The Harm a President Can Do

By Alan Caruba

The announcement that Barack Hussein Obama will run for reelection was greeted with little fanfare and less surprise. In order to raise money, he needed to make it official and he was quick to join Rev. Al Sharpton, a man with a dubious history of histrionics, at a Harlem event.

Even with the data available, two years into his first term, it is difficult to grasp how much harm he has done to the nation as its elected leader.

Despite the fact that, until November 2010, the Congress was controlled by the Democrats, he was so busy during his second year that he could not find time to present Congress with a budget. The government shutdown is pure political theatre and should be avoided. If it comes, it will be the result of a political calculation that the President can benefit from it.

Obamacare, the hallmark of his political legacy, is opposed by 26 U.S. States and has been declared unconstitutional in a federal court. The House has voted to repeal it. Hardly a week goes by without finding billions in new costs buried within its pages, all of which expand the size of government beyond imagination.

In two years, the nation has accumulated debt at a rate more than 27 times as fast as its entire prior history since the day George Washington took office. In January 2009, when President Obama was sworn into office, the national debt was $10.627 trillion. Today it is $14.052 trillion and rising.

The leadership that the world has long looked to America to provide has dissipated. The nations of the West, in particular the European socialist nations, have also spent themselves into penury. Portugal is the latest to cry out for help. Greece, Ireland, Spain, all once among the great powers, have drained their coffers with cradle-to-grave assurances that the government would always pick up the tab.

After two years in which every regulatory obstacle, including an illegal “moratorium” on deep water drilling for oil was imposed, the price of West Texas crude oil went from $38.74 a barrel to $99.02. Other commodities, soybeans, sugar, and corn have all seen similar increases. The price of corn has more than doubled in just twelve months.

America has enormous reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas. It has long been a giant agricultural economy, but all this potential wealth is being throttled by men and women in the Obama administration who think Americans must be forced to change their driving and eating habits. In a consumer-driven economy, they want Americans to consume less.

When President Obama was sworn in, there were 2,600,000 long-term unemployed. Today there are 9,193,000 Americans in that category. People living in poverty in America have, in just two year’s time, gone from 39,800,000 to 43,600,000. This occurred during a time when massive “bailouts” were undertaken by the government. They are now widely regarded as failures.

The greatest automotive manufacturer in the world, General Motors, is for all intents and purposes owned by the government. Auto union jobs had to be saved even if taxpayers had to have their taxes diverted for that purpose. Having brought the company to ruin with outrageous work, wage, health, and pension demands, they were still to be rewarded by the Obama administration. The heads of public service unions, among the largest in the nations, have enjoyed an open-door policy at the White House.

Having been elected by campaigning against the war in Iraq, President Obama expanded the number of troops in Afghanistan. While U.S. troop presence in Iraq was being reduced, the President suddenly engaged the nation militarily in Libya without any authorization from Congress.

With one glaring exception, no cohesive foreign policy regarding the Middle East exists. Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East, an ally of the United States, surrounded on all sides by enemies and threatened daily by Iran, has been abandoned.

Egypt’s Mubarack was publicly abandoned, but Iran’s Ahmadinejad’s stolen election evoked no response when people took to the streets in Tehran to protest it. Col. Gadhafi remains in control of Libya. Syria’s dictator was called “a reformer.”

Domestically, the President calls for windmills to produce energy when they remain one of the least practical means, sustained solely by government subsidies and mandates. The factory in which he made the call belongs to a Spanish company. His call for solar energy is equally fatuous. High speed rail is yet another foolish initiative.

The last two years have been testimony to the harm a President can do to a nation and yet, despite the obvious harm being imposed on millions of Americans, the President continues to enjoy the support of people for whom the growth of the government, the increase in spending, and the nation’s loss of leadership in the world is not understood and will not be until it is too late to reverse the damage.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Nutty Professors and Nutty New Taxes

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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It Really Is a Small World

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to panic? Hardly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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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

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GE's Really Big, Bad Ideas

By Alan Caruba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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No to the Cape Cod Wind Farm. Yes to Whaling Ships!

By Alan Caruba

The opposition from residents of Cape Cod to the proposed wind farm off their coast line to generate electricity has been vociferous, but they are up against a juggernaut of well-funded special interests that are indifferent to the destruction of the natural beauty of the area, its sailing lanes, the dangers to migratory bird species, and the endless noise that the dozens of blades will impose on the area.

If the producers of these turbines are so keen on wind power, I propose that they change their business plan and begin building wind-driven sailing ships instead. It would be a boon to the economy employing hundreds of craftsman and all the others who would be needed to cut down the trees from Massachusetts’ forests and transport them to the timber mills that would be needed to create the various wooden elements of these great ships.

New Bedford, Massachusetts and other coastal towns were famous throughout New England at the height of the days of the whaling industry. Whale oil kept the lamps of citizens glowing until the invention of electricity introduced the miracle of incandescent light bulbs. Since these bulbs’ manufacture and sale have been banned by the federal government, it seems obvious to me that a renewed whaling industry is just around the corner.

Hundreds of large trees of several types were needed to build an average-sized whale ship. White cedar was in particular demand. Clear-cutting portions of the State’s forests would make room for more housing in newly created suburban areas, thus contributing to its economic growth. Trees from other parts of the nation could be put on barges and brought to the newly resuscitated ship building sites.

Even if whale oil didn’t make a comeback, locals and tourists could be treated to a variety of whale meat and blubber recipes, thus reducing the need for the raising of cattle which contribute to global warming with their ceaseless emissions of methane and other trace gases in the atmosphere.

Thus, New Bedford could return to its historic roots while at the same time the ocean area off Cape Cod’s coasts could be kept in the pristine way that Nature has provided for millions of years before the invention of wind turbines.

Imagine the pride that locals could take in the new whale ships. Four types were commonly built in New Bedford. The largest had three masts with huge sails to capture the wind and often carried four or five whaleboats used to pursue the whales. They had crews that numbered thirty or more. Here again, in these times of widespread unemployment, one can see the advantage this offers.

Artisans would be employed to sculpt the fanciful figureheads that adorned earlier whale ships, as well as stern carvings for the two-and-three mast ships that were the pride of New England.

If all this sounds fanciful or even idiotic, it is. Environmentalists will protest the cutting down of any trees. Animal rights advocates will protest the killing of whales.

As John Droz. Jr., an authority on wind power points out, “Wind energy was abandoned well over a hundred years ago, as it was totally inconsistent with our burgeoning more modern needs of power, even in the late 1800s.”

IF there was any need for wind power, why is it necessary for the government to mandate, i.e. require its use?

If there is no global warming, why are we told wind power doesn’t generate the carbon dioxide that is supposed to be causing it?

Why are Americans being literally forced to accept a form of energy abandoned more than a century ago?

I hope this little exercise also demonstrates how idiotic it would be to put row upon row of wind turbines in place to provide less electrical energy than a single coal-fired or nuclear plant would produce far more economically and efficiently.

Too many environmental proposals like wind power have no more basis in reality than my proposal to reinstitute wooden ships for a long gone whaling industry.

I hope the Cape Cod wind farm proposal is ultimately defeated because it makes no sense, would prove far too costly insofar as it would not provide any savings in energy costs to consumers who would, in fact, see their electricity bills increase.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that the turbines will be built, not in America, but in China, a nation that is building an average of one new coal-fired plant every week to provide the energy it requires.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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