Renewables: Florida’s Green Energy Killing Fields

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BirdsFlorida Power and Light (FP&L) on its website states, “At our three solar energy centers throughout Florida, we’re making the most of our state’s sunshine, turning it into clean energy and using it to power your home or business.” FP&L has solar energy centers (solar panel farms) located in Cape Canaveral (Space Coast Next Generation Solar Energy Center), Desoto County (Desoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center) and Indiantown (Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center).

In August 2007 then Governor Crist joined FPL Group Inc. chairman and chief executive officer Lew Hay in announcing FPL Group’s $2.4 billion investment program aimed at increasing the use of solar thermal energy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions. One of the country’s largest electric utilities, FPL is planning to build 300 megawatts of solar generating capacity in Florida. The new facility will avoid nearly 11 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions over a 20-year period. FPL Groups serves customers in 26 states, and its principal subsidiary, Florida Power & Light Company, serves more than 4.3 million customer accounts in Florida.

“It only makes sense that the sunshine state would have a solar power plant,” former Governor Crist said. “This plant will serve as an example to other Florida and American companies that alternative energy can work.”

According to the Tampa Bay Times, “As of June 2013, California leads the nation with 3,761 megawatts of installed solar capacity. Arizona comes in second with 1,250 megawatts. New Jersey, which isn’t exactly known for its sunny skies but where roof-mounted units have proven popular, ranks third with 1,119 megawatts. Florida, by contrast, has 202 megawatts, making it No. 10 in the nation.”

What the media does not tell you is how many birds have been killed at FP&L’s three solar energy centers.

The author of Energy Freedom and Executive Director for Energy Makes America Great Inc. and the Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE) Marita Noon writes, “Even green projects have an impact on their surrounding environment. Green energy, specifically so-called renewables [wind, solar], has been sold to the American public as the answer to a host of crimes against the planet.”

Noon reports:

Wind turbines chop up bald and golden eagles, and other endangered species, like a Cuisinart—the taller turbines with longer blades (which produce more energy, and, therefore, is where the trend is heading) have a predicted annual ten-fold mortality increase.

[ … ]

Hundreds of acres of photovoltaic solar panels confuse migratory water birds, such as the “once-critically endangered brown pelican whose lifestyle involves fishing by diving into open water,” to veer miles out of their way to dive toward what they perceive are lakes or wetlands—only to die from “blunt force trauma.” At the largest solar thermal plant in the world, Ivanpah, owned by BrightSource Energy, the 170,000 reflecting mirrors—designed to “superheat liquid in boilers”—literally fries feathers. The USA Today reports that the intense radiation—called solar flux—has singed some birds, melted feathers, and denatured the protein in their wings as they fly through the intense heat. Unable to fly, the injured birds drop out of the sky and die.

Ellen Knickmeyer and John Locher from the Associated Press report, “Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — ‘streamers,’ for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.  Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one ‘streamer’ every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.”

ABC NEWS VIDEO: Governor Jerry Brown (D-CA) mandated that 33% of the states energy be from solar power, stating, “The sun in California is like the oil in Texas.”

The BrightSource Energy website states, “Since its founding in 2006, BrightSource has significantly evolved – from a small start-up with a great idea that became the foundation for the world’s largest solar thermal power project – to a company focused on global deployment of its solar field technology and support services.”

On September 21, 2012, the LA Times ran a story about the BrightSource Energy large-scale solar projects titled, “Taxpayers, ratepayers will fund California solar plants,” with the subhead: A new breed of prospectors — banks, insurers, utility companies — are receiving billions in subsidies while taxpayer and ratepayers are paying most of the costs. Critics say it’s a rip-off.”

Florida FP&L ratepayers subsidize these three renewable solar energy wildlife killing fields. Will we be constructing more of these “solar deserts” in the sunshine state?

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Charlie Crist says Florida is the Sunshine State, but “we’re hardly doing any solar energy production”
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Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) Supports Using Food For Fuel While Children are Starving

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Ethanol is a farmer welfare program with the government decreeing corn based Ethanol be converted into fuel which has resulted in dramatically rising prices and conversion of huge amounts of acreage to corn production from other crops. Simply another example of government favoring one group (farmers) at the expense of consumers who now pay a lot more for corn based foods at the store and gasoline at the station.

 

Earth’s Energy in an article titled Reducing Carbon: Unintended Consequences reports:

Over the past couple of years there has been much written about how the attempt by the US to substitute ethanol for gasoline was leading to higher food prices.  The ethanol is made from corn and as the demand for ethanol shot up (largely mandated by government requirements that gasoline had to have a minimum ethanol content and corresponding subsidies to the ethanol industry), this meant less corn was available for other uses in the food chain, including the feeding of livestock. Initially the ethanol content was to be 10% but in the past year the US government has raised this target to 15%. (See, for example, Ethanol Blamed for Record Food Prices in MIT Technology Review and The Case Against Biofuels: Probing Ethanol’s Hidden Costs at Environment 360)

Senator Claire McCaskill: Are you not aware our country was developed on cheap, not expensive energy?

Are you not aware of the development of tremendous amounts of oil and natural gas taking place in the United States today by fracking? Are you not aware the reason we don’t have dramatically more production is due to the government blocking development by placing lands off limits. The government is our biggest enemy in trying to reach energy independence along with communists posing as environmentalists!

Are you not aware we have almost 200,000 miles of petroleum pipelines in the U.S.A. but the Keystone Pipeline has been blocked by your party for over 5 years for strictly political reasons? They say it isn’t safe to transport by pipeline which is ridiculous as it is the safest form of transportation. Currently the oil is coming by rail and you see how safe it is by the accidents occurring?

Are you not aware ethanol is subsidized and raises the price of gasoline to consumers and businesses alike but benefiting farmers?

Being a member of Congress I can understand how every time you decide to mandate something for the free market you muck it up. Corn should be used for food not as a fuel additive that decreases performance and harms small engines.

Turn on the TV and soon an ad appears asking for $19 a month to help feed hungry children around the world followed by another ad saying one in four children in the United States goes to bed hungry at night. If true, how can you in good conscience support Ethanol unless you are more concerned about buying votes through corn subsidies to farmers than the health of children around the world?

Greens are the Enemies of Energy

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Here in America and elsewhere around the world, Greens continue to war against any energy other than the “renewable” kind, wind and solar, that is more costly and next to useless. Only coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear keeps the modern and developing world functioning and growing.

The most publicized aspect is Obama’s “War on Coal” and, thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, it has been successful; responsible for shutting down several hundred coal-fired plants by issuing costly regulations based on the utterly false claim that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced to save the Earth from “global warming.”

Light Bulb

Rest in peace.

The EPA is the government’s ultimate enemy of energy, though the Department of the Interior and other elements of the government participate in limiting access to our vast energy reserves and energy use nationwide. By government edict, the incandescent light bulb has been banned. How insane is that?

The Earth has been cooling for seventeen years at this point, but the Greens call this a “pause.” That pause is going to last for many more years and could even become a new ice age.

A study commissioned by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) on the impact of the proposed new EPA regulation of emissions found that, as CNSNews reported, it “could be the costliest federal rule by reducing the Gross National Product by $270 billion a per year and $3.4 trillion from 2017 to 2040” adding $2.2 trillion in compliance costs for the same period. Jay Timmons, CEO and president of NAM, said, “This regulation has the capacity to stop the manufacturing comeback in its tracks.”

EPA FactsAs Thomas Pyle, the president of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), said in June, “President Obama is delivering on his promise to send electricity prices skyrocketing.” Noting a proposed EPA regulation that would shut more plants, he said “With this new rule, Americans can expect to pay $200 more each year for their electricity.” Having failed to turn around the nation’s economy halfway into his second term, Obama is adding to the economic burdens of all Americans.

America could literally become energy independent given its vast reserves of energy sources. In the case of coal, the federal government owns 957 billion short tons of coal in the lower 48 States, of which about 550 billion short tons—about 57 percent—are available in the Powder River Basin. It is estimated to be worth $22.5 trillion to the U.S. economy, but as the IER notes, it “remains unrealized due to government barriers on coal production.” It would last 250 years, greater than Russia and China. When you add in Alaska, the U.S. has enough coal to last 9,000 years at today’s consumption rates!

In 2013 the IER estimated the worth of the government’s oil and coal technically recoverable resources to the economy to be $128 trillion, about eight times our national debt at the time.

There isn’t a day that goes by that environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the National Resources Defense Council, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, along with dozens of others, do not speak out against the extracting and use of all forms of energy, calling coal “dirty” and claiming Big Oil is the enemy.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Greens held off attacking the nuclear industry because it does not produce “greenhouse gas” emissions. Mind you, these gases, primarily carbon dioxide, represent no threat of warming and, indeed, as the main “food” of all vegetation on Earth, more carbon dioxide would be a good thing, increasing crop yields and healthy forests.

Events such as the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster raised understandable fears. The Greens began opposing nuclear energy claiming that radiation would kill millions in the event of a meltdown. This simply is not true. Unlike France that reprocesses spent nuclear fuel, President Carter’s decision to not allow reprocessing proved to be very detrimental, requiring repositories for large quantities.

To this day, one of the largest, Yucca Mountain Repository, authorized in 1987, is opposed by Greens. Even so, it was approved in 2002 by Congress, but the funding for its development was terminated by the Obama administration in 2011. Today there are only four new nuclear power plants under construction and, in time, all one hundred existing plants will likely be retired starting in the mid-2030s.

The Greens’ attack on coal is based on claims that air quality must be protected, but today’s air quality has been steadily improving for years and new technologies have reduced emissions without the need to impose impossible regulatory standards. As the American Petroleum Institute recently noted, “These standards are not justified from a health perspective because the science is simply not showing a need to reduce ozone levels.”

The new EPA standards are expected to be announced in December. We better hope that the November midterm elections put enough new candidates into Congress to reject those standards or the cost of living in America, the capacity to produce electricity, the construction and expansion of our manufacturing sector will all worsen, putting America on a path to decline.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

DARK WINTER BOOK COVERRELATED VIDEO: The Space and Science Research Corporation founder and president and former White House national space policy adviser John L. Casey joins Newsmax TV – Mid Point to discuss facts about ominous changes taking place in the Sun and the climate.

Casey highlights some revelations from his new book, “Dark Winter: How The Sun Is Causing A 30-Year Cold Spell.”

Why You Should Brush Off That New Keystone XL Study

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A new study claims that the State Department underestimated the amount of greenhouse emissions from the Keystone XL pipeline. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Building the Keystone XL pipeline could lead to as much as four times more greenhouse gas emissions than the State Department has estimated for the controversial project, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change that relies on different calculations about oil consumption.

…

The study’s authors based their calculation on the premise that increased supplies of petroleum through the pipeline would push down global oil prices marginally, and that would lead to an increase in consumption and thus pollution.

But wait, the State Department concluded in its final environmental impact statement that Canada’s oil sands crude will be developed and affect global consumption no matter how it’s transported:

[A]pproval or denial of any one crude oil transport project, including the proposed Project, is unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands, or the continued demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United States.

Based upon that analysis, the State Department determined that the pipeline would have minimal impact on the environment.

The oil is already coming to market by rail, and more pipelines are either in the planning stages or are working their way through the approval process. It will get to market, one way or another.

What’s more, the AP reports that some economists are skeptical of the study’s findings:

An increase of 121 million tons of carbon dioxide is dwarfed by the 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide the world pumped into the air in 2013. That’s why University of Sussex economist Richard Tol dismissed the calculated Keystone effect as merely a drop in the bucket. If somebody is concerned about climate change, he wrote in an email, the pipeline “should be the furthest from your mind.”

…

Independent energy economist Judith Dwarkin in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, dismissed the study, faulting the idea that added oil production will lower the price and boost demand. Usually, she said, it’s consumption that spurs price and then oil production.

Since we know this oil will be developed, the Keystone XL pipeline should be a part of the transport mix. It will create jobs, boost local economies, improve America’s energy security, and do it with minimal impact on the environment.

This study didn’t offer any reason to not approve it.

UPDATE: Oil Sands Fact Check points out that State Department considered and cited a draft of this study in its final environmental impact statement.

Follow Sean Hackbarth on Twitter at @seanhackbarth and the U.S. Chamber at @uschamber.

EDITORS NOTE: In its August 18, 2014 edition Forbes reports, “Warren Buffett and Carl Ican, two of the nation’s richest investors have benefited from insufficient pipeline capacity. Millions of barrels of oil are being moved around America by train, and and Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owned railroad company Burlington/Northern and railcarmaker Union Tank Car. Ican owns railcar producers American Railcar Industries and ACF Industries, together with a huge fleet of oil-carrying railcars.

The featured image is a mining truck carrying oil sands in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Photographer: Jimmy Jeong/Bloomberg.

Florida Solar Power: Free electricity? Not so much!

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We  have all heard the line “if it sounds too good to be true…” Well solar power is one of those ideas that is too good to be true. Another favorite if it sounds too good to be true are the often repeated statements of President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry claiming renewable energy will lower our electric bills and create millions of jobs that can’t be sent overseas.

For an example of “too good to be true” close to home in the sunshine state, consider Hillsborough County, where the courthouse in 2010 was outfitted with rooftop solar panels, designed to produce 40% of the facility’s electricity, save $60,000 annually in electricity costs, and pay for themselves. The initial cost was $1.2 million, so by saving $60,000 per year, they would pay for themselves in 20 years – a nice, round number. Oh, and by the way, they were going to produce jobs. As part of the Obama Stimulus.

You believe this, right? Sounds good, right?

Well, not exactly. According to the WFTS News article “Solar Panels on Tampa Courthouse Fail to Meet Promises“, the panels are reducing electricity need by 15 – 18%, a savings of less than $2000 per month. At that rate, it will take 45 years for the panels to pay for their cost – if they last that long. As far as I know, there is no hard data yet on solar cell lifetime duration. Estimates range between 15 and 20 years. Solar panels deteriorate over their lifetime, so the $2000/month savings will be going down.

The cruelest blow in all this? Jobs: 12 of them, for four months.

Who brought this too good to be true miracle to pass? Well, you remember who brought us the Obama Stimulus Bill, as well as ObamaCare, the Democratic Party, which controlled Congress and the White House in 2010. They thought it was wonderful:

It is so wonderful to see the Recovery Act at work in our community, creating jobs and saving money” said U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Tampa).

This is a nice initiative that will allow the county to put a little money back into the pockets of taxpayers at a time that they need it most, and to create jobs,” said Castor.

These, by the way, were advanced solar cells, touted as being able to produce electricity even by moonlight. If this pie-in-the-sky Obama engineering doesn’t work in Florida, it bodes ill for other, more Northerly locations.

Obama came to Denver to sign the Stimulus Bill, at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science – which, like Hillsborough County Courthouse, was fitted with solar cells. Denver’s system (200 kilowatts, DC) cost $720,000, and was estimated to cover 1 to 2 % of DMNS use. The chief technology officer, Dave Noel, tried to sell the idea to the board, but admitted, without the Stimulus incentive, 110 years would be required to amortize the cost. Colorado is a pretty sunny state, with over 300 sunny days per year, but it also gets a little cold and Winter days are short. DMNS has an online graph of their solar power generation; over the last 74 months, they’ve generated 16,448 kWh per month. At $0.10/kWh, that’s worth $1645/month. Compared to the initial cost of $720,000, we’re paying off the investment over a period of only 37 years. Less than 110 years, but still twice the expected life of the solar cells.

This defiance of science, engineering and good sense has been going on all over the world, furthered by faddish green enthusiasts. Thankfully, it’s htting the wall of reality. Germany is retreating, both in the face of economic reality and their dependence on Russian natural gas. Germany has 28 electrical generating plants under construction, powered by….coal. In some cases, it’s lignite (brown) coal, the most CO2-intensive variety.

Reality means nothing to the Obama administration, however. Monday’s Wall Street Journal carries an article on the Obama plan to help Africa, specifically Kenya….wait, is this ironic? Doesn’t Obama have some connection with Kenya? The article, headlined “Kenyan Wind Project Reveals Challenges to Obama Aid Plans” reveals that Kenyan farmers are reluctant to give up their land and homes for a wind farm. Perhaps they’ve heard that no electricity flows when the wind doesn’t blow – as the Germans have learned, the hard way.

al gore statement on icecapsLaugh of the Week:

The EPA was in Denver last week, taking comments from citizens on the new regulations to diminish CO2 emissions from coal and save us all from asthma, heart attacks, and other health hazards. Apparently, Al Gore has a fleet of ice cream trucks that he sends to occasions like this to hand out free ice cream to people suffering from the heat – omnipresent because of global warming. Hey, who doesn’t like ice cream, even from The Goreacle, on a hot Summer day?

The temperature in Denver was 58F, in a steady (cold) rain. Even free ice cream wasn’t a big hit. The Gore Effect strikes again. God really does have a sense of humor.

Response to Senator Bernie Sanders on the Keystone Pipeline

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Dear Senator Sanders:

As I was growing up one of the things I learned that helped this country become as successful as it did was by having cheap energy sources. Amazingly, the government that helped support achieving cheap energy is now so full of communists such as yourself and many democrats including the president who are trying to cripple the country and drive energy costs high so alternatives like wind and solar are comparably priced since their production costs resist being lowered. High energy costs drive up the cost of all goods and services.

A second thing you mention is the transporting of tar sands oil as being dangerous to transport by pipeline. Are you aware of the tens of thousands of miles of oil pipeline we have in the country today which is the safest form of transport there is.

You say there would be great envrionmental damage if the pipeline would be completed since greenhouse gases emitted are greater. I suppose you stand side by side with the former communists now posing as environmentalist in opposing Keystone. The majority of what you refer to in greenhouse gases is CO2 I assume which is what we exhale as we breathe. Perhaps we could offset that increase by enforcing our immigration laws and deporting the millions of illegal aliens that are here exhaling CO2 24 hours a day and stop mass legal immigration. Doesn’t that bother you? Tell me why environmentalists never complain about mass immigration legal and illegal adding to our environmental woes?

You tout wind and solar as real alternatives. What planet are you on? By the way senator, how many birds do the propellers on the wind farms kill annually (over 300K) and how many are killed by solar reflecting and singing feathers causing birds to crash? Why haven’t you and the other environmentalists stood up for the creatures? You and they certainly would be urinating and moaning if oil or gas was killing as many animals.

I could go on but I think you get the point Senator. You and the rest of the communists posing as environmentalists are very selective in what you recognize as a problem. Coincidentally it always has something to do with impeding our progress as a nation.

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RELATED VIDEO: Environmentalists have declared that global warming can’t be stopped without ending the “hegemonic capitalist system,” saying that cap-and-trade systems and conservation efforts are “false solutions.” Read more.

Delusional Stalinist “Science”

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It seems appropriate to think about freedom as one aspect of Science – perhaps the most important aspect. After all, the first scientific society, the Royal Society, has as its motto: ”Nullius in Verba.” It’s part of a longer quotation from the poet Horace, saying a person need not be bound by the opinion of his/her master. A member of the Royal Society was free to disagree with the King. The Royal who gave them that charter and his patronage is the under-appreciated Charles II.

Sad to see that the present Crown Prince is the terribly misinformed son of Elizabeth II, Charles, Duke of Wales, who persists in trying to convince the government of his delusions about man-made global warming. Like our own “Constitutional Scholar in the White House” (to quote his press flack), Charles doesn’t seem to understand Britain’s (unwritten) constitution. The Royal Family is a patriotic symbol, a unifying, apolitical embodiment of Britannia, of heritage, of patriotism, of duty. Charles, in a widely reported story in the British Press, has been trying to impose ever more renewable power generation on the population, already grumbling over the cost of electricity.

lysenko

Trofim Lysenko

The so-far classic example of political interference with scientific freedom is the Soviet Union under Stalin and Khrushchev, from 1927 till 1962. Their favored “scientist” was Trofim Lysenko, a minimally educated agronomist whose denial of Mendelian genetics turned Russia and Ukraine from the Breadbasket of Europe to an importer of grain for decades. Millions of Russians went hungry and thousands died of starvation. In the process, several thousand trained biologists were fired, imprisoned, or executed. Nikolai Vavilov was disgracefully dismissed from the presidency of the Agriculture Academy in 1938 and died in prison in 1940. Before the Bolsheviks, in the early 1900’s, two Russian biologists had received Nobel prizes; Russia was not a scientific backwater during  freedom.

Darwin had hypothesized that “… in the struggle for existence, …, favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species….” It’s important to realize that Darwin had no identified mechanism by which such a variation was transmitted to offspring; Gregor Mendel’s experiments with pea plants remained unknown for decades, and Darwin’s hypothesis was widely rejected. Genes, deduced from Mendel’s data, made Darwin’s evolution mechanism feasible. The American John Hunt Morgan (Nobel laureate) identified genes in 1933 as units of chromosomes.

Marxism-Leninism, however, rejected any ideal laws that exist independently of matter; genes, God and “absolute ideas” do not exist. The ideal Soviet Man could be formed to be whatever the state wanted; a human is a tabula rasa, to be written by society. Lysenko was clever enough to offer a biological version; under Lysenko’s theory of agriculture, Southern plants could be trained to grow in the North, cows could be trained to give fatter milk, rye could be transformed into wheat and wheat into barley, and hens could lay hybrid eggs after fertilization by several roosters. Mendelian theory was just Bourgeois corruption. This was music to Stalin’s ears and to the commisars that were installed at all levels of science. The damage to Russian science persists to this day; Amazon publishes a book on the subject, and Wikipedia has lots on Lysenko.

Today, in America, we have a similar situation. An arrogant ideologue in the White House, with no scientific training, claims that man-made climate change is the greatest crisis facing humanity (not a claim by the IPCC). Those who disagree are “members of the flat Earth Society.” Before I continue my rant, let’s remember a little perspective: there has been NO global warming for 17+ years, the 100+ climate forecast models of the IPCC have all been wrong in forecasting various degrees of heating, Antarctic Sea Ice is at record levels (2.3 million sq kilometers above average), severe Atlantic hurricanes are rare, tornadoes last Summer were at a record low….there’s more, but the scientific method – comparing hypothesis with experimental data – no longer matters  to Obama, as it didn’t to Stalin. The cruel irony is that American “climate scientists” did this to themselves; Russian scientists at least tried to fight back against Stalin. Let’s hope no Americans freeze this Winter due to Obama’s restrictions on energy.

Peggy Noonan has an amusing weekend column, The Daydream and the Nightmare, accompanied by a sketch of Obama (the daydream) imagining his ugly head on Mt. Rushmore (the nightmare).  Noonan marvels that any president, golfing and traveling constantly, could be so unconcerned about the complete failure of both his domestic and foreign policy endeavors; she draws the conclusion that Obama considers them successful:

“He thinks he is right about his essential policies. He is steering the world toward not relying on America. He is steering America toward greater dependence on and allegiance to government. He is creating a more Federally-controlled, Washington-centric nation that is run and organized by progressives. He thinks he’s done his work, set America on a leftward course, and though his poll numbers    are down now, History will look back on him and see him as heroic… He is Lincoln, scorned in his time… He’s waiting for History to get its act together and see his true size…”

I give Ms. Noonan a B+ for her column; she missed a lot – the appointment of John Podesta, the recent Nat’l Climate Assessment, the “Risky Business” nonsense from his stooges. Obama’s not through yet; he’s not “running out the clock” as she puts it. The final item on his agenda is much on his mind, and he mentions it every week. He’s out to destroy American industry, to “make the cost of electricity skyrocket”, as he promised to his backers early in 2008 in San Francisco. That’s what the new EPA “carbon pollution” regs are all about. Only two and a half more years to get it done. Another aspect of American exceptionalism to kill.

A few things you may not have noticed (or didn’t hear from the Mainstream Media):

Canada has finally gotten tired of waiting and has voted to build a pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia  where an ocean terminal will transfer “dirty oil sands” black gold to Asia. It will be burned there, much less cleanly than here. Goodbye, Keystone XL; goodbye, 22,000 American jobs; goodbye, energy independence.

om www.americanthinker.com]
Coal may have played an integral role in turning the U.S. into the world’s top economic superpower, but President Obama is actively pushing China, India and other emerging economies to ignore the fuel that powered the Industrial Revolution and instead embrace renewable sources favored by those on the political left.

As part of his passionate push on climate change, the president recently implored developing countries to “leapfrog” old energy sources, which are the primary drivers of carbon emissions. So far, however, there’s little evidence those countries intend to listen to Mr. Obama, with China’s coal consumption, for example, skyrocketing and projected to keep growing for the foreseeable future. The country now accounts for nearly 50 percent of all global coal consumption, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Some energy analysts say that expecting the president’s sermon — in which he urges nations to now do as we say, not as we did for more than a century — to dramatically alter the worldwide energy landscape is a glaring example of the “dream world” that Mr. Obama and his backers in the environmental movement call home. [Honest, folks, I don’t make this stuff up. As I said,  he is delusional. But his EPA will hurt America, which is the goal.]

Antarctic sea ice is at all-time record levels, 2.3 million sq kilometers above normal.

Wait, what?! It’s collapsing any day now; we all heard that last month.

[from http://www.livescience.com/40451-volcanic-co2-levels-are-staggering.html]

“In 1992, it was thought that volcanic degassing released something like 100 million tons of CO2 each year. Around the turn of the millennium, this figure was getting closer to 200. The most recent estimate, released this February, comes from a team led by Mike Burton, of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology – and it’s just shy of 600 million tons. It caps a staggering trend: A six-fold increase in just two decades.”

Hmmmm. The US/NASA  just launched a new satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory -2 (OCO-2). It will be very interesting to see where the major sources of carbon dioxide are. Mount Fuji? Kilauea? Will Obama order somebody to shut them down?

Numerous solar physicists, Russian and American, have pointed out that solar activity, measured by sunspots and by geomagnetic field strength measurements, is decreasing, both long term,  over several solar cycles and over the declining current cycle. Several have claimed that terrestrial temperature must soon go down, i.e., Earth cooling lies ahead in the near future. Arm waving as far as I’ve been concerned.

But an Aussie scientist, David Evans, claims to have a statistical model, based on past records of solar activity and Earth temperature. It should be released, as an Excel spreadsheet, in a few weeks. Science is based on the ability to DISPROVE a hypothesis. Evans may turn out to be wrong – like the quacks who claim CO2 controls the climate – but it’s a starting point. BTW, climate history shows that the decline into a glacial age is usually slow, over several hundred years. I’ll let you know if anything seems to verify.

Open letter to CEO of Nextera Energy on Smart Meters

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Mr. James L. Robo
Chairman and Ceo
Nextera Energy, Inc.

Re:   Are Smart Meters Really the Intelligent Choice

Dear Mr. Robo,

Did you read where FPL spent $800,000,000.00 to buy smart meters for 4.5 million customers and is installing them at no charge along with 10,000 intelligent devices to move the information around because they say it will be a huge benefit to their customers? Now I have read over the huge customer benefits touted by FPL as being able to monitor your electric power usage even by the hour but see nothing else! Wow, that is exactly what I’m sure all people have been waiting for the ability to do. There will probably be block parties formed to watch the results and experiment with turning appliances on and off to monitor usage. I wonder how society ever survived without it and perhaps could become as big a fad as the hula hoop.

If that is true I am sure you would agree Mr. Robo that this would be the first time a company acted so benevolently towards its millions of customers and a utility no less. As I mentioned in my previous letter they are so hell bent on being benevolent to the customers they are penalizing the people staring the gift horse in the mouth though the people declining didn’t consume $1.00 of the $800 Million FPL spent.

Did you read the utility is portraying itself as a real environmentally conscious company even using Agenda 21 words like sustainability and renewable?

Did you read where they tout they have the largest wind and solar portfolio in the Country? Now that might rate a pat on the head from President Obama for battling the evil climate change hoax he is bound and determined to push as an agenda so he can soak consumers even more through eliminating evil carbon that we exhale as we breathe. It is the consumer who pays though.

Did you read where smart people are wondering how much more expensive their electricity is since the cost to produce a KW of electricity is several times higher through solar or wind than through fossil fuels? In the brochure lauding the environmental tilt of the company and patting themselves on the back about how environmentally pure they are they fail to mention an important thing; the hundreds of thousands of birds chopped up by the rotor blades and the birds killed by wings singed from the solar heat causing them to crash and die every year. I suppose they don’t want to ruin the message they are putting out and want to portray to the public since some might get upset that even bald eagles are victims of the blades yet the federal government is silent in spite of the fact there are severe penalties for killing bald eagles.

Did you read where having all of these additional portals from wind and solar farms opens up the windows available for hackers to penetrate to shut down our grid (blackout)? Even worse, the information is all of the millions of smart meters the utility installed also are a path for penetrating the system to shut it down!

So Mr, Robo, it appears the utility that is so proud of its environmental approach to providing “sustainable and renewable” energy that decimates hundreds of thousands of birds every year also is making it dramatically easier for hackers to shut down the grid because of the millions and millions of portals they can now use to penetrate the system. Do you think the utility thought of that before they acquired the largest wind and solar portfolio in the country and installed millions of electronic meters that makes us ever more vulnerable to be attacked by hackers? If that happens, what will the utility say I wonder?

Perhaps the people who refused the meters should be thanked by not increasing the number of portals any further instead of being penalized for not making the grid ever more susceptible for hackers. Would you agree those who declined the meters were really the smart people and those who chose the meter made a dumb choice?

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Obama Continues His Attack on U.S. Energy

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The delay of the Keystone XL pipeline is a perfect example of the way President Obama and his administration has engaged in, not just a war on coal, but on all forms of energy the nation has and needs. Even his State Department admits there is no reason to refuse its construction and, as turmoil affects the Middle East, there is an increased need to tap our own oil and welcome Canada’s.

The latest news, however, is that Canada has just approved the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, a major pipeline to ship Canadian oil—to Asia.

The pure evil of the delay is compounded by the loss of the many jobs the pipeline—that will not require taxpayer funding—represents to help reduce the nation’s obscene rate of unemployment and to generate new revenue for the nation. That’s what oil, coal, and natural gas does.

Less visible has been the out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency that has, since Obama took office on January 20, 2009, issued 2,827 new final regulations totally 24,915,000 words to fill 24,915 pages of the Federal Register. As a CNSnews article reported, “The Obama EPA regulations have 22 times as many words as the entire Harry Potter series which includes seven books with 1,084,170 words.” Every one of the EPA regulations affects some aspect of life in America, crushing economic development in every conceivable way.

The worst part of the EPA regulation orgy is the fact that virtually all of it is based on a hoax. As reported by James Delingpole, a British journalist, “19 million jobs lost plus $4,335 trillion spent equals a global mean temperature of 0.018 degrees Celsius. Yes, horrible but true. These are the costs to the U.S. economy, by 2100, of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory war on carbon dioxide, whereby all states must reduce emissions from coal-fired electricity generating plants by 30% before 2005 levels.”

Citing a study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Delingpole reported that the new regulations will cost the economy another $51 billion annually, result in the 224,000 more lost jobs every year, and cost every American household $3,400 per year in higher prices for energy, food, and other necessities.”

This is an all-out attack on industry, business, and the use of electricity by all Americans.

There is absolutely no reason, nor need to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), a gas on which all life on Earth depends because it is to vegetation what oxygen is to all living creatures. It is the “food” on which every blade of grass depends. More CO2 means more crops and healthier forests.

The EPA’s regulations would yield“Less than two one-hundredths of a degree Celsius by the year 2100.

Disastrously, even the Supreme Court—the same one that signed off on Obamacare as a tax—has not ruled against the EPA’s false assertions about CO2. In late June, however, it did place limits on the EPA’s effort to limit power plant and factory emissions blamed for a global warming that does not exist. The Earth has been cooling for seventeen years, but the Court ruled that the EPA lacked authority in some cases to force companies to evaluate ways to reduce CO2 emissions.

As Craig Rucker, the Executive Director of the free market think tank, CFACT, points out, “The Court served notice that the Executive Branch cannot unilaterally write its own laws. This is an important principle. However, the United States still remains fated to suffer most of the economic damage EPA’s regulations will cause. True reform will require congressional action.”

Thanks to the lies that have been taught about “global warming”, now called “climate change”, in the nation’s schools to a generation of Americans, and the deluge of lies about the environment that have been repeated in the nation’s media, too many Americans still do not make the connection between the use of the nation’s vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, and their personal lifestyles and the nation’s economic growth.

The attacks on the energy industries by environmental organizations have been attacks on all Americans who turn on the lights or drive anywhere. Their mantra has been “dirty coal” and “dirty oil” along with lies about the way energy industries contribute billions to the nation’s revenue in taxes.

An example of these attacks have been those directed against “fracking”, the short term for hydraulic fracturing, a technology that has been in use for more than a half century and whose development has generated a boom in natural gas these days. Claims about fracking pollution have no basis in fact.

A new book, “The Fracking Truth—America’s Energy Revolution: The Inside, Untold Story”, by Chris Faulkner is well worth reading for the extraordinary way he explains fracking and the facts he provides about energy in America. It is published by Platform Press.

America has huge reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. “This phenomenon of energy abundance and efficiency,” says Faulkner, “makes it almost a certainty that the cost of powering our nation—already a bargain by international standards—is going to become even less of a burden for our economy for many decades to come.” But not if the EPA and other Obama government agencies such as the Department of the Interior have their way.

One example: “According to the American Petroleum Institute, at least 87% of our federal offshore acreage is off-limits to drilling. API commissioned the consultancy Wood Mackenzie to assess the foregone offshore opportunity in specific terms. The upshot: Increased access to oil and gas reserves underlying federal waters could, by 2025, generate an additional 4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, add $150 billion to government revenues, and create 530,00 jobs.”

“In fact, since 2007, about 96% of the increase in America’s oil and gas production occurred on private lands in the United States. Meanwhile, oil and gas production on federal lands declined to a ten-year low in fiscal years 2011-2012.”

Who is forcing coal-fired electricity plants to close? The Obama administration. Who is denying access to vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas on federal lands? The Obama administration. Who continues to lie about “climate change” pegged to carbon dioxide emissions? The Obama administration. And this is happening as China and India cannot build new coal-fired plants fast enough and Europe abandons wind and solar energy.

Who is the enemy of energy, current and future, in the United States? Barack Obama.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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Lenar Whitney: Global Warming is a Hoax

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Conservative for Congress Lenar Whitney denounces “Global Warming” as a myth, designed to give more power to the executive branch, while increasing taxes in a progressive’s dream to regulate every aspect of American life ­ from our light bulbs to our thermostat.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/0BzItCPk5j4[/youtube]

 

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Report: Southern Leg of Keystone XL Has Been a Job Creator, Generated Economic Growth

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Critics like Tom Steyer’s Next Gen Climate operation wants you to believe that the Keystone XL pipeline will only create a few dozen jobs. However, after looking at the construction of the southern leg of the pipeline, the truth is far different.

A new report finds that construction of the 485-mile Gulf Coast Project, stretching from Cushing, Oklahoma to Nederland, Texas, created thousands of jobs and added billions to local economies.  The Gulf Coast pipeline is the portion of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that was able to be built because it didn’t require a Presidential Permit.  It is helping improve the transportation of oil sands crude to Gulf Coast refiners – the same crude that Keystone XL will carry.

The report, prepared by Southern Methodist University’s Maguire Energy Institute for the Consumer Energy Alliance, found that in Oklahoma and Texas, the project resulted in

  • Over $5.7 billion in new economic activity.
  • Over 42,000 person years of new employment.
  • Over $217 million in additional state and local taxes.

The authors write:

[T]he Gulf Coast Project pipeline contributed substantially to the economic health of most of the counties along the alignment during the 2012-2014 construction period. In the years ahead, recurring expenditures for operations and maintenance of the pipeline will continue to support jobs while generating income and tax revenues for Oklahoma, Texas and the 24 affected counties.

Counties in Oklahoma where the pipeline was construction saw an average per capita income increase of 78%. Three counties—Seminole, Hughes, and Coal—saw over 90% increases. For counties in Texas, the average per capita income increase was 58%.

On a press call, Bud Weinstein, an economics professor at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business and one of the reports’ authors noted that “most of these counties are comparatively low-income, rural counties.” Construction of the Gulf Coast Project has been a “tremendous economic tonic.” For instance, the report finds “pipeline activities averaged 31 percent of personal income” in Oklahoma.

During construction, TransCanada spent about $6 million per month directly in the local community. Here are some examples of local entrepreneurs taking advantage of the business opportunities the pipeline’s construction offered:

For instance, Clifford Bryant, a local entrepreneur in Prague, Oklahoma, reports that construction of the pipeline “doubled our city sales tax receipts.” Clifford bought a mobile RV and trailer park when he heard that TransCanada would be bringing a construction yard to town for its Gulf Coast Pipeline Project.  Previously, only 11 of the 57 spots in the park were occupied.  Once construction began, all 57 were occupied. Clifford notes that a full RV park contributes as much as $8,000 a month in electricity fees alone to the municipal utility.

In the Southeast Texas town of Kountze, Jeremy Kunk’s Ready Ice Company sold approximately 30,000 pounds of ice per week to pipeline construction sites in its area. The ice improved safety by keeping workers cool and hydrated.  Kunk expects that the economic boost supplied by pipeline projects will be long-lasting. “Pipeline construction such as TransCanada’s Gulf Coast Pipeline Project is going to feed our refineries more product and keep us hopping for the next five, 10 years at least.”

Joe Penland is another Texas business owner who benefited from TransCanada’s pipeline construction. Joe owns Quality Mat Company in Southeast Texas. His company partnered with TransCanada to make the Gulf Coast Project safer. With a patented concept, Penland fabricates more than 250,000 mats per year in his facility inside the Beaumont city limits.  He leased the mats to TransCanada during construction of the Gulf Coast Pipeline in Oklahoma and Texas.

Positive benefits would extend to more states if the northern leg of the pipeline, linking Alberta to Nebraska, were approved by the Obama administration. “Similar state and local economic benefits can be anticipated should the United States give the go-ahead for construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska,” the authors write.

“I would expect similar impacts” to those found in Oklahoma and Texas if the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline is approved, Weinstein said on the press call.

Follow Sean Hackbarth on Twitter at @seanhackbarth and the U.S. Chamber at @uschamber.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is of sections of pipe sit on the ground in Atoka, Oklahoma. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg.

 

Obama Talks Climate Change While Iraq Implodes

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Photo of armed Iraqi boy courtesy of  AFP and Atlas Shrugs.

It is depressing beyond words that we will have to endure two and a half more years of an endless stream of lies about climate change from President Obama.

On June 14 he gave a commencement speech to graduates of the University of California at Irvine, using it to tell Big Fat Lies, not the least of which was that the Earth’s temperatures were rising when in fact they have been falling for nearly eighteen years.

It is an endless source of wonder to me that no part of the mainstream media disputes him when he says things like this. For years now they have been reporting the evidence of increasingly cold weather worldwide.

On the same day the President was lying about warming, eight inches of snow fell in Rize, Turkey. It has fallen as well in South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia while closer to home snow fell on several cities in Idaho with cold freezes extending into Oregon. In June!

Cartoon - Climate Change Red LineObama used the speech to demand that politicians take steps to acknowledge climate change which used to be called global warming until it became undeniable to everyone except the charlatans lining their pockets with utterly bogus “research” that underwrites the source of the lies, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Obama continues to listen to his White House advisor, Dr. John Holdren, whose contempt for the human race is such he would happily see large parts of it disappear. In February, Holdren told reporters that all weather is impacted by climate change, but that is what climate change has done for 4.5 billion years. Not mentioned was that climate cycles are measured in centuries while weather is a short-term event. The most recent mini-ice age lasted from 1300 to 1850.

Holdren alluded to droughts affecting parts of the nation, claiming they were getting longer and drying. Two leading climate scientists, former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer and University of Colorado climate scientists, Roger Pielke, Jr, called Holdren’s assertions “pseudo-science rambling.” “The idea that any of the weather we are seeing is in any significant way due to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions verges on irrationality,” said Spencer. Pielke called Holdren’s assertions “zombie science.”

While Holdren is warning about droughts that could cause famines, James M. Taylor, the managing editor of the Heartland Institute’s monthly, Environment & Climate News, took aim at the IPCC claims, noting that U.S. and global crop production, especially the most important staple food crops, corn, rice, and wheat, “have more than tripled since 1970. During the past few years, the United States has set crop production records for alfalfa, cotton, beans, sugar beets, sweet potatoes, canola, corn, flaxseed, hops, rice sorghum, soybeans, sunflowers, peanuts and wheat, to name just a few.”

The worst part of Obama’s lies about the so-called “greenhouse gases” that we’ve been told for decades are warming the Earth is the way those lies are translated into government policies. The Obama administration, via the Environmental Protection Agency, has launched a war on coal-fired plants that produce 40% of the nation’s electricity claiming that their emissions such as carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing a warming that is not happening. What is happening is a deliberate effort to drive up the cost of electricity for everyone.

America runs on electricity and 68% of it is generated by fossil fuels, 20% by nuclear, and 7% by hydropower. So called “clean energy”, wind and solar, provides about 4% at far higher costs than the others and exists largely due to government subsidies and mandates.

Claims about increased severe storms, heat waves, and hurricanes simply have no basis in fact. In recent years there has been a record low in the numbers of tornadoes, hurricanes, no change in the rise of sea levels, but record gains in Arctic and Antarctic ice. None of this is reported by the mainstream media.

Yet Obama told graduates that rising temperatures and sea levels, as well as intensifying storm patterns represent “one of the most significant long-term challenges that our country and our planet face.” He said this even though his administration’s recent National Climate Assessment acknowledged that “There has been no universal trend in the overall extent of drought across the continental U.S. since 1900.” The report, however, is being used to justify carbon-related regulations.

While the world’s attention is on one of the greatest threats facing it, the takeover of northern Iraq by a barbaric Islamist group—one from which even al Qaeda disassociated itself—Obama is talking about non-existent climate threats to further policies that kill jobs in the U.S. and harm its struggling recovery of our economy.

While the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) seeks to expand its control of a major portion of the Middle East, Obama thought it was more important to lie about the climate to college graduates.

How much more damage Obama can inflict on the economy between now and the end of his second term in office is unknown, but what we do know is that his priorities, based on scare-mongering speeches about the climate will continue until he leaves office.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

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EPA Pumps Up Benefits of Proposed Carbon Regulation

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EPA argues that its proposed carbon regulations on existing power plants will offer $30 billion in climate benefits by 2030 with only $7.3 billion in costs. Sounds like a great deal, right? Not so fast.

A Brookings Institution white paper finds that EPA pumped up that number by including global climate benefits. If the agency took the standard approach and only examined the costs and benefits to those in the United States—who will feel its full brunt —then the climate benefits from the proposed rule would fall to as little as 7% of what EPA estimates, much less than the proposed regulation’s costs.

Authors Ted Gayer, Vice President and Director, Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and Kip Viscusi, law professor at Vanderbilt University, explain that a basic component to cost-benefit analysis is looking at the appropriate population:

The pertinent populations that are attributed standing in a benefit-cost analysis should correspond to the political jurisdiction that is bearing the cost.

For example, when analyzing a new Wisconsin milk regulation, one should include the regulation’s effects on Wisconsin farmers and milk drinkers and not on those living in Florida.

Likewise, the cost-benefit analysis of EPA’s proposed carbon should be limited to the United States, but that’s not what EPA is doing. Gayer and Viscusi write [emphasis mine]:

The recent governmental analyses of the benefits associated with reduction of [greenhouse gas] emissions represent a rare instance in which U.S. regulatory impact analyses have used a worldwide benefits reference point rather than a U.S. reference point.

The only other time the authors could find an instance of this was in 1980 involving a uranium regulation.

Why is EPA doing this? Because it’ll make the proposed rule more politically palatable, write Gayer and Viscusi:

[I]mposing a global perspective on benefits will increase the apparent desirability of the policy but will overstate the actual benefits to the American people.

However, EPA’s use of global benefits as the justification for the proposed carbon rule crosses Presidential Executive Orders that state that cost-benefit analyses should be limited to the effects on the American public. For instance, President Clinton’s Executive Order 12866 reads: [emphasis mine]

The American people deserve a regulatory system that works for them, not against them: a regulatory system that protects and improves their health, safety, environment, and well-being and improves the performance of the economy without imposing unacceptable or unreasonable costs on society…

President Obama’s Executive Order 13563 is along those same lines: [emphasis mine]:

Federal agencies should promulgate only such regulations as are required by law, are necessary to interpret the law, or are made necessary by compelling public need, such as material failures of private markets to protect or improve the health and safety of the public, the environment, or the well-being of the American people.

In addition, guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) advises regulators that

Your analysis should focus on benefits and costs that accrue to citizens and residents of the United States. Where you choose to evaluate a regulation that is likely to have effects beyond the borders of the United States, these effects should be reported separately.

The U.S. Chamber and several other trade associations have been arguing this exact point. “Consistent with OMB guidance, the costs of a rule for entities in the United States should be presented in comparison with the benefits occurring in the United States,” states a comment to OMB on the administration’s social cost of carbon estimates.

Gayer and Viscusi go on to write, “If one were to focus on the domestic benefits rather than the worldwide benefits, the [greenhouse gas] benefit component would sometimes be extremely small.”

How small? The Obama Administration estimates that most of the climate benefits of reducing carbon emissions would be outside the United States. “Only 7 to 23 percent of these benefits would be domestic benefits,” write Gayer and Viscusi. This means that “the domestic benefits amount [of the proposed carbon rule] is only $2.1 billion-$6.9 billion, which is less than the estimated compliance costs for the rule of $7.3 billion.”

EPA should be honest with the American people. Based on its own estimates, the costs of the proposed carbon rule–job losses, higher electricity costs, and a less-reliable electrical grid–outweigh its domestic climate benefits. The proposed rule is bad enough, but the misleading way EPA is justifying it is just as bad.

UPDATE: Michael Bastasch at the Daily Caller News Foundation pulled out a few more interesting quotes from the paper:

“If global consequences are permitted to govern the terms of the benefit-cost analysis, then the selection of policy initiatives likewise should be governed by global considerations, subject to compliance with U.S. law,” argue Gayer and Viscusi.

“Whether it makes sense to routinely expand the scope of the assessed policy impacts beyond the citizenry of the nation bearing the costs is highly problematic,” the authors write. “What is clear at this juncture is that the recent expansion of [greenhouse gas] benefit assessments to include global impacts merits much more scrutiny and justification than it has received to date.”

Follow Sean Hackbarth on Twitter at @seanhackbarth and the U.S. Chamber at @uschamber.

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[youtube]http://youtu.be/CpJhJW0rvbg[/youtube]

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo of EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy is courtesy of photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg.

Irony Alert! Coal-Fired Train Featured on White House Christmas Ornament

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The Obama White House may think coal isn’t good enough to power our economy, but it must think it’s good enough to add some Christmas cheer.

While the Obama administration gave coal producers and electricity generators an early lump of coal after EPA released proposed carbon regulations, a coal-fired train is the star of the 2014 White House Christmas ornament.

2014 White House Christmas Ornament Features a Coal-Fired Train

 As the White House Historical Association explains, the ornament is the first to be composed of two pieces [emphasis mine]:

The locomotive is a detailed miniature replica of one of several steam-powered locomotives that pulled the Presidential Special; it is attached to the coal car that held its fuel. The other miniature car is the Superb, the president’s private heavyweight Pullman car. The last car on the Special, the Superb was outfitted with a public address system. President Harding made appearances and delivered speeches at stops across the country from a platform at the back of the car.

President Warren Harding’s transcontinental speaking and sightseeing tour inspired the design.

The ornament reminds us that just as it powered the trains that tied America together into an economic powerhouse, coal still plays a critical role in fueling America’s economy. According to the Energy Information Agency, more electricity is produced by coal (37%) than any other energy source. It’s the backbone of affordable, reliable electricity.
Electricity generation by energy source.

Source: Energy Information Administration

The United States possesses coal reserves that can last for nearly three centuries. The attacks on this abundant energy source by regulators will mean lost jobs, slower economic growth, higher electricity costs, and a less reliable electrical grid.

President Obama said in 2008 while campaigning, “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.” However, trinkets depicting coal apparently are acceptable.

The ornament is a lovely decoration sure to add character to anyone’s Christmas tree, even of those whose jobs will be lost because of federal regulations pushing coal use out of the economy.

Follow Sean Hackbarth on Twitter at @seanhackbarth and the U.S. Chamber at @uschamber.

Hollywood celebrities caught accepting money from “Middle Eastern oil interests” to make anti-fracking film

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project veritas logoJames O’Keefe Premieres “Expose: Hollywood’s War on US Energy” at Cannes Film Festival. Hollywood celebrities are caught on hidden camera accepting money from “Middle Eastern oil interests”

HotAir.com’s Ed Morrissey writes, “For those who remember the controversy surrounding the financing of the anti-fracking Matt Damon film Promised Land, this new undercover video from James O’Keefe and Project Veritas will simply confirm suspicions. O’Keefe set himself up as an ersatz Middle Eastern oil baron in order to test the Hollywood environmental waters to see how welcome his supposed money would be in attacking American energy independence. The big names in this effort, Ed Begley Jr and Mariel Hemingway, will get the most notice but are in essence collateral damage. The real targets for this probe are Josh and Rebecca Tickell, award-winning producers who are all too keen to take Middle Eastern money to attack American natural-gas exploration…”

In a blockbuster new video, Project Veritas has exposed the truth about the dark funding behind Hollywood’s anti-fracking messaging machine. New York Times Bestselling Author and Project Veritas founder and president James O’Keefe debuted the latest investigation at a “premiere” in Cannes, France on Wednesday.

In the investigation, an undercover journalist from Project Veritas posed as a member of a Middle Eastern oil dynasty and offered $9 million in funding to American filmmakers to fund an anti-fracking movie.

okeefe at cannes film festival

James O’Keefe at Cannes Film Festival.

In video from a meeting with Ed Begley Jr., Mariel Hemingway and Josh Tickell, a Project Veritas investigator disguised as “Muhammed” offered $9 million for an anti-fracking film. “Muhammad” clearly states: “If Washington DC continues fracking, America will be energy efficient, and then they won’t need my oil anymore.”

In the same conversation, Begley and Hemingway accept the funding and agree to hide the source of funds for the anti-fracking movie. Hemingway agreeing that those who will know the source of the funding are “only at this table.”

Ed Begley Jr. is an outspoken environmental activist and current Governor on the board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science (the organization that brings us the OSCARS every year.)

Mariel Hemingway is a Golden Globe- and Oscar-nominated actress.

Josh Tickell is a Sundance Film Festival Winner and the director of environmental message movies “Fuel”, “The Big Fix” and “PUMP”.

Team Begley even submitted a video of Oscar-nominated actor Mark Ruffalo offering his unwavering support for the fictitious anti-fracking film project.

The meeting came about after a series of discussions with Josh and Rebecca Tickell. A Project Veritas journalist posed as an ad executive seeking to broker a deal for his client (“Muhammed”) to fund an American-made anti-fracking film.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/KOX5ehfFF7I[/youtube]

In a phone call to Tickell, the ad executive states: “My client’s interest is to end American energy independence; your interest is to end fracking. And you guys understand that?”

Tickell’s response: “Correct. Yes, super clear.”

Tickell makes it clear on the tape that revealing the source of funding for an activist film can undermine its credibility. Tickell notes that the movie “Promised Land” undermined its own message because it was labeled as being funded by Image Nation Abu Dhabi. His advice: “So rather than putting that [the source of funding] up front, don’t mention that.”

In a follow-up call with Josh and Rebecca Tickell, Rebecca Tickell assures our investigator: “We would never tell about where the funding is coming from. That would be really awkward for us.”

Josh Tickell: “We’re confident that we can keep this zip locked, you know tight, air-tight forever. If we don’t protect who is kind of funding this thing, if we have to disclose that or that becomes a necessary part of it, the whole enterprise will not work.”

Project Veritas founder and president James O’Keefe stated Wednesday:

“This latest investigation shows the dark side of Hollywood’s environmental movement. Hollywood is willing to take and conceal money from Middle Eastern oil interests in order to advance their cause of destroying American energy independence.”

The raw video can be found at http://Youtube.com/VeritasVisuals

Project Veritas is non-partisan and does not advocate for political candidates or parties. The purpose of Project Veritas’ investigations is to expose waste, fraud, dishonesty and self-dealing.

Stay up to date on who responds by following us on Facebook athttp://Facebook.com/ProjectVeritas and on Twitter @Project_Veritas.

Support Project Veritas’ investigations at http://ProjectVeritas.com/donate