"Earth Hour's" Global Propaganda Campaign

By Alan Caruba

On Saturday, 8:30 PM local time, everyone will be invited to turn off all their electrical devices and presumably sit in the dark. According to the World Wildlife Fund, Earth Hour is intended to “encourage American cities to prepare for the costly impacts of climate-related extreme weather and reduce their carbon footprint.”

Earth Hour is an example of the enormous funding available to the Greens and of their continued assault on the world’s population to encourage and maintain its message that the Earth is imperiled by mankind’s activities, i.e., the use of energy. Earth Hour is a huge piece of international propaganda. Millions of dollars and man-hours have been expended to get the lights turned off from the Eiffel Tower to the Empire State Building, the Leaning Tower of Pisa to Australia’s Opera House.

You may have noticed there is no longer any reference to “global warming.” That’s because a growing percentage of Americans have concluded that global warming is a hoax. The same charlatans behind Earth Hour and the forthcoming Earth Day on April 22nd have mostly abandoned any reference to global warming and are now lying to you about “climate change” and, soon enough, will shift their message to “sustainability.”

On December 21, 2012, you will find the same people who have drunk deeply of the global warming Kool-Aid sitting on mountaintops waiting for the end of the world as predicted by a Mayan calendar. You will not find any Mayans there because that civilization is long gone.

More recently, Pastor Harold Camping predicted the end of the world in 1994 and then revised his prediction to May 21, 2011. People have been predicting the end of the world for a very long time. They have all been wrong.

Earth Hour fits into this pattern, but its insidious purpose to maintain the same levels of anxiety and fear that has driven the environmental movement since it began in earnest back in the 1970s when it was predicting an ice age would arrive. A decade later they switched gears and began predicting global warming, projecting the end over periods of time from a decade to fifty years or so.

Global warming—a dramatic rise in the Earth’s temperatures—did not occur for two reasons; (1) it was a hoax based on computer models created by charlatans and, (2) largely due to a natural cooling cycle that set in around 1998 as the Sun’s sunspot activity began its own natural cycle in which fewer such magnetic storms occurred. Scientists have long known that a reduction of sunspots has always been accompanied by cooling on Earth.

The Green’s claim that a build-up of carbon dioxide (CO2) would plunge the Earth into a period of warming is the greatest lie of the modern era. The Earth has had periods in which the level of CO2 was much higher. Vital to all life on Earth, CO2 is to all vegetation what oxygen is to all animal life.

The notion that “man made” CO2 portends disaster is false and is directed at forcing the reduction of the use of all “fossil fuels” for industrial and all other uses. It is the greatest scam ever perpetrated because the Greens use it to sell “carbon credits”, worthless pieces of paper that could be sold or traded in the same way as the “indulgences” that were sold as a way to buy a ticket into heaven.

I recommend that you read a short book that explains how and why the environmental movement is a huge scam and a hideous attack on mankind. “Roosters of the Apocalypse” by Rael Jean Isaac ($8.95) is published by The Heartland Institute and can be purchased from its website. In less time than it takes to watch “Dancing with the Stars”, you will learn everything you need to know about the global warming scam and all the ways you and everyone else are being robbed by the schemes tied to it, to “climate change”, and to “sustainability.”

Ms. Isaac tells the story of how, in today’s South Africa, the Xhosa tribe destroyed its economy in 1856. Based on a prophecy of a 15-year-old orphan girl, they killed an estimated half-million of their own cattle, ceased planting crops, and destroyed their grain stores. “By the end of 1857 between thirty and fifty thousand of them had starved to death—a third to a half of their population.”

Turning off all electricity during Earth Hour is no different from what the Xhosa tribe did and refusing to allow the drilling for oil and natural gas, or mining coal, all of which the United States has in sufficient abundance to make us energy independent and exporters of these energy reserves, is an act of national suicide; one that this international symbolism portends for any nation that abandons the energy that sustains economic growth and the welfare of millions.

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Human activity, mostly in the past five thousand years that we call civilization, has not had a thing to do with its existence, but some humans are foolish creatures, easily spooked by prophecies that do not come true or claims that they are responsible for its existence and future. Some of them will turn off their electricity on Saturday.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Destroying America by Denying Access to Energy

By Alan Caruba

It is the crime of the century that America, home to some of the world’s greatest reserves of coal, natural gas and oil, is being deliberately destroyed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior as they do everything in their power to restrict access and drive energy producers out of business.

It is common sense that a nation that cannot produce sufficient electricity to turn on its lights and power its manufacturing sector will be destroyed if current Obama administration regulations and actions continue. Our vital transportation sector and all others that utilize petroleum-based products will suffer, too.

While President Obama babbles about millionaires and billionaires, everyone will be impoverished by the loss of jobs and revenue our energy sector produces now and can produce in the future.

This isn’t an “energy policy.” It’s a “no-energy policy” and it is a guarantee of economic disaster.

Obama’s decision to reject a permit for Canada’s XL Keystone pipeline is just one example. It is a job-killer and a revenue-killer. There are thousands of pipelines serving America’s energy needs and the XL Keystone pipeline would ensure that Canada’s own vast energy reserves would flow to America. It is one of our key trade partners and Obama has slapped it in the face.

In early January, Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, announced a new 20-year, million-acre ban on uranium mining for federal lands in Arizona, despite the fact that these lands hold the highest-grade of known uranium deposits in the United States. It is an outrage that a new GOP-Congress will have to overturn if the nation is to be assured of sufficient uranium to power its nuclear plants and for weapons development. If the ban remains, these uranium resources would be inaccessible until 2023!

Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research said that Salazar’s announcement “further compounds a man-made energy crisis that has been planned and executed in Washington, D.C.”

At the same time we are learning of enormous natural gas discoveries that can reduce our energy bills and turn sleeping little towns into boomtowns, environmental organizations have launched a vast propaganda campaign against “fracking”, a technology that has been safely used for more than fifty years. Their claims about dangers to the nation’s supply of fresh water are baseless. Their claims that fracking has caused earthquakes in Ohio are absurd.

Need it be said that the Environmental Protection Agency has turned its eyes on fracking and is working on a report due later this year that will likely call for harsh crackdowns on its use and more regulations to throttle the expansion of natural gas extraction?

The EPA has just released a report of those power plants that top the list of its regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. There is no basis in science to justify the reduction of CO2. Indeed, since it is a gas on which all vegetation depends, much as oxygen is vital to all animal life, reducing it would impair great crop yields and healthier forests.

These regulations are based on the global warming hoax that blamed CO2 for warming the earth. That is utterly false. The Earth is currently in a perfectly natural cooling cycle and the climate of the Earth is almost entirely based on the Sun—solar radiation—along with the actions of oceans, clouds, and even volcanic activity that spews tons of particulates into the atmosphere.

Coal-fired power plants account for fifty percent of all the electricity generated in the United States. Fifty percent! And yet the EPA is determined to shut down dozens of them providing that vital factor in the lives of all Americans and the economy, nor does this take into account the billions that energy producers have spent to upgrade their technology to reduce emissions.

The Obama administration fuel economy agenda, a call for 54.5 miles per gallon ignores simple physics. There is a finite amount of energy a gallon of gas can generate. If you dilute it with ethanol as is currently required, you get even less mileage. The administration is trying to circumvent Congress by issuing standards based on regulating “greenhouse gas emissions”, but there is no need for this. It is a false argument. The Center for Automotive Research says that the proposed new standards would cause the retail price of average motor vehicles to increase by more than $11,000.

Americans and the nation’s future are being victimized by Obama administration policies. The 18th annual Index of Economic Freedom, was released on January 12th by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, measures the many factors that contribute to the economic health of a nation—things like property rights, regulatory efficiency, open markets, free trade and labor policies.

Economic freedom is declining worldwide as governments try to spend their way out of the global recession. The United States fell to 10th place. In 2009 it ranked 6th, in 2010 it was 8th, and in 2011, it was 9th.

We are witnessing the deliberate murder of a superpower.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Great Renewable Energy Scam Continues

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obama's War on Oil, Coal, and America

By Alan Caruba

If there is a single reason for defeating Barack Obama’s bid for reelection, it would be his energy policies, all of which have been aimed at denying Americans access to their domestic oil as well as our huge reserves of coal.

Both energy sources would generate thousands of jobs at a time when unemployment figures rival those of the Great Depression. At the same time, domestic oil production would reduce our obscene dependency on foreign oil while coal production would ensure that we can all enjoy the most affordable electricity insofar as coal is responsible for just over half of all electricity generated.

Fortunately for Americans, Exxon has not abandoned the search for new sources of domestic oil, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars this requires. In early June it announced large discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico, the first in decades. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the company “unveiled three discoveries that are likely to turn it into one of the biggest producers of oil and gas in the region.”

On the same day, Seldon B. Graham, Jr., an oil engineer and attorney, had a letter in The Wall Street Journal in which he noted that “the actual price of U.S. oil is cheaper than the actual price of foreign oil” advising readers that the “the oil price” cited in the media is actually a reflection of Wall Street speculators making bets on the future, not the market price.

“U.S. consumers,” said Graham “could save some $17.7 billion annually at the current price difference if U.S. oil replaced foreign oil.”

At the same time Exxon was announcing its discoveries, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was holding a particularly acrimonious meeting involving the members of the cartel. The meeting reportedly “broke up in disarray with no decision on raising production—despite widespread fears that higher crude prices were endangering the world economy.”

The so-called Arab Spring involving turmoil in nations from Tunisia to Yemen, along with the fighting going on in Libya, an oil-producing nation, has sharpened the divisions within OPEC, but the greatest of these is between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Iran has played a role in the turmoil, backing the Syrian regime and warning Saudi Arabia against further support of Bahrain. Apocalyptic fears are being generated as Iran closes in on having its own nuclear weapons.

What, then, has been the Obama administration’s response to this? While slowly beginning to provide new permits for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, having declared a moratorium after the BP accident (and thus destroying countless jobs in the Gulf States region), it is now threatening a new way to shut down oil exploration and production in one of the most oil-rich areas of the nation, the Permian Basin of West Texas and Southeast New Mexico.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced it intends to declare the dunes sagebrush lizard an “endangered species” because it believes that oil production is destroying parts of the lizard’s home. Ignoring the nation’s financial crisis, its high rate of unemployment, and the rising cost of gasoline at the pump, the USFWS thinks that it is more important to protect “a unique sand dune ecosystem” for a LIZARD.

“This is the most prolific oil-production region in onshore America,” said Ben Sheppard, president of the Permian Basic Petroleum Association. That, of course, is why the Obama administration wants to attack it in the same way it has been attacking any off-shore production off the coast of Alaska and, of course, in ANWR, the site of billions of untapped barrels of oil.

At the same time Investors Business Daily took note of the Environmental Protection Agency’s drive to impose new regulations on utilities that use coal. “The rules make sense only if you want less energy, higher prices, and fewer jobs.”

“We’re being systematically starved of energy,” said IBD, “and our economy is suffering. Just don’t ask the White House to help.” It estimated that the new EPA rules would cost electric utilities $184 billion by 2030 and kill 1.4 million jobs. They would, of course, increase the cost of electricity to everyone.

Like everything else the EPA proposes, it is based on totally bogus estimates of air pollution in addition to the scientifically-debased assertion that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced to save the Earth from global warming. Meanwhile, the UN Kyoto Protocol intended to reduce CO2 emissions is soon to end as most of the original nations signing onto it have abandoned it.

America has arrived at a moment in time when the enemy is now the administration in control of its ability to provide the power it needs to dig out of the current financial crisis. If a foreign government was imposing these restrictions we would go to war against it.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The EPA's Fantastic Clean Air Fictions

By Alan Caruba

Reading the Environmental Protection Agency’s news releases is a trip into the world of science fiction, of fantastical assertions and predictions that have no relationship to reality. The EPA is a most wicked assemblage of alleged scientists and political appointees whose sole purpose is to economically burden the industrial, commercial, and agricultural sectors of the nation in every way possible.

Most reporters covering environmental issues these days are so brainwashed and brain dead they never actually question the drivel that the EPA shovels on a daily basis. The latest is a March 16 release “EPA Proposes First National Standard for Mercury Pollution from Power Plants.” The key words here are “power plants”, the 24/7 generators of the electricity we all depend upon.

By burdening power plants with unnecessary costs the EPA drives up the price of electricity and are thus able to make a better case for “renewables”, the worst, most unreliable and most unaffordable producers of electricity, wind and solar power. In the process, they get to demonize coal-burning plants that produce fifty percent of the electricity.

The opening paragraph of the EPA release is a staggering 100-plus words in length, two run-on sentences that would earn any high school English student a failing grade.

“WASHINGTON – In response to a court deadline, today the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed the first-ever national standards for mercury, arsenic and other toxic air pollution from power plants. The new power plant mercury and air toxics standards – which eliminate 20 years of uncertainty across industry – would require many power plants to install widely available, proven pollution control technologies to cut harmful emissions of mercury, arsenic, chromium, nickel and acid gases, while preventing as many as 17,000 premature deaths and 11,000 heart attacks a year. The new proposed standards would also provide particular health benefits for children, preventing 120,000 cases of childhood asthma symptoms and about 11,000 fewer cases of acute bronchitis among children each year. The proposed standards would also avert more than 12,000 emergency room visits and hospital admissions and 850,000 fewer days of work missed due to illness.

The assertions made on behalf of the proposed rule, one that the EPA has waited eleven years to slip by the public, are so absurd that it is testimony to how stupid the EPA thinks the public is.

It is an aggregation of statistics without any citation of their source, all intended to drive home the horrors that Americans have allegedly been living with and fanciful health threats the rule will allegedly prevent. How can anyone know or even predict how many “emergency room visits” are attributable to mercury, arsenic, chromium, nickel, and acid gas emissions? And who among you knows the actual amounts? The facts put the lie to this fear-mongering and the EPA’s own monitoring data provide them!

The release continues in this fear-mongering vein, blandly stating that “Toxic air pollutants like mercury from coal-and-oil fired plants have been shown to cause neurological damage, including lower IQ, in children exposed in the womb and during early development.” So this new rule is all about saving unborn and infant children from the horrible coal-and-oil plants. How much government regulation is attributed to protecting children? A lot! Where is the proof offered by the EPA for this assertion? Not stated.

Again, if these emissions are such a dire health hazard, why did it take eleven years for the EPA to take action? The answer to that is that this EPA is operating within the most Leftist, power-grabbing administration in the history of the nation. It is under the control of a known socialist, Carol Browner, the President’s energy and environmental czar, and her sock puppet, Lisa Jackson, the Director of the EPA.

If you want to learn the truth about the state of the nation’s air quality and the lies being told by the EPA, you should read Steve Milloy’s 16-page analysis, “EPA’s Clean Air Act: Pretending air pollution is worse than it is”, posted to Junkscience.com on March 9, 2011.

“The EPA relies on health studies that exaggerate harm and economic studies that understate regulatory costs in order to maintain the fiction that its ever-more stringent regulations are providing meaningful public health benefits,” says Milloy. He then cites studies of particulate matter in 32 Midwest and Eastern states covered by the Clean Air Transport Rule that demonstrate how meaningless the EPA assertions are.

“There is no tangible scientific evidence that current air quality standards are not already more than sufficiently protective of public heath. Data has been hidden from the public by the agency and by a clique of EPA-funded researchers.”

You’re being duped. You’re being robbed. The utilities affected by this new regulation only want “certainty” regarding how much they will have to shell out for the unnecessary mediation measures that will be required. The bill will be paid by energy consumers who have no choice.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

It Really Is a Small World

By Alan Caruba

There is a flood in Australia of biblical proportions though it must be said there is little news of it in the U.S. media. Much of Queensland is under water which would be comparable to saying that much of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and a large portion of New York is under water. Australia is very big.

If that news was not disturbing enough, on Tuesday, Krakatau volcano in Indonesia erupted, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands in its vicinity as ash rained down on two large provinces. Meanwhile, the Kizimen volcano on Kamchatka is erupting as well.

England is passing through the worst winter in the last hundred years of recorded history. Its heavy investment in clean energy, specifically wind turbines, has turned out to be a bad idea since they tend not to turn much when the weather turns cold. Having shut down most of its coal mines, England is experiencing a lack of electrical power that is killing some folks.

No, it is not the Apocalypse, but it might as well be for people fleeing or trapped by these huge events.

No doubt some people are trying to organize efforts to save the kangaroos and koala bears in Australia while others are worrying about indigenous animals in Indonesia. If this sounds like they have idiotic priorities, they do. The same indifference Nature shows to these critters applies to you as well.

The anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, January 13, will occasion a flurry of articles and analysis of what has happened since (not much) but will fade by the weekend. Haiti hasn’t had a good day for centuries.

Meanwhile, snow has fallen in 49 of the U.S. States including Hawaii! It covered 69% of the lower 48. The northeast just experienced its second blizzard since Christmas.

Time to panic? Hardly.

So when should we panic? I would suggest a good time would be when we in America wake up and discover that the current administration has forced enough coal-burning utilities to shut down and there’s no electricity or just not enough to go around. Coal provides fifty percent of all of the electricity we use in the U.S.

We might begin to panic when we realize that the government remains steadfastly in the way of building more nuclear plants to generate electricity, despite its rhetoric stating the opposite.

Most Americans will begin to get angry when a gallon of gasoline hits $4 or more and will wonder why without wondering what happens when the U.S. government shuts down much of the drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by simply not issuing permits and forbids exploration or drilling off the long East and West coasts where billions of barrels of oil are believed to exist. Brazil is doing it. Why not us?

Oil is a global commodity which means that its price is determined by supply and demand. Right now, as China’s economy continues to surge and ours continues to stagnate, China is buying up as much oil as it can get its hands on. It is drilling for it off the coast of Cuba, a mere 90 miles from the tip of Florida.

Due to the floods in Australia, a major producer of coal, China is looking to purchase coal dug out of the mines in Appalachia, precisely where the Obama administration has done its best to shut down mines.

So, you see, it really is a small world after all.

The last great eruption of Krakatau actually lowered the temperature worldwide by throwing so much “schmutz” into the atmosphere it interfered with the Sun’s warming rays.

No matter where you live, it helps if the government doesn’t behave in a totally irrational and stupid way in the name of some bogus notion like global warming.

By the way, where is Al Gore these days? I hear China is experiencing some monster snow storms and it wouldn’t surprise me to hear he’s over there.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Your Insane U.S. Energy Department

By Alan Caruba

In mid-September, Cathy Zoi, an Assistant Secretary of Energy, said that the U.S. Department of Energy has a “mandate” to issue regulations about what household appliances should be available to Americans in the future.

A CNSnews story reported that while speaking at the inaugural meeting of the recently reestablished Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, Ms. Zoi “pointed to four tactics the Obama administration intended to use to advance the ‘deployment of clean energy.’ The first three were government subsidies, special tax incentives, and low-interest government-backed loans for green energy projects.”

The likelihood that any of these “green energy” projects will yield any electrical power comparable to a single coal-fired or nuclear plant is negligible. Two recent huge wastes of taxpayer money involve a $57 million program that includes $11 million under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—the failed “stimulus” plan—to support clean energy technology commercialization projects for 33 small businesses across the country.

Among the projects is “harvesting/dewatering technology for algal biofuels”, money devoted to algae as a source of power. Other projects include organic light-emitting diodes, and advanced materials and bio-fueled oxide fuel cells. Meanwhile, the moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico restricts the provision of an energy source on which the nation is dependent.

In September the DOE also awarded $37 million for “marine and hydrokinetic energy technology development.” The object of this is to “accelerate the technologies and commercial readiness of technologies “to generate renewable electricity from the nation’s oceans and free-flowing rivers and streams.” Meanwhile the nation already generates six percent of its electricity from hydroelectric systems among which the Hoover Dam is one of the best known.

The Department of Energy was created in the wake of the oil crisis of the 1970s and was signed into existence by President Jimmy Carter on August 4, 1977. Its responsibilities were the nation’s nuclear weapons program, a nuclear reactor for the U.S. Navy, energy conservation, energy-related research, radioactive waste disposal, and domestic energy production.

It currently employs 16,000 federal workers and, in 2009, had an annual budget of $24.1 billion. President Obama appointed Dr. Steven Chu as its Secretary. Dr. Chu is perhaps best known for recommending that global warming can be avoided by painting the roofs and highways white in order to reflect back the sun’s radiation. Will someone please get a net and throw it over Dr. Chu?

One might think that the DOE would have taken an active role in the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but that responsibility was handed over to the U.S. Coast Guard while the Department of the Interior was a key player as well.

Meanwhile, over at the DOE, Ms. Zoi was gloating that the fourth tactic “which the Secretary and I love is where we have a mandate. Where we can actually just issue regulations and do market transformation.”

Where is it written in the U.S. Constitution that the government should play an active role in “market transformation”? The DOE intends to “set efficiency standards for energy-consuming products.”

These will include commercial clothes washers, small electric motors, water heaters, direct heating equipment and pool heaters, among the countless products consumers use on a daily basis.

Instead of encouraging the building of more coal-fired, natural gas, and nuclear plants to generate the electricity a population in excess of 300 million use daily, the DOE wants to get between consumers and manufacturers to “mandate” how much electricity products can use!

“We’re going to make people save money for themselves,” said Ms. Zoi.

I have a great idea how to save billions. Shut down the Department of Energy.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

An Ill Wind (Power) in New Jersey

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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

It's Always "Earth Hour" in North Korea

For all those Green morons calling on us to turn off our lights Saturday evening from 8:30 PM to 9:30 PM to celebrate "Earth Hour", this is what it looks like every night in North and South Korea. The North is in the grip of a Stalinist dictator and the South is a thriving democracy.

Like fire, electricity is truly a gift of the gods. It is the difference between the Dark Age and the present age...but not for everyone. Much of Africa is in darkness. too. People who hate civilization and the humans who created it are welcome to live out in the wilderness or in some primitive backward country where they burn dung to cook their meals.

If America doesn't start building more coal-fired plants, nuclear plants, and other generators of electricity, we too shall live in darkness when the sun goes down. Be warned, the present administration is doing everything possible to make that future happen.

-- Alan Caruba

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.

How to be a Jerk

By Alan Caruba

Let us begin with a fact that whole legions of global warming alarmists cannot wish away or hide from public view. The Earth has been cooling since 1998 and it is getting demonstrably cooler almost everywhere in the world. The cooling will continue for decades.

So it follows that the best way to be a complete jerk is to have your book, “Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming”, published at the same time that a recent Public Strategies Inc/Politico poll revealed that “Just four percent (4%) ranked climate change as the top issue."

If the congressional election—-next year’s midterms—-were held today the economy would be the top issue (45%), followed by insane government spending (21%)

Another survey, one by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, conducted between September 30 and October 4, found that “fewer respondents see global warming as a very serious problem,; 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.”

James Hoggan, the cofounder of DeSmogBlog, along with Richard Littlemore are the proud authors of what has to be the silliest book of the year. It actually has a blurb on the back cover from Leonardo DeCaprio, famed actor and, until now, an unknown meteorological savant.

In the interest of full disclosure, both Hoggan and I have plied the magical arts and craft of public relations for a living. Thanks to Obama’s stimulus, clunkers program, ownership of General Motors and other former private enterprises, I have been forcibly retired. I am looking forward to not being retired as I have rent to pay and enjoy eating on a regular basis.

Hoggan’s preface begins by saying, “This is a story of betrayal, a story of selfishness, greed, and irresponsibility on an epic scale. In its darkest chapters, it’s a story of deceit, of poisoning public judgment—of an anti-democratic attack on our political structure and a strategic undermining of the journalistic watchdogs who keep our social institutions honest.”

Did he say “journalistic watchdogs”? Last year more than 40,000 of them lost their jobs due to an ailing economy, bad business models, and the growing perception that the “news” they were reporting was biased and unreliable.

To this day, reporters are still writing about "global warming" as if it is real and blathering about greenhouse gas emissions as if they have anything to do with the climate.

From Hoggan’s description I thought he was talking about the huge global warming hoax that has been foisted on the world’s population by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore, countless feckless politicians, grant-seeking scientists, and so-called environmental organizations.

But no, Hoggan is talking about “an organized campaign, largely financed by the coal and oil industries, to make us think that climate science was somehow still controversial, (that) climate change still unproven.”

Climate “science” based on appallingly manipulative and misleading computer models is controversial. As for “climate change”, it is the new term being used by “global warming” alarmists because there is NO global warming.

Ignoring the billions the U.S. government under several presidents have lavished on scientists lined up to prove the Earth was dramatically warming, the sea levels were rising at unprecedented rates, that polar bears—-excellent swimmers-—were drowning, and just about other natural phenomenon was affected by or demonstrated global warming, so far as Hoggan is concerned, “Denier scientists were being paid well, not for conducting climate research, but for practicing public relations.”

Like many alarmists, Hoggan does not care much for humanity or its achievements, noting that “We can kill one another more quickly than ever in human history, and we can change the world’s climate in a way that scientists say is threatening our ability to survive on Earth.”

Only ignoramuses think that human beings “can change the world’s climate.”

Oh wait, it turns out that the President of the United States, speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was critical of the “naysayers” who “make cynical claims” that ignore the alleged scientific evidence about greenhouse gas, i.e., carbon dioxide, emissions.

Move over Hoggan, it turns out that Obama is as big a jerk as you.

Obama has been touting “clean energy” technologies such as solar and wind that are so wanting in practicality and dependability that only government requirements keep these providers of barely one percent of all electricity in business.

As part of the stimulus and the horrid Cap-and-Trade bill lingering a slow death in Congress, billions of taxpayer dollars would go to “clean energy” companies while the Obama administration wages an economic war on coal and oil companies, denies permits to mine coal, the opportunity to drill for oil in Alaska or in 85% of the nation’s continental shelf.

If coal and oil companies that provide 99% of our power for transportation and all other uses are evil, then surely General Electric that manufactures wind turbines and stands to make a lot of money thanks to a government ban on the manufacture and use of all incandescent light bulbs is the epitome of all that is good and wonderful.

“We are standing at the edge of a cliff,” writes Hoggan of global warming and “Behind us is a considerable crowd, 6.7 billion people and counting.”

Oh, those terrible human beings who want a standard of living that includes electric lights, television sets, computers, air conditioners, automobiles, and a dinner that does not require burning animal dung to cook.

Maybe Hoggan is bucking for a prize for publishing one of the most idiotic books of the year, ten years into a worldwide cooling of the Earth.

Light Bulbs: Taking Away Your Choice

By Alan Caruba

I am always amazed at the variety of choice that exists in my local supermarket. There are other supermarkets in the area, but the one I frequent most has lower prices on most items and almost anything you want to purchase allows one to select among several brands available.

We Americans may not think much about choice when it comes to what we buy because we have so many choices. It is the mark of a free marketplace where competition determines winners and losers. It says a lot about a society that puts a high premium on freedom.

Your government, however, has decided that, in 2012, you can no longer choose to purchase and use Thomas Edison’s iconic invention, the 100 watt incandescent light bulb. By 2014, all such bulbs will be banned from sale. That’s right, they will vanish from the shelves of supermarkets and other outlets.

As this is being written, your government is debating taking away your choice to purchase health insurance. Or not. If it gets its way, everyone, old and young, healthy or ill, everyone will have to buy health insurance—most likely the brand issued by the government because it will drive most present insurance companies out of business. That is so un-American as to defy belief.

In Europe, thanks to a European Union ban on incandescent light bulbs, consumers are cleaning out the shelves to stockpile a supply when they can no longer be sold. As Jason Lomberg, the Technical Editor of Electronic Component News, a trade publication, noted recently, “The ban has proved to be massively unpopular. All across Europe its media are reporting huge increases in the sales of incandescent sales. In Germany alone, sales for 100 watt bulbs rose by 80% to 150%.

Why were the EU and U.S. bans put in place? It is the view of environmentalists who insist that incandescent bulbs are less energy “efficient” than compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) and that consumers must be denied the choice between them.

They are less “efficient”, but it is equally true that CFL’s unnatural, bluish light takes time to achieve full brightness, about three minutes on the average. At least a quarter of them fall short meeting their rated service life, meaning you will have to buy more of them.

In addition to the fact that some “emit a headache-inducing buzzing sound” the worst thing about fluorescent light bulbs is that they contain mercury. As a recent issue of The DeWeese Report points out, they “contain poisonous liquid mercury over 300 times the EPA’s standard accepted safety level.”

“In addition, days after a bulb has been broken,” noted Tom DeWeese, “vacuuming or simply crawling across the carpeted floor where the bulb was broken can cause mercury vapor levels to shoot back upwards of 100 times the accepted level of safety.” Who crawls on the floor? Babies! Whose closer to the floor than you? Pets!

The Maine Department of Environmental Protection reported that a woman was quoted $2,000 for cleanup of a broken compact fluorescent bulb in her house.

The politicians in the U.S. Congress, pandering as always to the crazed environmentalists, enacted the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that put the ban in place to begin in 2012.

The Obama administration has declared war on the building of new coal-fired energy plants despite the fact that they currently provide just over half of all the electricity we use daily, nor has a new nuclear plant been built in decades. It won’t allow any offshore exploration and extraction of oil or natural gas either. So, while allegedly providing for “energy independence” the government is thwarting any new provision of electricity.

But you will be forced to buy fluorescent light bulbs to ensure “energy efficiency” while one of the greatest inventions, the incandescent light bulb, is banned from use. The result will turn all U.S. landfills into toxic dumps.

Where the government finds the justification for destroying your right of choice continues to elude my grasp.

What it portends are supermarkets with far less products and food choices than currently exist because some environmentalist or vegetarian has decided that coercive laws are the best way to take away the freedom of choice that is quintessentially American.

This ban must be repealed along with so-called healthcare “reform” and the hideous “cap-and-trade” law, renamed as the “American Clean Energy and Security Act”, that will raise the cost of electricity in the name of saving the Earth from a “global warming” that is NOT happening.

As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Keeping Americans in the Dark

By Alan Caruba

After endless speeches and the biggest protest march in recent U.S. history, one would think that the Obama administration would get the message that Americans do not want them or the present Congress to tamper with Medicare other than to eliminate waste.

The administration’s top spokesmen, however, professed to know little about the march by nearly two million Americans and, at the same time, to know more about the nation’s healthcare system than those inside it who say there simply are not enough physicians and nurses to meet even today’s needs.

Americans have figured out they don’t want Obamacare, but a regime that has its own agenda and intends to impose it on an unwilling public is not interested in the voice of the people.

If you think Obamacare is a nightmare or as Rush Limbaugh now calls it “crap legislation”, you have no idea what the Obama gang have in store for you. H.R.2454, the American Clean Energy And Security Act of 2009, barely passed the House in June. It is also known as the Waxman-Markey bill and, most generally, as Cap-and-Trade.

It is a monstrosity that everyone, including its sponsors, agree is a massive tax on all energy use. The minute you walk in your home or apartment and turn on the lights, you will feel the impact of this bill. It is currently marinating in the Senate.

Here’s what almost no one is talking about. At what point will America begin to experience California-style blackouts and brownouts when there simply is insufficient capacity to generate electricity?

Let’s begin by understanding that Cap-and-Trade is based on something that is NOT happening and therefore requires no legislation. Moreover, there is NO scientific justification for reducing or sequestering carbon dioxide, a trade gas that is vital to all plant growth on Earth and, by extension, to all life on Earth.

Cap-and-Trade refers to so-called “carbon credits”, essentially a new form of financial instrument to be sold, purchased, and traded among utilities and industries that generate and use energy. It exists because Congress believes “global warming” is occurring when, in fact, it stopped ten years ago.

The American Clean Energy And Security Act is a complete and total deception.

The “clean energy” to which it refers is wind and solar energy which provides just about one percent of all the electricity in the nation and exists only because it is heavily subsidized with taxpayer and energy consumer dollars. These are quite possibly the two most stupid ways to generate electricity ever invented.

As for energy “Security”, you need to know that the Obama administration is doing everything in its power to restrict the use of coal, a provider of just over half of all the electricity generated in America, and is opposed to the exploration and development of any new sources of oil in or offshore of the nation.

America is being stripped of any “security” that would result from access to our own vast reserves of coal or of oil and natural gas.

In early September, the Associated Press reported that the EPA has identified 79 coal mine permits “for review.” When the EPA says it is reviewing something, it really means it is setting up the process to withdraw permission. Using the Clean Water Act as cover, 49 mines in Kentucky, 23 mines in West Virginia, six in Ohio and one in Tennessee will get the axe. The impact on the economies of these states, the loss of jobs, and the loss of the coal is incalculable at this point.

That, however, is just one example of the Obama War on Coal in America. In August, the board of South Carolina’s largest power producer, Santee Cooper, voted to suspend construction of a proposed $2.2 billion Pee Dee Energy Campus, a 600-MW coal-fired power plant in Florence County. No plant. No energy. No jobs. Et cetera.

I could regale you with the many other ways Obama is trying to shut down the nation, but you get the point.

As Pogo famously declared, “We have met the enemy and they is us!” In this case, the enemy is in the White House and in the U.S. Congress.

The Sierra Club versus Electricity

By Alan Caruba

In early July the Sierra Club celebrated the fact that, “Today, 100 of those planned coal plants have been defeated or abandoned.”

They crowed over the fact that a year ago there were plans for 150 new plants and that they had successfully thwarted the provision of electrical power around the nation. As for as the Sierra Club is concerned, “This milestone marks a significant shift in the way Americans are looking at our energy choices. Cities, states, businesses and electric utilities are all moving away from the polluting coal power of the past.”

Today’s coal-fired plants are all equipped with very expensive technology that eliminates the pollution of the past, “scrubbing” their massive stacks before any is emitted. They are not polluting anything, but they are providing affordable electrical energy.

Coal represents just a shade over fifty percent of all the electricity Americans use. It is so abundant here in America that the provision of those 150 plants would have ensured that the nation had a significant portion of the additional power it requires for a growing population and our manufacturing sector.

Why does the Sierra Club oppose coal-fired plants? It says that “carbon dioxide pollution, a main cause of global warming” is the reason, but CO2 is not a pollutant. It is the gas of life because without it not one single blade of grass or any other vegetation grows on planet Earth. Our food supply, crops and the livestock that depend upon them, is the result of CO2.

And, of course, there is NO global warming. The planet has been cooling for the past decade and the science of CO2 demonstrates that it plays no role whatever with regard to major climate trends.

The Sierra Club’s opposition to coal-fired plants is entirely based on a LIE.

It doesn’t stop there, however. As far back as 1974, the Sierra Club has been opposed to nuclear energy as well. They called for “adequate national and global policies to curb energy over-use and unnecessary economic growth.”

“Unnecessary economic growth”? If a nation does not maintain its economic growth it also does not provide jobs. It does not have the means by which to fund defense, infrastructure, and to compete globally in manufacturing and exports. This is an idiotic policy, but not if your aim, your purpose is to attack the most essential element of growth, the provision of energy.

A visit to the Sierra Club website provides ample evidence of its objection to all forms of energy except the least practical and effective, the so-called “renewable” forms such as wind and solar. Even T. Boone Pickens who gambled on the largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle has thrown in the towel, announcing that his $2 billion investment is now, in retrospect, rather foolish given the need to get the power from the farm to where it is needed.

Pickens is now stuck with 687 giant wind turbines, each of which is taller than a 30-story building.

The same may be said of solar power that, like wind, is not dependable and must be located far from the transmission lines and the nation’s urban areas that are most in need of electricity.

At what point will Americans begin to realize that the giant Green organizations like the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and others stand in opposition to the very thing they most desperately need, energy?

At what point will Americans begin to realize that failing to access its own vast natural resources, coal, oil and natural gas, is suicidal?

One hopes it will not be before the economy is so severely damaged that we cannot borrow or fund the coal-fired and nuclear plants that we need to keep us from being figuratively and literally in the dark.

As California Goes....

By Alan Caruba

As a lifelong resident of New Jersey, one of the most fiscally imprudent states, it may be deemed unfair for me to say bad things about California, but having lived in a state that has “been there, done that” it also endows me with an understanding of what happens when a state is taken over by its public service unions and indulges in stupid environmental policies that have nothing to do with a sound economy.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared an economic crisis last week in order to demand some fiscal sanity that has not been forthcoming from its legislature. By the end of the month, California will be forced to pay bills with IOUs and we all know that won’t work. The U.S. Constitution reserves to the federal government the right “to coin money, regulate the value thereof…” As a form of currency, IOUs are forbidden to California.

A recent issue of The Heartland Institute’s “Budget & Tax News” monthly newspaper had a disturbing article by Jason Sorens and William Ruger, two members of the University of Buffalo faculty who studied the issue of personal and financial freedom in the nation’s 50 States. Their study ranked states on government spending, taxes, and regulations on market transactions and private behavior.

Since Americans pride themselves as a free people, the actions of state government have a direct impact on how much actual freedom they have because “states and local governments regulate workplaces, land use, and health insurance. They tell individual citizens how to educate their children, where they are permitted to smoke, which kinds of firearms they may own, and when they are allowed to buy liquor.” And, of course, they levy taxes.

The five least-free States, from the bottom up, are New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, California, and Maryland. New York State’s legislature has been in a complete meltdown, unable and unwilling to tend to business. New Jersey is locked in the run-up to an election pitting an ultra-liberal Governor, Jon Corzine, against a Republican candidate who promises to do a better job of governance, but in New Jersey that is no guarantee of any improvement.

California, ranked fourth from the bottom in terms of freedom, reflects the study’s finding that “Liberal states tend to be nanny states when it comes to issues of personal choice.” Linked to economic freedom, states that impose excessive taxation and regulation tend to chase people and business away.

New Jersey has had more people leaving than coming to live there and, in the 1990s California saw 2.08 million more people leave than moved there from other parts of the nation. According to the U.S. Census, this loss was offset by a net immigration of 2.02 million from Latin America. To put it another way, California imported poverty along with an increase in the social services these new immigrants (many illegal) require.

One of the factors contributing to the population loss was the high cost of housing in California, about 53.1% above the February 1999 median of $129,300 in the rest of the nation, making housing in California less affordable than anywhere else. When the housing bubble burst in late 2008, California’s homeownership rate was only 55.7% as compared to 66% for the entire nation. In more blunt terms, California’s white (non-Hispanic) population has been leaving in droves.

The result of this has been a dramatic increase in costs relative to the rise of its population of illegal aliens. By 2004, a study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) that examined the costs of education, health care, and the incarceration of illegal aliens committing crimes in California, concluded it costs Californians $10.5 billion per year. The K-12 education system spent approximately $7.7 billion to school the children of illegal aliens and another $1.4 billion in taxpayer’s money went toward providing healthcare to them and their families, about the same spent on incarcerating illegal alien criminals.

Doing nothing about immigration comes with a big price tag and this is increasingly true of the entire nation that is estimated to have some 12 million illegal aliens. Neither the Bush administration of the passed eight years, nor the new Obama administration will stem this wholesale invasion of the nation, not just burdening taxpayers, but reducing the number of jobs available to natural born and naturalized citizens. Amnesty would double or triple the number of new citizens as family members join them.

Of equal concern are the nation’s energy policies and, in this regard, California is the template for doing everything possible to restrict the development of its own energy sources and reserves.

The state’s oldest oil refinery, the massive 104-year-old Richmond facility was in the process of modernization, but environmentalists sued and a judge ordered Chevron Corporation to stop work for yet another “environmental impact report.” A hundred workers have been laid off and as many as a thousand more may lose their jobs as the project shuts down. That is insanity.

California is highly dependent on imported electricity. As of 2008, its failure to provide for the energy needs of its citizens meant it was short by 23% of the total demand for power. California has been loath to permit the building of coal-fired plants and slow to build those based on nuclear power. California has been a big proponent of wind and solar energy; the least practical means of providing electricity.

Today, California consumes 65% more electricity than it did in 1980. Coal-based electricity imports from other states grew by 60% from 1998 to 2005. Intent on emphasizing “efficient” power use policies, California has discovered that efficiency improvements do not reduce its overall energy consumption and, as often as not, leads to more energy use because people perceive such “efficiency” savings as freeing up more dollars for other energy-consuming devices and activities.

Meanwhile, demands for greater energy “efficiency” have driven up the cost of housing and driven out manufacturing firms because of high energy prices. If the states from which it imports electricity were to reduce or cut off supplies, California would swiftly decline to the status of a third world nation.

Estimates of the amounts of untapped oil off its coast on the continental shelf are in the millions of barrels, possibly billions. A reversal of this policy would generate lots of high-paying jobs and reduce the nation’s dependence on imported oil.

As this is being written, California faces a $21.3 billion deficit. Its citizens have defeated all of the proposed measures to close it, probably in retaliation for the spendthrift insanity of its legislature.

These are the same policies—immigration, education¸ housing, energy—being pursued by the Obama administration and, if California is a template for what will occur nationwide, it portends a very grim future.

Saturday: Keep Your Lights on Tonight!

By Alan Caruba
March 28, 2009

Does it sometimes seem like everything you read, see or do has the word “Green” attached to it?

We have a Green President and a Green Congress. More and more products and services tout themselves as Green. We are paying more and more with greenbacks—dollars—that are in danger of losing what value they once had.

Green was not always the great, amorphous dream of achieving oneness with Mother Earth. People still talk about being “Green with envy” or “Turning Green” just before a projectile vomit attack.

We have reached this nauseating time in our society as the result of a vast environmental movement, truly worldwide, that are masters of propaganda and possessed of the millions necessary to brainwash a lot of people into accepting an endless assault on all the advancements in science, engineering, and technology we accept as part of our everyday lives.

So, naturally, the World Wildlife Fund has come up with “Earth Hour”, an event in which at 8:30PM, Saturday night, in everyone’s respective time zone, people will be asked to turn off their lights and, presumably, the use of all electricity to increase awareness of “energy conservation.”

Two questions: What does this have to do with wildlife? And why should anyone bother?

What need is there to “conserve energy?” One either uses it or does not. You can’t “conserve” it. You can use more or less of it, but you cannot save it up for later. Electricity is always “now.”

Is the Earth running out of coal? Hardly, the Chinese can’t build coal-fired plants fast enough to generate the electricity to grow their economy. In India, they’re launched on a huge program to build nuclear plants for the same reason. A nation without adequate electricity is strictly Third World.

Nor is the Earth running out of oil. The rumor is that there are vast amounts in the Arctic and both the U.S. and Russia are making nasty noises at one another to ensure that neither one or the other gains control of it. Brazil just struck oil way offshore of its beautiful beaches and you don’t hear them complaining about it.

The U.S., of course, has vast untapped reserves of oil offshore and an estimated 3 to 4.3 BILLION barrels of it in the Bakken Formation under North Dakota and Montana. There’s oil under Utah as well. We’re not running out of oil in the United States. We just can’t drill for it thanks to Congress and the White House.

We can’t build coal-fired plants either because the Greens keep telling us that coal is “dirty.” The electricity it provides—just over half of all that’s used nationwide—isn’t dirty. Soon, though, they’re won’t be enough of it because our Green President thinks that solar and wind can provide it. It can’t and it won’t. Ever.

There’s just one way to “conserve” energy. Don’t use it. Don’t turn on the light. Don’t turn on the computer. Don’t turn on the television. Unplug your refrigerator, your heating and cooling system. Don’t wash and dry your clothes in a machine. Don’t use it.

Otherwise, the next moron that talks about conserving energy should be stuffed in a barrel and allowed to float over the Niagara Falls which, during Earth Hour, will not be lighted.

We will all be treated to the idiotic sight of a darkened Empire State Building and other similar structures around the world such as the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, Las Vegas strip, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the London Eye Ferris wheel, and the Pyramids of Egypt.

For a whole hour they will go dark to remind us to “conserve energy” that does not need conserving. It needs to be expanded into parts of the world where there is no electricity and, as a result, there is no economy which is another way of saying there is a lot of poverty, sickness, and early death.

The U.S. Government's War on Coal!

By Alan Caruba

While President Obama was eagerly signing new legislation to keep unqualified borrowers in their homes by doling out billions of our dollars, over at the Environmental Protection Agency they were leaking plans to use the Clean Air Act as a subterfuge to regulate the second most essential gas, other than oxygen, for all life on planet Earth, carbon dioxide (C02).

Cheering from the sidelines is every demented environmental group in America including the Sierra Club which, if it had its way, would ban the building of a single new coal-fired plant anywhere and shut down the existing ones. This is madness on a scale we have not seen since the mid-point of the last century.

Over at Friends of the Earth, they are breaking out the prayer beads, worried to death that upgrading and improving the nation’s infrastructure means building new roads, bridges and tunnels where they are needed.

All the while, the most deceitful President to have ever occupied the Oval Office keeps telling everyone that global warming is real when, in fact, the Earth has been cooling for the past decade. Obama is trying to transform the United States of America into a nation where science means nothing and lies mean everything.

We now have the spectacle of a government employee, Dr. James Hansen, shilling for Capitol Climate Action, http://www.capitolclimateaction.com/, saying on a YouTube video that everyone should come to Washington, D.C. on March 2 for what is described as “the largest mass civil disobedience for the climate in U.S. history.” The event is a protest of the Capitol Power Plant that uses—gasp—coal to produce electricity.

By the way, that white stuff coming out of the stacks of power plants, including nuclear, is excess steam used to turn the huge turbines that generate electricity. In other words, water vapor.

Dr. Hansen is the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies who lately has been writing to the leaders of the United Kingdom and Europe saying that coal-fired plants are the moral equivalent of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz during WWII. He’s the fellow who, in 1988, told a congressional committee that global warming was going to destroy the Earth. Al Gore uses him as a footstool.

The immediate question is why someone drawing a government check should also be advocating civil disobedience on behalf of a non-governmental organization or group?

The larger question is whether the government is going to make it impossible to provide the growing needs for electricity that all Americans will require by 2030 or sooner? The U.S. has vast deposits of coal with which to generate electricity. To claim that coal is responsible for a global warming that is not occurring and that we must abandon the source of 50% of all the electricity we use every day is insane.

First let’s fire Dr. Hansen. He is making a mockery of NASA and engaging in behavior that is irrational and quite possibly illegal.

Then let’s bury the White House in emails, letters and faxes to say “Lay off coal!”

In an astonishing few weeks, the Obama administration has initiated legislation that will further bankrupt the nation, saddle future generations with debt, interfered with the normal action of the housing market, and now wants to leave us without enough electricity to turn on the lights!