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

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Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli

By Alan Caruba

One of the most famous lines from The Godfather was, “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli” Permit me to update that to the Middle East. Forget the wars, buy the oil, and develop our own oil as fast as possible.

Middle Eastern and other oil produced worldwide is for sale to anyone who wants to purchase it. Putting our troops in harm’s way and spending trillions to do so is idiotic.

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan has been marked as always with all manner of killing. The latest have been bombings in Baghdad that killed more than sixty people, the continued slaughter of Syrians sick of the two-generation despotism of the Assad family, the lingering fighting in Libya, and our continuing losses in Afghanistan.

The U.S. stepped in when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 to grab its oil reserves. It went back in 2003 to get rid of Saddam and never left. After 9/11 in 2001 it carpet bombed Tora Bora in Afghanistan to kill al Qaeda members and then never left. What’s wrong with this policy? There is no oil in Afghanistan. Iraq’s oil will be subject to its internal conflict and Iran’s meddling for the foreseeable future.

The Middle Eastern and African oil cartel, OPEC controls 44% of the world’s crude oil production and 79% of the world’s crude oil reserves. Thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Energy, the U.S. is unable to access billions of barrels of oil in Alaska and the continental shelf on both coasts.

This policy applies as well to our coal and natural gas reserves despite the fact that the U.S. has century’s worth of coal and is discovering new reserves of natural gas every day.

We have been losing the capacity to refine oil. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2009 there are 148 operable refineries, down from 150 and only 137 refineries were actually operating, down from 141. Regulations have ensured that not one new refinery has been built in the U.S. for over three decades.

Whose oil do we buy? Canada provides the U.S. with two million barrels of the eleven million we use every day. If the Obama administration and environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth would get out of the way and let the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline project be built, it would move oil from Canada’s Alberta province to existing pipelines and refineries for an additional 1.1 million barrels. We also purchase oil that originates in Mexico and even Venezuela.

There are about 40 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico offshore of U.S. States, to which you can add an estimated 14 billion barrels off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The Obama administration’s response to this has been to restrict access to it. After the BP Oil accident in the Gulf, the Obama administration’s moratorium destroyed an estimated 13,000 jobs as oil rigs left for other sites and the local economy took a huge hit.

The Obama administration keeps telling everyone that it is the big, evil oil companies that determine the cost of oil and the price of gasoline, but oil is a global commodity and big oil companies can only get the daily price of various grades of crude. The top three U.S. oil companies paid $42.8 billion in income taxes in 2010 and, it should be noted, provided 9.2 million jobs for Americans who also paid taxes.

While vilifying U.S. oil companies, the Obama administration neglects to mention that ExxonMobil’s pretax income in 2010 was $52 billion, from which it paid $21.6 billion in income taxes worldwide, leaving a net income of $30.5 billion. That’s a tax rate of 45%, fully 10% above the statutory corporate rate of 35%. The same tax costs apply to ConocoPhilips and Chevron.

The United States has vast oil, gas, coal, uranium, rare earth and other natural resources. The federal government has for decades placed every obstacle it can in the way of accessing them

Instead, the Obama administration keeps saying that “green jobs” would replace those in the energy sector, along with increased subsidizing of wind and solar energy, the source of barely 3% of all the energy we use daily.

Today, when one in ten Americans are out of work, just tapping the oil in the outer continental shelf between 3 and 200 miles off our coast, developing our domestic oil and natural gas reserves, has the potential to create 1.2 million jobs representing $70 billion in annual wages. And that does not include development of our massive coal reserves!

Worldwide, the U.S. is already in competition with China and India to purchase the oil needed to sustain our industries and transportation. This is the real world, not the fantasy conjured up by the federal government and environmental organizations doing everything possible to turn off the lights and leave our cars parked in the garages of America.

In September, after having driven the economy into the ditch, the President says that a new plan to get the economy going again will be unveiled. It’s a good guess that energy development, other than wind and solar, will not be part of that plan.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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It's Just a Heat Wave

By Alan Caruba

The most surprising thing about the current heat wave affecting much of the United States is that no global warming charlatan is claiming that it is the result of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Since the late 1980s, Americans were assailed with the global warming hoax until, in November 2009, the release of emails between the trolls ginning up false “climate models” were exposed.

These days the term “climate change” is used as a substitute for “global warming”, but fewer of us are fooled by this. Al Gore is planning a last-ditch effort in September to revive the hoax, but that will fail.

Even those in the mainstream media are too embarrassed to report the absurd notion that CO2, a trace gas in the Earth’s atmosphere (0.0380%) vital to all vegetation on the planet has anything to do with climate cycles. A new cooling cycle that kicked in around 1998 is the predictable result of less solar activity.

This is not to say it’s not hot. Heat waves are as common to summer months as blizzards are to winter ones. For those who possess the memory of fungus, there was a heat wave that engulfed the East Coast from July 4 through 9th in 2010. Weather records reflect that heat waves are a natural event, often following or preceding record setting cold waves.

While Al Gore and the last holdouts of the global warming hoax continue to tell us that CO2 emissions (the use of fossil fuels for energy to produce electricity, drive anywhere, and manufacture anything) will destroy the world, the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, will soon announce a finding that will blow the CO2 nonsense to bits.

Dennis T. Avery of the Hudson Institute, reports CERN has demonstrated “that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in the earth’s atmosphere.” Cosmic rays are subatomic particles from outer space. More clouds means that less of the sun’s warmth reaches the Earth’s surface.

This completely overturns the torrent of lies that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been churning out for decades. The IPCC’s scientists went into full panic mood as a new cooling cycle asserted itself in 1998.

As Avery points out, the IPCC scientists had deliberately ignored “the Medieval Warming (950-1200 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC-600BC) or the big Holocene Warmings centered on 6,000 and 8,000 BC.” There was also a Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850 to account for as well.

While the global warming crowd has been telling everyone that they must stop burning coal, using oil or natural gas, and “reduce our carbon footprint”, a recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, in just four days, negated every government-mandated effort to control or reduce CO2 emissions worldwide for the past five years! When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it put so much smoke and other gases in the atmosphere that it cooled the Earth’s temperatures for a few years until they dissipated.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is frantically issuing new rules and regulations to reduce the CO2 emissions from utilities and manufacturing facilities before the public realizes that its actual goal is to kill the U.S. economy by increasing the cost of electricity and everything else. It is insanely trying to shut down the mining of coal, while other elements of the Obama regime are trying to stop any drilling for oil.

Unable to scare everyone with the global warming hoax, new horrors are being invented, from ocean acidification to the claim that the atmosphere is being overloaded with nitrogen. Relax, there’s four times more nitrogen in the atmosphere than oxygen and it’s no big deal.

The Greens think you’re stupid

Americans need to be aware that major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are desperate to maintain the fictions required to deprive the U.S. of the energy it needs to function.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just gave $50 million to the Sierra Club to support its “Beyond Coal” campaign. Bloomberg actually thinks it’s a good thing the Sierra Club has managed to stop 150 coal-burning plants from being built. Meanwhile, during the current heat wave, providers of electricity are worrying whether they can continue to meet the increased demand for it. Coal provides 50% of all the electricity we use in America.

How stupid or evil do you have to be to stop building the plants that provide electricity at a time when the population and the demand for it is rising? Must America become a third world nation with rolling blackouts and brownouts?

Friends of the Earth are in a panic that Republicans might actually get the U.S. government to cut back on the insane spending that has put the nation on the edge of sovereign default. Lately they’re claiming that Majority Leader, Eric Candor (R-VA) “is threatening to sink the American economy and undermine environmental protections so that his wealthy friends, including big oil corporations, can keep sitting on their cushions.”

That’s the same Big Oil that hasn’t been able to build a single new refinery in the U.S. since the 1970s. That’s the same Big Oil that has seen ten oil rigs leave the Gulf of Mexico since the May 2010 Obama “moratorium” for drilling sites in Egypt, Congo, French Guiana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Brazil. They took a lot of jobs and revenue with them,

If you wanted to destroy America, all you have to do is make it impossible to access several century’s worth of its own huge reserves of coal and the billions of barrels of oil inland and offshore that would, indeed, make America more energy independent.

The next time anyone speaks about “sustainability”, they are talking about turning out the lights and emptying the highways of America. The next time anyone talks about “the environment”, they mean the same thing.

So, remember, it’s just a heat wave. It will end just like all the others and, in a few months, we will all be talking about the blizzards.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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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

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Against All Energy Anywhere

By Alan Caruba

One of the great afflictions of the environmentalists—Greens—everywhere is a profound lack of understanding of the role that energy plays in whether a nation prospers or just limps along, barely keeping the lights on.

A classic case is the communist paradise of North Korea that is almost completely dark at night while just across the 38th parallel, South Korea is ablaze with light, energy, and a thriving economy.

Dedicated Greens don’t really like any kind of energy whether it is nuclear, provided by burning coal, from natural gas, oil or from hydropower. They think that wind power is trouble-free and cost effective when it is neither. They feel the same way about solar power. Both are deemed acceptable because they don’t “emit” anything. This viewpoint is not merely naïve, it is profoundly stupid.

Before we go further, let’s examine the basic facts of U.S. power, give or take a percentage point or two, coal provides over 50% of electrical power. Nuclear provides around 20%, natural gas is just over 20%, hydroelectric is close to 7%, and so-called “renewables” like wind and solar are credited with about 3%. Petroleum generated electricity is 1% and “other sources”, whatever they may be, come in at around 0.3%.

These are figures from 2009 and, suffice to say, are subject to change, but not much.

Friends of the Earth, an international Green organization, (FOE) is no friend to humanity. Hardcore Greens think Earth’s problems would be solved if human beings were not part of its ecology.

Following the Japan earthquake, FOE sent an email to its members and fellow travelers saying, “We must learn from this disaster. Tell your members of Congress that nuclear power should not be part of our energy future.” Ironically, FOE is very unhappy with President Obama and his administration which has been very inclined toward nuclear energy.

The Sierra Club, another ultra-Green organization, put out a newsletter reminding its members that it is “unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy” and has been “for more than three decades.” The same newsletter warned that “politicians who owe their primary allegiance to the fossil-fuel industry (coal, natural gas, and oil) are quick to promote domestic drilling and deregulation, as if that would make the gauge on the gas pump start to run backward.” In point of fact, it would. U.S. domestic oil is always cheaper than imported oil.

The Sierra Club just conjured up a petition “to tell the Obama administration to protect the Arctic Refuge” because “We cannot allow these oil companies to destroy the pristine wilderness of the Arctic Refuge.” Every time you hear the words “pristine wilderness” think of a place no human would ever want to live, let alone visit. And no one is really addressing the economic devastation the Obama administration has visited on the Gulf States because of its refusal to allow oil drilling to resume.

FOE recently was fulminating against the use of coal to light up the homes, businesses and streets of South Africa and was equally unhappy about the effort to install a pipeline from Canada to the U.S. to transmit oil derived from its tar sands. A lot of our “imported” oil comes from Canada. That’s because it has been government policy for decades to make it difficult, if not impossible, to drill, extract, and refine oil here in America.

The March 21-27 edition of Bloomberg Business Week has an article by Brendan Greeley that is a good analysis titled “Facing Up to Nuclear Risk.” When nuclear plants have been built as many safety factors as possible have been built into them, but it is impossible to calculate the impact of an earthquake. The U.S. has its own tectonic fault lines, all well known, but the fact remains nuclear plants have been built near or on them.

“David Okrent, who advised the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on reactor safety for 20 years, points out that reactors are designed for only a set of defined events. ‘The early nuclear reactors weren’t designed for tornadoes,’ he says, ‘until one came along in Arkansas, and then we thought, ‘we gotta design for tornadoes.’ It’s not easy to be all-knowing.”

Were it not for Green propaganda, the U.S. would not be wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on idiotic wind and solar farms that are utterly dependent on government subsidies and mandates that require utilities to use the pitifully small amounts of electricity they produce.

The same can be said of the equally idiotic regulatory mandates for ethanol that drive up the cost of every gallon of gas pumped while, at the same time, reducing the mileage and damaging to your car’s engine. Even Al Gore thinks ethanol is a bad idea.

Ironically, more people have died from wind turbines than nuclear plants. In 2008, there were 41 recorded deaths. The carnage on birds and bats is rarely mentioned by the media. Despite all the blather about Three Mile Island not one person has died from radiation since nuclear plants were first introduced.

It is surely worth noting that coal-burning plants in a nation that is the Saudi Arabia of coal do not have meltdowns causing radiation that can make large areas uninhabitable. That “smoke” you see coming from the smokestacks of such plants is steam. Water vapor. Clouds are made of water vapor.

If we were really serious about safety and the provision of more electrical power, the U.S. would be building a hell of a lot more coal-burning plants right now and into the future.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Obama's Endless Energy Lies

By Alan Caruba

For anyone who follows energy issues, the President’s press conference on Friday was a breathtaking example of his ability and willingness to lie about America’s energy needs and reserves while obfuscating his administration’s relentless attacks on the nation’s coal and oil industries.

Even if we give Obama the benefit of the doubt by saying he is being “misinformed” by advisors, it does not alter the fact that he has, since the days of his campaign in 2008, made no secret of his intention to undermine America’s oil and coal industries while encouraging greater use of the two forms of energy, wind and solar power, that are of the least value in the real world. Neither would exist without massive tax incentives and subsidies or mandates that require their use.

Obama’s lies are so easily refuted one might think he would hesitate to tell them, but he is undeterred by the truth.

Claims that his administration is approving drilling permits were disputed by the Governor of Alaska, Sean Parnell, in a March 3rd Wall Street Journal editorial. “…Alaska and the Gulf states have been blocked from developing America’s oil by politically driven federal policy…In Alaska, an oil company can buy federal leases, spend over $3 billion in permitting and capital costs, apply for an air permit from the Environmental Protection Agency, and then wait for five years and still have no permit.”

Obama’s claim that his administration is looking at oil leases that have not been developed into drilling sites obscures the fact that, despite billions invested in them by companies prepared to explore and extract oil, his administration has pursued a policy of stalling such efforts.

His claim that America has only two percent of the proven oil reserves of the world’s oil is just a flat-out lie. The Congressional Research Service recently released a report asserting that the U.S. has at least 17 percent of the world’s oil. And that is just the amount known to exist domestically and offshore.

In a March 11th statement by Thomas Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research said that “The CRS found that there is likely to be a combined 164.1 billion barrels or 8.5 times as much as the president alleges.”

It is Obama whose policies are driving up the cost of a gallon of gas at the pump. When one considers that U.S. oil is always cheaper per barrel than imported oil, Americans are being robbed, not by oil companies, but by White House restrictions on oil production.

This is a President who, in January 2008, campaigning for the office, told the San Francisco Chronicle that his cap-and-trade plan would cause electricity rates to “necessarily skyrocket.” The Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, told the Wall Street Journal that same year that “Somehow, we have to figure out how to boast the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe” which was paying $10 a gallon!

The Obama energy plan is devoted to bankrupting Americans and bankrupting America.

As Nansen G. Saler, president and CEO of Quantum Reservoir Impact, Houston, asked in a March 9th Wall Street Journal commentary, “How do we go from where we are today—importing about 20% of our daily energy supply—to where we want to be in 2026, perhaps even (as) an energy exporter?”

Imagine that? The U.S. as an energy exporter? Imagine the thousands of jobs that represents? Imagine the revenue that represents to a nation in its present financial crisis? Imagine the savings at the pump?

In 1960, the writer Mary McCarthy was being interviewed by Dick Cavett and was asked which writers she thought were over-rated. She named three, one of whom was Lillian Hellman, a well known Communist sympathizer. McCarthy replied that “everything she writes is a lie, including the ‘and’ and ‘the.’ It sparked a great literary controversy, but I was reminded of it while listening to Obama.

This President, blathering about “energy efficiency”, electric cars, high speed trains, thousands of acres covered by wind turbines and solar farms, and all the other pipedreams that represent a Green agenda, is deliberately misleading Americans while his administration, instead of “winning the future”, is killing the future for America..

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Did the Global Warming Hoax Die in Cancun?

By Alan Caruba

If you want to know the core beliefs of those who gathered in Cancun, Mexico, for yet another Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conference, you need look no further than the way one of its days began with a prayer to Ixchel, a Mayan Moon goddess.

The global warmists are essentially pagans for whom the worship of Gaia, an Earth goddess of Greek origin, symbolizes their rejection of the Judeo-Christian values embraced by Western civilization.

It is, by now, a cliché to call environmentalism a religion, but that does not reduce the truth of this observation. For people of faith, however, it did not go unnoticed that the previous conference in Copenhagen closed amidst a huge blizzard that hit that city, nor that President Obama and the American contingent attending the conference had to depart early in order to avoid being unable to return to Washington, D.C. due to a blizzard that closed that city.

In Cancun, as negotiators from nearly 200 countries met to save the Earth from an utterly false “warming”, the seaside Mexican city’s temperatures plunged to a 100-year record low of 54 degrees Fahrenheit!

Amidst the sybaritic parties attended by the delegates, the Cancun conference hammered out demands for further reductions in the so-called greenhouse gases said to threaten the Earth with a huge warming, but Japan where the original Kyoto Protocols for such reductions were initiated opted out and it is worth noting that both India and China had always been exempted from them along with “developing” nations.

In reality, the IPCC conference was the charade designed to engineer a massive transfer of wealth from industrialized nations to those, as often as not, ruled by a variety of despots and authoritarian, corrupt governments that have failed to keep pace with the West for whom the use of “fossil fuels” has marked their economic ascendancy.

Behind the calls for energy reduction is an unspoken and inhuman desire by environmentalists to greatly reduce the world’s population by starving it of the energy it requires to prosper and survive. Along with many coal-fired plants, in both India and China plans are proceeding to introduce increased nuclear energy to benefit their populations of more than a billion each.

In stark contrast, under the Obama administration, the coal and oil industries have found themselves under attack, including a moratorium on all further exploration and extraction of oil in the Gulf of Mexico and off the east and west coasts. Plans for more nuclear production of electricity have been stymied as well.

The original Kyoto Protocols were unanimously rejected by the U.S. Senate in 1997.and in more recent years support for wind and solar production that only exists due to government subsidies and mandates is disappearing in nations that originally signed onto the limits on greenhouse gas emissions. In the U.S. both represent less than three percent of electricity generation.

The Earth has been cooling since 1998 when a new, entirely natural cooling cycle began. The last such cycle of note occurred between 1300 and 1850 and is known as the Little Ice Age. Predictions for the current cycle suggest it too may last several decades or longer.

As for carbon dioxide emissions, there is no evidence they influence the Earth’s overall temperatures. Indeed, carbon dioxide is vital to the growth of all vegetation, crops and forests, and thus to all life on the planet. Nor is there any evidence to support the absurd claim that human beings are causing the Earth to warm. For that you need only look to the low level of sunspots, magnetic storms, of the Sun.

There was no science of any merit to be heard or seen at the Cancun conference, only the massive body of lies generated by the United Nation’s IPCC. In November 2009, just prior to the last conference, the world learned of the machinations of a handful of rogue climate scientists to foist deliberately falsified IPCC “proof” of global warming.

There never was a “consensus” of scientists to support the global warming fraud. What is left is the spectacle of United Nations delegates seeking to impose its control over the world’s sovereign nations through the most audacious scheme ever perpetrated in the name of science.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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Oil Drilling Moratorium is an Act of Treason

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cry treason! For that is what it is.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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More about → Oil Drilling Moratorium is an Act of Treason

Denying Americans Their Own Energy

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → Denying Americans Their Own Energy

How Crazy Is It?

By Alan Caruba

How crazy is it to keep telling people the economy is recovering when everyone knows the “stimulus” was a complete flop and unemployment is up?

How crazy is it to keep wanting to spend more billions on “stimulus”?

How crazy is it to let the Bush tax cuts expire when every economist in America is telling you to extend or make them permanent?

How crazy is it for the federal government to sue Arizona for passing a law that directly mirrors a federal one intended to enforce the prohibition against illegal aliens?

How crazy is it to help fund a deepwater oil drilling operation off the coast of Brazil while refusing to allow it anywhere off the East and West coasts of America?

How crazy is it to refuse to open a tiny portion of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to drilling for oil at a time when we are importing sixty percent of oil from foreign producers?

How crazy is it to “reform” Medicare by adding thousands more to its rolls while telling everyone you were cutting its costs?

How crazy is it to pass Obamacare without telling people that many would lose their insurance while others would see their premiums increase?

How crazy is it to require utilities to purchase electricity from wind and solar farms when neither could exist without taxpayer subsidies, nor produces a steady supply?

How crazy is it to try to stop the building of coal-fired plants to generate electricity when the United States is the “Saudi Arabia of coal”, having hundreds of years’ supply?

How crazy is it to continue the moratorium on U.S. oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, throwing more people out of work, denying the oil to the marketplace, and yet give money to Mexico so it can drill in the same Gulf?

How crazy is it to try to close Guantanamo when no U.S. state prison system and no foreign nation want to take the detainees? When one third or more of those previously released returned to the battlefield?

How crazy is it to continue blaming G.W. Bush for everything when you’ve spent more time on the golf course in a year and a half than he did during eight years in office?

How crazy is it to give a speech on the war in Afghanistan at West Point and announce when the U.S. will be leaving?

How crazy is it for the federal government to ban the incandescent light bulb?

I could ask this generic question many times regarding the Obama administration and some previous congressional actions, but they add up to something less than “crazy” and more like a plan to harm the nation and all Americans when it comes to energy, healthcare, and national security.

Some may say this notion is just plain crazy, but it may be closer to the truth than anyone wants to admit.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → How Crazy Is It?