill. It is not a jobs bill.

It is just another scheme based on the fraud of reducing so-called greenhouse gas emissions. The Earth produces 97% of these emissions. They are a part of the atmosphere of the Earth, albeit the atmosphere is almost entirely composed of oxygen and nitrogen. It is best understood as primarily water vapor!

The cartoon character, Pogo, famously said, “We have met the enemy and it is us.” You can watch them join hands on Saturday and demand a return to the Dark Ages.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Shut Up, Barack!

By Alan Caruba

Does anyone recall the first weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency? He was everywhere on the media all the time.

His constant use of TelePrompters became an instant joke, suggesting he could not say anything unless it was scripted. Indeed, listening to him try to speak without them is a painful process of a very slow selection of words and very long pauses in between.

After his first press conference he stopped holding them until 309 days later when he addressed the oil spill in the Gulf. It was such a lame performance that his advisors apparently thought a speech from the Oval Office, his first, would make up for that. It didn’t.

In this age of 24/7 news coverage, Barack Obama has managed to make himself ubiquitous to the point of complete inanity.

So, I have a bit of advice for him: Shut up, Barack.

The seas have not ceased to rise because you were elected (as promised) and the Earth has not “healed itself.” Indeed, it is bleeding oil at a prodigious rate, confounding BP’s engineers, all graduates no doubt of the Acme School of Oil Drilling.

What have we learned about Barack Hussein Obama? If George W. Bush was considered an amiable dunce, Obama has demonstrated to everyone he is the worst kind of ideologue, totally tone deaf to the Voice of the People.

When nearly a million Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. on September 12th last year to protest Obamacare, his communications advisor, David Axelrod dismissed them saying, “They’re wrong.”

Axelrod was on all the network and cable news shows the day following his Oval Office appearance defending a speech that essentially said we don’t know what we’re doing, but we blame BP. The good news is that the president has finally found someone else to blame other than George W. Bush for his own ineptitude and incompetence.

In case you haven’t noticed, Obama’s approval ratings in the polls are in the low 40s and heading south. There is a hard core of about 30% who support Obama no matter what he does or doesn’t do.

In an article by the Editor-in-Chief of CNSnews, Terence P. Jeffrey, he noted that “The middle class is abandoning President Barack Obama, according to data released by the Gallup Poll. The only income bracket among which a majority still says they approve of the job he is doing as president are those earning $2,000 per month or less.”

Anyone still making a living comparable to achieving the American Dream has long since abandoned the great Community Organizer with the exception of union members. When you lose the middle class, you have lost the great engine of the American economy.

With the exception of the growing legion of government workers, the unions had been losing members for years. They were held in generally low esteem and their destruction of General Motors and Chrysler bears out their parasitic relationship with business and industry. Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s support from teacher’s unions suggests why our educational system has been in the toilet for decades.

Every time Obama opens his mouth, his approval falls. It began with his great Apology Tour to the Middle East at the beginning of his presidency, continued with his acceptance of a Nobel Peace Prize for having done nothing notable, and plunged with his advocacy of the much-hated Obamacare shoved down the throats of all Americans.

In addition to advocating a Cap-and-Trade bill that is a huge tax on energy use, he is now babbling about a “clean energy future” that apparently involves paving over America with millions of acres of solar farms and coast-to-coast wind turbines.

Obama doesn’t like coal that provides fifty percent of all the electricity we use every day and, of course, oil that fuels our cars, trucks, tractors, et cetera.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

Barack Hussein Obama is living proof of that.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Obama Asks America to Commit Suicide

By Alan Caruba

President Obama is one of the most articulate we have had in that office. His ability to deliver a speech or a short talk such as his first from the Oval Office Tuesday evening is impressive. He knows how to deliver an address.

What he doesn’t know or doesn’t care about is the difference between the truth and a lie.

His fifteen-minute address was the piling on of one lie after another regarding America’s use of energy and its needs for the future.

It is a lie to say America is “addicted” to “fossil fuels.” Oil is not a fossil fuel. It is not the result of dead dinosaurs. It is created deep in the bowels of the planet. There is an abundance of oil, but with the wealth it creates there is also massive corruption in many of the nations that possess it.

We are no more addicted to oil than we are addicted to oxygen. This extraordinary mineral is a part of every aspect of our lives; used to create plastic, used in pharmaceuticals, used for the asphalt that pave our highways, and used as the fuel for our cars, trucks, and for countless other applications.

Oil is not “finite” as the president suggested. There is no end of oil.

There are, however, tremendous challenges and costs to find it, drill for it, transport it, and refine it. It is an industry that requires huge amounts of money to discover new reservoirs of oil and even more to acquire it. It involves tremendous risk as well. Oil companies that hit too many dry wells are no longer in business.

The president cited China as a nation pursuing “clean energy”, but the president said nothing of the new coal-fired plants to generate electricity that China has been opening every week in recent years and will continue to do in the years ahead. The president did not mention that China is literally drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Cuba. Like every modern nation, China needs oil.

America needs oil, but the policies of previous administrations from the 1970s onward have stymied production, shut down existing wells, driven oil companies to seek it anywhere but here!

Instead, he devoted the thrust of his address to tell Americans they must “embrace a clean energy future”, must “transition away” from so-called fossil fuels, and that the nation must, in fact, “accelerate” that effort.

The president is lying. There is no “clean energy future” when he talks of solar and wind energy.

Neither solar or wind can begin to compete with oil, coal and natural gas. If they were viable, the government would not have to plunder the national treasury to provide them with subsidies, requiring that they be included as a source by utilities.

Together, after many years of propaganda, they only provide about three percent of the nation’s energy requirements. They will never provide enough because the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine. Every wind and solar farm must be backed up by a traditional plant, be it coal-fired, nuclear, natural gas or hydroelectric.

Instead, this administration has declared war on the most abundant source of energy we have in America, coal. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal.

Coal provides fifty percent of our electricity and it could provide even more; a source that could last for centuries, except that the Obama administration is doing everything it can to thwart the building of new coal-fired plants, to shut down coal mining operations.

If Americans continue to believe this president’s lies, if we continue to believe decades of lies by environmental organizations, many of whom have been the happy recipients of oil industry largess and support, and if we abandon the very sources of energy on which our entire economy and way of life depends, this president will have led America off the cliff.

President Obama is asking America to commit suicide.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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

The US Government is Pushing Climate Change like a Drug

By Alan Caruba

We all know that heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamines are addictive drugs that do a great deal of harm to those addicted to them, but the U.S. government has been pushing global warming, now called climate change, to addict Americans to the belief that the Earth is threatened when it is not.

Climate change is what has been going on for the 4.5 billion of years of Earth’s existence. It has nothing to do with human behavior, energy use, or carbon dioxide, the bogyman of greenhouse gases.

So why is the National Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering, preparing to release “three new reports examining how the nation can combat the effects of global warming”?

Why does one of the reports focus “on the science that supports human-induced climate change and the others review options for limiting the magnitude and adapting to the impacts of global warming” when there is NO global warming?

The Earth has been a distinct and well-documented cooling cycle for over a decade at this point in time!

Moreover, the U.S. government has wasted some $50 billion on climate change research over the course of the last two or three decades. Do we really need three new reports—--particularly when they are going to repeat that same debunked “science” that has underwritten the greatest fraud of the modern era?

May 19 is the day when the president of the National Academy of Sciences, Ralph J. Cicerone, will deliver the opening statement and members of the several panels will commit an act of scientific charlatanism by repeating the lies that have been driving the global warming fraud for way too long.

Fortunately, if you want the truth, you can attend the speakers and panels of the 4th International Conference on Climate Change that will occur May 16-18 in Chicago. It is sponsored by The Heartland Institute

Could these three new reports have anything to do with the fact that a so-called climate bill, the Cap-and-Trade Act (since renamed) has been introduced in the Senate, having been pushed through the House in the same way as Obamacare? The bill is an economy-killer.

The Renewable Energy Scam

Could this have something to do with the U.S. Army hosting “the inaugural Renewable Energy Rodeo and Symposium” on June 8-9m at Fort Bliss? And would somebody please tell me what fighting of our nation’s wars has to do with renewable energy? Answer: It doesn’t. But when you are in the process of corrupting science while promoting the most bogus forms of energy other than oil, natural gas, and coal, using every element of the federal government to advance your agenda is obvious.

Meanwhile, the International City/County Management Association has received a $5 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy to “head a team that will work with local government leaders and stakeholders to accelerate wider adoption of solar energy. IMCA will work with the American Planning Association, the National Association of Regional Councils, and industry experts on this new project.”

The key words here are “industry experts” because, if the U.S. government was not wasting your money on solar energy, the most inefficient method of generating electricity other than wind, those in these industries would be looking for jobs waiting on tables or working a Zamboni ice smoothing machine.

Quite possibly, too, you are unaware that the National Governors Association, rather than focusing on the fact that most States are broke, will instead devote themselves to “initiatives to improve energy efficiency, promote alternative (solar and wind) energy sources, and (to) lower greenhouse gas emissions.”

What Americans are being subjected to is a campaign to enrich wind and solar energy producers and the sellers of “carbon credits” while at the same time being told that climate change is the most pressing issue facing the nation. It is a totally invented issue.

This is criminality on a massive scale because it is criminal to impoverish Americans by advocating energy schemes that ignore our dependence on the traditional sources of energy. Indeed, the entire industrialized and modern world depends on these sources.

It is criminal to advocate a bogus “climate change” whose true intent is to enrich utilities, some select large industries, and others with worthless “carbon credits” to be sold on exchanges controlled by Wall Street firms and environmental titans like Al Gore. In Europe such exchanges have generated massive fraud.

While this occurs—if it does occur—Americans will pay more for electrical energy and see a significant rise in the cost of gasoline. Manufacturing will seek friendlier nations in which to set up shop and thousands more jobs will be exported.

We must rid ourselves of the Obama administration and the Democrats in control of Congress before they achieve their goal of destroying America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Solar Powered Lies

By Alan Caruba

I lived in Florida for some five years between attending the University of Miami and returning after service in the Army for a job I left on news of JFK’s assassination. Some five years ago my older brother, a resident of Boynton Beach, urged me to relocate.

As the exit doors of the Palm Beach Airport slid open, I was hit with a soggy blast of hot air that instantly told me I would not be taking up residence there again.

I returned to New Jersey which shares with Florida, California and ten other States the dubious honor of being on the brink of financial collapse and default. Like others, New Jersey requires that some part of electricity production must came from “renewable” sources such as solar or wind.

Other States have a similar mandate. Utilities have embraced it because the costs are heavily subsidized with taxpayer dollars. It is an enormous waste of money made worse by the unreliable aspects of both plus the need to always have a backup supplier, usually in the form of a coal-fired plant.

To make matters worse, Congress is contemplating a national Renewable Electricity Standard that would require more use of solar and wind energy. The argument for this is the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid “global warming.” However, there is no global warming. For the past decade, there’s been a global cooling and it is anticipated to last for several more decades.

Finally, it must be said that there is NO connection whatever between greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and any warming that did naturally occur. Ever.

Thus, a national mandate would just multiply the waste of billions of taxpayer dollars required to subsidize these massively inefficient and unreliable forms of electricity production.

In October there was a flurry of news stories about the largest solar panel plant in the United States, located on 180 acres of land, 80 miles southeast of Tampa. Naturally, President Obama paid a visit to the Desoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center because he is a big booster of renewable energy. He keeps telling everyone that it will generate hundreds, if not thousands, of new “green” jobs.

What the President didn’t say during his visit was that the solar panels and other items were manufactured in nations other than the United States. The solar cells came from the Philippines. The steel mountings were made in Canada. The electric boxes were manufactured in Germany.

The project did generate some 400 temporary jobs, but how many full time jobs will the new Florida installation generate? The total comes to two full-time employees and six part-time groundskeepers who will work one week a month during the rainy season.

And here’s where it just gets totally obscene. The Desoto facilities and two other Florida Power and Light solar facilities will generate enough electricity to power just 3,000 homes of the 4,000,000-plus accounts served by Florida’s largest utility.

Less than 4% of Florida’s energy needs will be met by this $150 million facility. Meanwhile, proposed coal-fired and nuclear plants are fought to a standstill by environmentalists.

And, finally, consider this piece of news. General Electric just announced that it plans to close down its only solar-panel manufacturing facility because if found the price for panels had fallen below production costs! The 82 employees at the Newark, Delaware facility will join the other millions of Americans who are out of work.

America, like Great Britain, is closing in on an era of blackouts because the federal government is doing everything in its power to thwart the building of proven sources of electricity production, coal-fired and nuclear plants. America is the Saudi Arabia of coal, sitting atop enough to provide power for the next three hundred or more years. No new nuclear plants have been built in three decades.

It’s only a matter of time before the Obama administration announces that shoveling snow has been reclassified a “green” job. Jimmy Carter’s famed “misery index” is about to shoot off the charts.

Energy ABCs: Playing Americans for Fools

By Alan Caruba

I have long harbored strong doubts about the knowledge that most Americans possess regarding the sources of energy they largely take for granted. We flip a switch and the lights go on. We pull up to the gas pump and drive away. We use machines that are totally dependent on having enough electricity to power entire cities as well as rural communities.

Since all successful economies depend on abundant, affordable energy, why is the Congress preparing to pass a cap-and-trade bill, renamed to suggest “clean energy” and “national security” has anything to do with a huge tax on the use of energy by all Americans?

There are some fundamental facts about energy in America you need to know. The Congressional Research Service recently released a report on U.S. energy reserves. To begin:

The U.S. has 1,321 billion barrels of oil (or barrels of oil equivalent for other sources of energy) when combining its recoverable natural gas, oil and coal reserves. This is oil known to exist and oil estimates in fields as yet untapped. Between Alaska and the continental offshore potential, we could literally be self-sufficient.

Keep in mind, however, oil represents less than 40% of our energy use, nor do we import most of that from the Middle East. Two-thirds of our oil consumption comes from North America with Canada and Mexico being major providers. By expanding domestic production, we could reduce dependency on the Middle East even further.

That said, since the days of Jimmy Carter, the White House and Congress has gone out of its way to make it difficult, if not impossible, to tap domestic reserves. When a windfall profits tax was imposed on November 9, 1978, it sent a message to U.S. oil companies they were not welcome here.

While ExxonMobil is the favorite target of environmental organizations such as Friends of the Earth or the Sierra Club, the fact is that it is no longer in the seven top oil producers in the United States. The “big” domestic oil companies are now Aera Energy, Anadarko, and Occidental. ExxonMobil looks for oil in overseas locations.

Astonishingly, other oil producing nations whose reserves are ranked behind the U.S. are Russia, Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, and Canada. The only oil “shortage” in the U.S. is one created by Congress and the energy policies of a succession of past presidents. An estimated 87% of our oil reserves remain untouched.

When it comes to coal, the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal with 28% of all the world’s coal reserves. Russian comes in second with 19%. Coal represents more than 50% of all the electricity produced in America and the Obama administration has declared war on it.

The cap-and-trade bill before Congress puts all of its emphasis on the two worst, most expensive, and job-killing forms of energy, wind and solar. Combined they represent a pathetic 1% of electricity. They are unreliable sources, dependent on whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. Moreover, though never mentioned, they require backup sources of traditional energy production. You cannot have wind or solar energy without also having a coal-fired, hydroelectric, or nuclear plant to ensure a steady source.

As reported in Newsweek, “Each year as much as $100 billion is spent by governments and consumers around the world on green subsidies to encourage wind, solar, and other renewable energy markets.”

The result, in the U.S. is a virtually army, “1,150 lobbying groups that spent more than $20 million to lobby the U.S. Congress as it was writing the Clean Energy bill (which would create a $60 billion annual market for emissions permits by 2012.)”

The Newsweek article said, “It’s a genetic defect that not only guarantees great waste, but opens the door to manipulation and often demonstrably contravenes the objectives that climate policy is supposed to achieve.”

We do not have a climate policy in the United States. We have a huge scheme to enrich a small group of people who will control the exchanges for utterly bogus “carbon credits”, nothing more than the right to emit carbon dioxide as the natural result of burning fuel for energy. It is not, however, such industrial and other uses that represents the largest emitter of carbon dioxide. The Earth itself is responsible for 95% of the CO2 in the atmosphere and that CO2 represents 3.618%.

By comparison, nuclear energy does not produce CO2 emissions and yet there hasn’t been a new nuclear reactor built in the United States for some thirty years.

The same is true for the building of a single new oil refinery in America. Since it takes about a decade from start to finish on these huge engineering projects and a billion dollar investment, it would be 2020 before one was in full production if begun next year. The real question is, if you were an oil company CEO, would you invest that kind of money when the U.S. won’t let you explore or extract oil on or offshore?

What no one is telling you is that CO2 does not “cause” global warming and there is no global warming. The Earth is actually in a natural cycle of cooling that began in 1998 and is anticipated to last at least two to three decades.

Europe’s experience with “renewable” energy has been a disaster. Great Britain is facing blackouts that will make economic growth impossible and wreak havoc on the daily lives of the English. As with other European nations, it has driven up the cost of electricity.

The American energy consumer is being lied to and stolen from in the form of the cap-and-trade bill under consideration and other obstacles.

The nation as a whole is being put at risk for lack of access to our own vast energy reserves, coal, oil, and natural gas, as well as nuclear power that will be needed to reverse the present recession, unemployment, and the ability to grow our way back to prosperity.

Editor's Note: To read the report, click on
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=f7bd7b77-ba50-48c2-a635-220d7cf8c519

Sunshine is Free Energy, Right?

By Alan Caruba

I cringe every time I hear President-elect Obama and the group of global warming maniacs he has assembled to run the nation talk about creating millions of “green jobs” based on solar and wind energy.

These are two of the least practical and most expensive ways to generate electricity for a nation whose population exceeds three hundred million people requiring billions of kilowatt-hours of electricity. Still don’t get it? Just look at a satellite photo of the United States at night!

But solar and wind energy is virtually free, right? You don’t have to pay anything for sunshine and wind, right? Wrong! If it was free or even affordable, there would be no need for huge government subsidies—your tax money—and mandates on utilities to include solar and wind energy. Without them neither solar nor wind power industries could exist.

I lived in little Maplewood, New Jersey for more than sixty years until a raise in my property taxes rendered my home unaffordable for an aging retiree. I moved to an apartment complex one town over. Other than the rent, my utility bills for electricity and heat are laughable compared to the upkeep of my former home. I don’t shovel the snow. I don’t mow the lawns. I have access to a large pool, a well-equipped fitness center, and even a business center equipped with computers.

The local weekly covers the news of my former hometown and the one in which I presently reside. On the front page of the December 24 edition was an article, “Solar panels on library vetoed.”

“Maplewood officials shelved plans to install solar panels or slates on top of Memorial Library. Harvesting solar power was seen as a way to save electricity and earn the township a little money by selling renewable energy certificates.”

Anyone buying “renewable energy” or “carbon credit” certificates is just throwing their money away. In the real world, they aren’t worth the paper they are printed upon, but utilities in New Jersey and nearby States are required by law to spend millions on them instead of being able to invest that money in upgrading their electrical grid and other maintenance.

“But the cost of the solar technology would have added $200,000 or more to the cost of replacing the facility’s roof. They also found they could save more by better conserving energy inside the building.”

I have read estimates of the cost of putting solar panels on one’s home that conclude you’d have to live there thirty years or more to ultimately earn a savings in energy use comparable to the initial cost of installation.

Financial analysts, Raymond James & Associates, released a report estimating that solar power in residential applications costs $0.37 per kilowatt-hour, nearly four times as much as electricity from conventional sources.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration released an estimate that, by 2030, solar power might be providing about 5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year to American consumers. By contrast, the agency expects that conventional coal-fired plants will produce 3,351 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. By any comparison available, solar is possibly the most idiotic way to produce electricity. With the exception, that is, of wind power.

Solar energy, except in limited uses, is one of the great scams of the environmental movement. It is also one of the cornerstones of the incoming administration’s plans to combat a global warming that hasn’t been happening for a decade.

Our economy is going to hell at the same time the incoming administration is laboring under the delusion that it can create millions of “green jobs” plus throw billions at various environmental projects to prevent a Depression.

You are looking at a serious act of madness and deception at the worst possible time.

Living in a Funhouse Run by Morons

By Alan Caruba

It is hard not to believe that the United States is being run by people who have no idea regarding science, economics, or history.

Case in point, back in 2007 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that carbon dioxide was “a pollutant.” That is to say, CO2 is, according to SCOTUS, a gas that must be limited, sequestered, and subject to vast bureaucratic efforts to save the planet from its deleterious affects.

The only problem with this definition is that CO2 is responsible for every blade of grass, every field of wheat, every giant Sequoia tree. Not one bit of vegetation on earth grows without it. Moreover, human beings exhale about two pounds of it daily. No vegetation. And soon no animals that are herbivores. Take away the herbivores and the carnivores, meat-eaters, have nothing to dine upon. This makes life dodgy for humans who are both herbivores and carnivores.

One can only conclude that the judges have drunk as deeply of the Green Kool-Aid as apparently every other member of government. Environmentalism will not save the planet or a single life. Just the opposite. Its opposition to pesticides like DDT has already cost millions of lives lost to malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.

But who could be against clean air and clean water? Well, certainly not Republicans because the Environmental Protection Agency was foisted upon us during the Nixon administration along with other agencies that expanded the size of the federal government.

Now we keep hearing that the present Recession will be solved with millions of “green collar” jobs. This is so absurd as to be laughed out of the room, but then, so is the notion that CO2 is a pollutant.

The one thing it surely is not, is a gas that has any effect whatever on climate change.

A policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, William Yeatman, pointed out that in my home state of New Jersey, Governor Jon Corzine repeating the same green job nonsense, “is doomed to failure for the same reason communism failed in Russia: government is incapable of successfully planning any industry,” adding that “the only jobs government can create are those for bureaucrats and regulators.” States that do not have a constitutional mandate to balance their budgets are also doomed to failure.

Right now, the wind and solar power industry produces about one percent of all the electricity Americans need, but we keep hearing that countless new green jobs will result from growth in both these areas. The problem is that without government subsidies, neither wind, nor power would even be in business.

In some cases, states have passed laws requiring utilities to get some of their power from wind and solar even though it is the least efficient and reliable means. Some states have required utilities to buy million of dollars of bogus “carbon credits” and guess who ends up picking up the tab for this? YOU!

The Obamaloonies cannot wait to take office and start running America and, if you think life is getting difficult now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. One of the reasons Detroit’s Big Three auto manufacturers are in Washington begging for a loan are the mandates imposed on them by Congress in the form of CAFÉ standards and a dozen other ways to insure every car and truck will cost more for no good reason.

I am all for safety standards, but have you noticed that more than 40,000 Americans die in car crashes every year no matter how many air bags and other gimmicks are added?

If you think the Congressional mandate that ethanol be blended with every gallon of gasoline was useful to anyone other than those making ethanol, think again. The ethanol debacle forced up the cost of corn and soy to the extent that food riots broke out around the world and now some of the same ethanol producers are going out of business because corn and soy’s prices have risen to a point where, even with major subsidies, they can’t make a profit.

If the word “subsidies” keeps popping up, it’s because Congress is under the impression that it can take public monies to prop up private enterprises whose sole purpose is to help save the Earth or make us “energy independent.”

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and no nation on Earth is energy independent. If that was the case, oil-rich Venezuela would not be tottering on the edge of insolvency. Of course, it helps that socialism is the economic system there.

And creeping socialism in the United States has not yet convinced anyone that it does not work. It has never worked. When you use “saving the environment” or “social justice” to justify one new socialist government program after another, eventually you end up with a DEPRESSION.

Who Are You Calling Stupid?

By Alan Caruba

The September 14, Sunday edition of The New York Times is a study in what might be called journalistic cognitive dissonance.

On the front page the lead story was “Storm Damage is Extensive and Millions Lose Power.” On the editorial page, Pulitzer Prize winning bloviator, Thomas Friedman, was explaining why we have to stop using oil as an energy source for transportation and replace coal and nuclear with wind turbines and solar panels to produce electricity.

The title of Friedman’s column was, “Making America Stupid”, and it is a pretty good description of the entire environmental movement whose main objective often seems to be the thwarting of any new energy, i.e., power, sources in America.

“Almost the entire metropolitan area (of Houston, Texas) lost power, and authorities said more than three million people were trying to manage in the dark. Utility officials say it could be weeks before power is restored throughout the region.”

Bad news for Texans, but worse news for the rest of us. “The magnitude of the power loss and the flooding raised the possibility that several major oil refineries would take more than a week to reopen.”

It helps, if you are a New York Times editor, to be unable to make the connection between your page one story and the babbling of Thomas Friedman who is inside the same issue calling for “innovating a whole new industry of clean power” for America after the grudging admission that “Of course, we’re going to need oil for many years.” You think????

Friedman’s column lambastes the bad old Republicans for wanting to “focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology—fossil fuels—rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology—renewable energy.”

That fabulous renewable energy, wind and solar power, would surely have been embraced by now if it could deliver the power that, for example, is not available in Houston and a huge swath of Texas. Could it be because a lot of power lines have been blown down?

In Texas, there are lots of wind turbines, but they like all the rest in the nation provide barely one percent of our electricity needs. And they exist only because they are heavily subsidized with federal and state funding. To put it another way, they are so inefficient and impractical, that without the government mandating them, they would not exist! The same goes for solar power.

This is what happens when government intrudes itself into areas left to intelligent people. During the Carter administration, the Department of Energy was established in 1977 for the purpose—we were told—of reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Thirty-one years later the budget for DOE is $24.2 billion a year. It has 16,000 employees and some 100,000 contract employees. Are we energy independent yet? This is the same Jimmy Carter who had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House. They’re gone now.

Friedman pauses in his criticism of Sen. McCain and the Republican solutions to our energy needs (“Drill, baby, drill!”) to make fun of their proposal for more nuclear plants. Rumor has it that France gets most of its electricity from them. India is building some for its growing energy needs, but Freidman wants to carpet America with solar panels and ruin the landscape will thousands of wind turbines. No thank you!

There’s a reason why we don’t have more coal-fired and nuclear plants generating the electricity we need.

There’s a reason our electric power grid is not being upgraded to meet our future needs.

There’s a reason oil companies won’t spend billions to build new refineries.

There’s a reason food costs more when corn is converted into fuel instead of food.

The reason is thirty-one years of government regulations and general interference with the power and energy industries that must answer to their investors while coping with “environmental” laws that slow or render impossible the provision of our energy needs.

Enthralled as all liberals are with Sen. Obama, Friedman assures us that, when elected, he will improve education and health care, deal with the deficit, and forge “a real energy policy based on building a whole new energy infrastructure.”

No, he won’t. The government just makes a botch of it when it intrudes into the marketplace to control education and health care.

The government has given us the deficit, not reduced it.

And real energy policy is based on access to our nation’s vast deposits of affordable coal and the ability of the oil and gas industry to extract the vast reserves of oil and natural gas that exist.

Friedman thinks it’s stupid to drill for oil and natural gas, and mine our coal. He thinks it’s smart to throw money at windmills and solar panels. He thinks you’re stupid enough to agree with him.

A New Definition of Agriculture

By Alan Caruba

When is a car not a car? When you decide to call it a bicycle. When is a horse not a horse? When you decide to call it a cow. Just because you call something a name that does not properly describe it does not change its reality, but I live in New Jersey where reality is subject to the whim of the morons we elect to represent us.

Thus, I give you a piece of legislation sponsored by State Senator Bob Smith that would redefine wind turbines and solar panels as “agriculture.” And all this time you thought agriculture was about growing crops and raising livestock.

An Associated Press article in the July 1 edition of The New Jersey Farmer, one of my favorite publications, the headline read, “N.J. weighs bill encouraging alternative farm energy.” It would define solar and wind energy generation as an “agricultural activity.”

Now, I grant you some savvy farmers have installed solar panels to generate electricity to run their farms, but to suggest that covering acre after acre of preserved farmland with solar panels and wind turbines is a truly bad idea. In fact, it’s so bad that the bill offers those who would do this protection “from nuisance complaints from neighbors, similar to protections farmers have from complaints about the smell of manure, for instance.”

If you don’t like the smell of manure, it’s probably not a good idea to build your home near a farm, something that people who think food magically appears on the shelves of supermarkets, were unaware of when they decided to retire to the bucolic areas of the state.

“Despite New Jersey being the most densely populated state, it is a leader in farm preservation, with more than 18 percent of its farmland preserved.” This was one of the few good ideas the legislature enacted. It has cost the state $680 million and another $358 million from local government and charities to ensure that our little paradise is not entirely paved over or turned into wall-to-wall strip malls and housing developments.

I am not alone in thinking it is a bad idea. Alison Mitchell, a policy director with the New Jersey Conservation Foundation points out that “farm preservation is meant to save agriculture and farmland—not spur new construction on preserved land.” You think?

The bill has cleared a N.J. Senate committee and is awaiting a vote by the full Senate. It has yet to have received assembly consideration. New Jersey is a state in which its entire Congressional delegation and Governor remains unalterably opposed to offshore exploration and drilling for oil and natural gas, but apparently covering farmland with solar panels and wind turbines is a good thing.

Imagine the joy of going to the shore and enjoying one of our many beaches and then driving home past miles and miles of wind turbines or solar panels, some of which are actually producing a small measure of power if the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. The rest of the time they would just be a giant eyesore.

And then imagine that they are “agriculture” and not some demented politician’s idea of what farming and ranching really should be.

Here's what everyone should worry about. Laws like this get picked up and enacted by other States.