Category Archives: climate change

With the passing of West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, the defining narrative among politicos will — after a few hours’ decorum — emerge as does Byrd = Kennedy? That is to say that, while so many West Virginians would never vote against Byrd, now that he’s gone there are plenty of the same Blue State voters who would vote against a non-Byrd Democrat in this Age of Obama.

I don’t follow West Virginia politics closely but assume their version of Scott Brown would be Rep. Shelley Moore Capito. His or her identity, as well as whether the same phenomenon would play out, likely depend on if the election is held this fall, vs. 2012: there are some murky legal issues to sort through involving how long a placeholder would hold the seat. Still I’m pretty sure it will be someone staunchly anti-cap-and-trade (in both parties, in fact; the last West Virginia politician to show insufficient zeal against the scheme, Rep. Alan Mollohan (D), recently lost in a primary).

Cap-and-trade of course is the vehicle by which the president vowed to cause your electricity prices to “necessarily skyrocket” as part of his effort to “bankrupt” the coal industry and anyone who sought to continue burning coal for that one-half of our electricity that it provides. Incidentally, today’s Wall Street Journal also notes how Obama’s anti-coal jihad just cost about 1,000 jobs in Wisconsin; West Virginia needs no such reminders yet as they pile up they also cannot help but be relevant.

How strongly West Virginia can inveigh, through its congressional representation, against this cruel ideological push is of increasing importance right now. Democrat staff are increasingly bold in their discussion of suckering Republicans into helping them pass it in a lame duck session, without having to vote on it in the Senate until after the elections.

The vehicle for said suckering is a “must-pass” Gulf spill bill — not that what is being proposed would have done anything to prevent the latest disaster of a company, BP, that like Enron lost the plot and fell apart as a result, any more than the financial services “reform” would have prevented the Fannie- and Freddie-precipitated meltdown.

From today’s E&E Daily story (subscription required):

What Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) puts in the Senate climate and energy bill, and what gets added on the floor, may not matter as much as simply whether some bill passes.

In the end, a joint House-Senate conference committee will likely hammer out the final version of the bill. That might not take place until a “lame duck” session after the November election, when much of the political pressure on lawmakers has dissipated.

Which means that despite the oft-repeated assertion by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) that “cap and trade is dead,” the House’s bill based on cap and trade could be back in play — someday, given the right conditions. Even if they do not enact cap and trade, Democratic leaders could use a conference to ratchet up the climate regultions [sic] past what the Senate agreed to and beyond what Democratic House centrists want.

“We have a lot of wiggle room in conference,” said a House Democratic aide.

And it could be hard for centrists in either party or either chamber to walk away from the bill if they have taken the risk of voting for it on initial passage.

“Once you get to conference, it’s an up-or-down vote,” said Norm Ornstein, a veteran congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “People who vote against it have to explain why they voted for it before they voted against it.”

That lame duck strategy is little more brazen than the Democrats’ efforts to cram-down the health care takeover. Indeed, not only will embittered losers have nothing else left to lose given the elections will be behind them. Worse, given that many Dems will be out of jobs by that point, they actually will be in a bidding war for ambassadorships or other sinecures by doing Obama a solid and seizing the ever-closing Obama Window to “fundamentally transform America”.

So the Dems think the Senate will pass a “Gulf spill” bill, the prospect of any vote against which they Dems are already styling as a vote for BP and Big Oil (they don’t say how). Then this will be merged with the House “energy” bill which was the 1,400 page monstrosity bearing cap-and-trade, among other odious delights of the Left.

It seems unlikely that Sen. Byrd would smile on this abuse of the rules of our representative democracy, but there you have it. His party will be against BP before they are for it…BP having invented carbon cap-and-trade with Enron, aggressively lobbying until this very day for the payoff it is designed to provide them.

The only issue is whether the Republicans are absorbing the message: the Dems are digging a political pit and layering its top with rhetorical palm fronds, certain that the Republicans will stumble into the “must do ’something’!” trap and pass a “Gulf spill bill”, with every sentient being knowing full well this is the Senate Dems’ ticket to a cap-and-trade, lame duck conference. And enactment of their last remaining high profile Power Grab.

Sadly, neither history nor the utterances of one Senate Republican to date provide any succor that they are on to the game.

From today’s Politico:

An all-night House-Senate conference committee delivered President Barack Obama and Democrats a far-reaching and historic achievement Friday – a realignment of the rules that govern Wall Street and a second victory toward Obama’s legislative triple crown.

The compromise bill now goes to the House and Senate for approval. For all the messiness of the process, financial reform and March’s health care reform win cumulatively make clear Obama and Democrats are governing in consequential ways – and once again Friday, without a single Republican vote. The results make clear the argument over Obama is no longer whether he’s effective or not, but whether voters will like the results.

The agreement came at 5:39 a.m., after 20 straight hours of work in the committee, a marathon session that tested the negotiating skills, patience and endurance of several dozen lawmakers tasked with reconciling two competing approaches to reining in Wall Street.

But it left no doubt about the mark Obama has left on his twin Democratic majorities in Congress – reluctant, even recalcitrant at times, but in the end, doing his bidding to remake two of the most important sectors of the U.S. economy.

His hoped-for third act – a wide-ranging climate change and energy bill – is next on Obama’s docket, and absent these successes, it would be easy to believe there was simply no way he could bend Congress to his will yet again, with midterms looming, poll numbers sagging and the nation’s financial coffers tapped out.

But Obama plans to press his advantage – to try to salvage one more legislative win out of the depths of the BP oil spill tragedy. He’s invited what amounts to the bipartisan Senate climate caucus to the White House Tuesday to plot out a way ahead.

Continue reading here.

A federal judge has, for the moment, spared already-suffering Gulf state residents from the brunt of President Obama’s most recent anti-energy Power Grab. It has enjoined the administration from implementing its moratorium on deepwater drilling. The Order is here, and the Opinion here.

The administration has vowed to appeal. Regardless of the outcome, this victory is temporary. As I detail in Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America, Obama and his administration are committed to strangling domestic energy production. At the same time they promise to also clamp down on the cost of consumption, all in a way that makes our last energy-poverty president, Jimmy Carter, appear a free-market pioneer.

This was telegraphed immediately after Obama’s inauguration by his by administration revoking massive tracts of public land from possible lease for domestic energy production, even to the point of suspending lease agreements already struck.

None of this is either accident or coincidence, but affirmed as a deliberate plan by Obama’s concurrent clamp-down on families’ access to energy with a cap-and-trade scheme he vowed would cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket”. Though he dared not speak the scheme’s name, Obama renewed his support for it in his Oval Office speech last Tuesday by praising the House-passed bill.

Then, he also restated his threat of imposing central planning in the guise of the state engineering a “green economy”. Although last week he also suddenly dropped reference to his specific European models – because those countries like Spain have now admitted the devastation they caused, after his praise brought scrutiny – we know that even Europe has refused to ban production of domestic energy resources.

From the moratorium blocked by a federal judge today, pending appeal by Obama, to the planned “lame-duck” Congress-wide passage of the “cap-and-trade” energy tax, Obama is affirming all that he telegraphed and which is laid out in detail in Power Grab.

While the White House really, really wants you believe that they have their boot on the neck of BP, it turns out that a key Administration official had his head inserted somewhere else just three short years ago. Do you think NOBEL LAUREATE (and Secretary of Energy) Steven Chu still thinks BP is going to help save the world?

This is one of the ironies of the disaster in the Gulf. From all available evidence, BP is as committed as anyone to the “comprehensive energy reform” agenda of the White House. No doubt this reflects both political realism and market opportunism on their part, but BP’s 2009 “Road Map for America’s Energy Future” could have been written by John Kerry. Higher energy prices, cap and trade? Bring it on, says BP.

And this isn’t a recent shift on BP’s part. Here’s embattled BP Chairman Tony Hayward back in June 2007:

From BP’s perspective, the evidence that climate change is happening, and that it is manmade, is mounting all the time. As the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found, the evidence is almost overwhelming. We could wait until the science is 100% certain, but BP believes that, as an energy company, it has a duty to act pre-emptively. When you balance the likely impacts of not taking action against the real opportunities that exist to take action, it is difficult to believe that humanity will not move towards a solution to climate change…

We need to ensure that the costs of emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are included in the price we pay for everything – whether it be a television, a train journey, or switching on a light – all should reflect the cost of emissions in their price.

This can be achieved through a Cap and Trade system, taxation, or regulation.

So it makes perfect sense that back in 2007 Steven Chu and UC Berkeley would be more than happy to accept a $500 million investment from BP to form the Energy BioSciences Institute. The relationship between Chu and BP was so cozy in fact that Chu subsequently brought on BP’s Chief Scientist Steve Koonin as an undersecretary at the Department of Energy.

My guess is that this history – and these relationships – played a part in the Administration’s initial confusion over whether BP was a “partner” in the effort to resolve the Gulf spill. Because for many within the Administration BP had been one of the good guys.

This also explains why BP has been so willing to prostrate themselves in front of their Democratic overlords in Congress and the White House. Here they thought they were trusted partners in saving the world from impending climate disaster. It turns out that their allies in the Obama Administration might soon be the only thing saving BP from the anger of a raging public…and insolvency.

You may have missed President Obama’s euphemism for massive wealth transfers involved in his “green economy” — central planning rebranded — that he said last week he will seek to use the Gulf oil spill to impose. That euphemism was:

“When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that would move our country towards energy independence. Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill –- a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.”

This is his fourth high-profile use of the phrase “finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy”, most recently his State of the Union speech. I addressed this in Chapter 6, “Green Eggs and Scam: The Wholesale Fraud of ‘Green Jobs’” from Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America:

That is the objective of various “green jobs” schemes: make everything else so expensive as to give life to the uneconomical. But that is incredibly economically harmful.

Also, note what President Obama said in his September 2009 UN “global warming” speech, a comment that should strike anyone who ever took an economics course or simply possessed the capacity for critical thought:

“Most importantly, the House of Representatives passed an energy and climate bill in June that would finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy for American businesses and dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

The key word there is that lawmakers passed a scheme to make inefficient projects “profitable”, not “cost-effective”. That’s corporate welfare. These mandates and subsidies would , however, add value to the investment portfolios of many leading lights among Obama’s allies, such as George Soros who, by chance, soon revealed plans to sink one billion dollars into “green jobs” schemes. Lo and behold, another of his investments, the Center for American Progress, furiously pushes “green jobs” schemes.

Recall the sage from Team Soros, Mr. [Andrew] Light, who assures us that these mandates are “gonna spur new innovation, which is gonna reward smart investment, and which is gonna make alternative energy sources competitive” with things that actually work. No. The laws of physics remain undefeated. All they will do is impose the agenda admitted to by Van Jones and his Blue-Green allies, and seize your wealth to reward the purely speculative among Obama’s Wall Street supporters underwriting the green campaign.

One way or the other, one of us is going to go down. President Obama, by insisting that he will go to the mat on his “green jobs” agenda, which is simply central planning with a coat of green paint, indicates he will risk his presidency on getting the cap-and-trade, gas tax and windmill mandate through the Senate (with a stranglehold on domestic energy production to boot), then through the House again on a conferenced bill.

If he succeeds he will have doomed us; if he fails, politically the effort will have finally, fully exposed him for what he is: a Power Grabbing Statist whose economics are recklessly dogmatic while at the same time ignoring those societies he claims are his model.

Obama reminded us how as a candidate he set out what he called a set of principles, which he acknowledged were passed by the House, in a vote almost precisely one year ago today.

Here is what he said then about cap-and-trade, which the House passed. This discussion occurred in the apparent context of how to mount his and his team’s big-ticket agenda items:

“The problem is, can you get the American people to say this is really important, and force their representatives to do the right thing. That requires mobilizing a citizenry…And climate change is a great example.”

You got it: this is the community organizer, refusing to allow a crisis to go to waste, but instead seeking to use it to do what he’s trying to do.

“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

“Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal-powered plants, you know, natural ga — you name, it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was — they will have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money, they will pass that money [sic] on to the consumer.”

That’s right. It’s a staggeringly large tax, which he acknowledged will be borne by consumers. This reflects two signs of economic literacy: the purpose and operation of cap-and-trade, and that businesses pass taxes on to consumers. Until they can’t, of course, then they move.

Oh, speaking of this being a tax, he added:

“This will also raise billions of dollars”.

Please note, that is not “some costs”. That is what Al Gore called a “wrenching transformation of society”.

First, a note about the lack of intellectual honesty in claiming that it was a lack of candor and political courage — both of which he was implicitly manifesting — that have left us relying on the most abundant reliable energy sources man has ever known. No. Physics and economics dictate from where we derive our energy. Not a lack of statism.

Further, we are not as he said running out of oil onshore, and in shallow water. We have generations of oil in oil shale and other “unconventional oil” sources, right beneath our soil. That he has to pretend we do not, and that he is not blocking it, tells you quite a bit of what you need to know about the sincerity of this seizure of a crisis to ensure it does not go to waste.

Which raises his claim that adopting his cap-and-trade statism will “grow the economy.” Absurd.

Consider the following excerpt from Chapter 6, “Green Eggs and Scam: The Wholesale Fraud of ‘Green Jobs’” from How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America: (citations are omitted)

CAN MAKE-WORK “GROW THE ECONOMY”?

Sadly, however, such impacts, whether “opportunity” costs or otherwise, are not pressing considerations in Washington. No, we are now told that by mandating that the American economy be driven by all manner of energy sources that cannot stand on their own, we will “grow the economy.” That is the new, favorite phrase of my young Democratic congressman, Tom Periello. Mr. Periello, like a host of lawmakers desperate to find cover for their 2009 vote in support of the disastrous Waxman-Markey “cap-and-trade” bill, has since dedicated countless hours on the House floor and elsewhere to spread this tawdry exposition of economic illiteracy to those masses he and his colleagues hope are desperate or inattentive enough to fall for it….

Sadly, the best case scenario for this claim would be that it is made out of disgraceful ignorance. …

The truth is that even inherently biased administration studies of the “green job” scheme cap-and-trade, by EPA, the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and the Congressional Budget Office, as well as the independent Brookings Institute, Heritage Foundation, American Council for Capital Formation, and CRA International, agree that these cap-and-trade bills must reduce overall employment and lead to lower incomes than can be had without them. EIA, for example, said that the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill destroys 2.3 million jobs on net when fully implemented (in 2030), 800,000 of them manufacturing jobs. Not one cap-and-trade scenario modeled by any of these entities produced net job or income growth from cap-and-trade.

Reckless and disingenuous though the claim is, agenda-driven whizzes in Washington insist that throwing away a billion dollars, confiscated from today’s and future generations, grows the economy—simply because they see a giant hamster wheel research facility go up in their district. But the claim that this will “grow the economy” is made up. These actions will do the opposite.

The government can give us nothing that it has not taken from us. The politics of envy, which underlies much of the “green jobs” hooey, have never been as strong in the United States as in Europe—and that fact gave us a chance for longer than the Europeans to stand firm against all of the promises of free ice cream. Now we are told to look to Europe, but ignore the actual lessons. Instead, accept a fairy tale.

Our German experts [at old-line and state-funded think tank RWI-Essen] summarized for us:

“German renewable energy policy, and in particular the adopted feed-in tariff scheme, has failed to harness the market incentives needed to ensure a viable and cost-effective introduction of renewable energies into the country’s energy portfolio. To the contrary, the government’s support mechanisms have in many respects subverted these incentives, resulting in massive expenditures that show little long-term promise for stimulating the economy, protecting the environment, or increasing energy security.”

I then discuss the doggerel, repeated by Obama, of Green Jobs in Red China, briefly excerpted here:

“What might be the most embarrassing aspect to this con is that the same policies supposedly ensuring that particular, politically desired goods will be produced here, because their use is mandated here, actually ensure they’ll be made somewhere else….

The lede in a November 5, 2009, Boston Globe story captured the situation well: “Little more than a year after cutting the ribbon at a new factory in Devens built with more than $58 million in state aid, Evergreen Solar said yesterday that it will shift its assembly of solar panels from there to China.” Ouch. It seems that “In exchange for receiving $58.6million in grants, loans, land, tax incentives, and other aid to build in Massachusetts, Evergreen pledged that it would add

350 new jobs,” which it did. Briefly, only to then “write off $40 million worth of equipment at Devens because of the production shift to China.” The company cited the cost of production here not faced if they build their machines elsewhere. No one told them it wasn’t polite to prove the president wrong, and send green jobs overseas, to make things for use back home in response to mandates making it more expensive to produce here, prompting others to move overseas.

Boy, Obamanomics can be exhausting.”

Tonight’s display, on substance, was sophomoric or uninformed. Politically, it was standard cynical fare.

It is difficult to be amazed by a politician but Obama’s rhetoric Tuesday night in fact betrayed a gobsmacking level of cynicism or ignorance: rationing is not a prescription for growth; the state cannot mandate defeat of the laws of physics. China is installing windmills because Western countries pay them to under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism, simply because those nations get emission “reduction” crisis for doing so which they need as they’ve discovered they can’t actually reduce emissions without economic crisis driving it (like today) or resulting from it (like in Spain, cited by Obama as his model eight times). And China will stop building windmills the minute we abandon this fetish.

Putting aside for a second the fact that this speech was given about 50 days late, last night’s oval office speech proved that the President is not ready to be honest with the American people.  For the first 30 days of this crisis, President Obama was ignoring the fact that the crisis existed, and now when he uses the oval office to give the people confidence that he is on top of the problem  he spends more time trying to sell cap and trade than discussing capping the well. Essentially, he is still ignoring the crisis.

Lets take a look at the key points of the President’s speech. He begins by trying to convince America that he has been doing a great job at managing the disaster:

“… I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge – a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s Secretary of Energy. Scientists at our national labs and experts from academia and other oil companies have also provided ideas and advice.”

Nobel prizes have not been impressive since  Obama recived one for doing nothing and Al Gore got one for a hoax.  The key is how the ideas from those great minds are implemented. The President’s management of the crisis has been horrible.  Even the progressive bible  the NY Times trashed Obama’s  management of the crisis:

“The information is not flowing,” Senator Nelson said. “The decisions are not timely. The resources are not produced. And as a result, you have a big mess, with no command and control.”

In other words,  the leadership and management coming from the executive branch of the government has been a disaster.

“Because of our efforts, millions of gallons of oil have already been removed from the water through burning, skimming, and other collection methods. Over five and a half million feet of boom has been laid across the water to block and absorb the approaching oil. We have approved the construction of new barrier islands in Louisiana to try and stop the oil before it reaches the shore, and we are working with Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida to implement creative approaches to their unique coastlines.”

A little truth Mr. President?  Only after Bobby Jindal said he was going to build the barrier islands whether they were approved or not, was the barrier island  plan approved.

The  President might have come clean and told us  why the United States refused to accept skimmers from the Dutch, or help from any other country. Maybe he could have explained  why miles of oil boom remain in a Maine warehouse despite the fact that the administration was informed of the supply the third week of May.

“… Tomorrow, I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness. And this fund will not be controlled by BP. In order to ensure that all legitimate claims are paid out in a fair and timely manner, the account must and will be administered by an independent, third party.”

While most people would agree that  BP should be paying  for the damage it caused, (BP has promised that it will),  there is no place in the constitution saying that the President has the power to demand a company set aside money in an escrow account? Nor is there a place saying  the POTUS can demand that the account be administered by a third party.  To be honest that clause could be hiding  right next to the clause saying  the government can force citizens to purchase health insurance.

The  demand for BP to freeze money in an escrow account shows a lack of understanding of capitalism. Not allowing BP to spend those dollars on growing its business is limiting the company’s ability to generate the profits  necessary to pay its obligation to the victims of the disaster.

“… Already, I have issued a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. I know this creates difficulty for the people who work on these rigs, but for the sake of their safety, and for the sake of the entire region, we need to know the facts before we allow deepwater drilling to continue.”

The drilling freeze is like closing down GM the first time one of its cars is involved in an accident.  Wood Mackenzie Research and Consulting published a report saying the six month moratorium will result in job losses of over 120,000 by 2014. The gulf region is already suffering, as is the American economy, the embargo does nothing but make it worse.

“One place we have already begun to take action is at the agency in charge of regulating drilling and issuing permits, known as the Minerals Management Service. Over the last decade, this agency has become emblematic of a failed philosophy that views all regulation with hostility – a philosophy that says corporations should be allowed to play by their own rules and police themselves. At this agency, industry insiders were put in charge of industry oversight. Oil companies showered regulators with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations.

When Ken Salazar became my Secretary of the Interior, one of his very first acts was to clean up the worst of the corruption at this agency. But it’s now clear that the problems there ran much deeper, and the pace of reform was just too slow.”

The problem was much worse than the President described.  The Minerals Management Service scandal  broke in September 2008. This crisis did not happen at the beginning of Obama’s administration but  there was a sixteen month window between the inauguration and the oil spill. This was Obama’s problem not Bush’s.

... a larger lesson is that no matter how much we improve our regulation of the industry, drilling for oil these days entails greater risk. After all, oil is a finite resource. We consume more than 20% of the world’s oil, but have less than 2% of the world’s oil reserves. And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean – because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.

Mr President you are lying. A report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) dated October 2009 proves Obama is lying. The report shows the  amount of  recoverable oil in the U.S. to be 167 billion barrels of oil, not the 21 billion figure pushed by the Democrats.  If exploited that 167 billion barrels could replace America’s  imports from OPEC countries for more than 75 years.

That same report shows that America’s combined recoverable natural gas, oil, and coal supply is the largest on Earth. America’s recoverable resources are far larger than those of Saudi Arabia (3rd), China (4th), and Canada (6th) combined. Those estimates don’t include America’s  immense oil shale deposits.

“The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight. Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be here in America. Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil. And today, as we look to the Gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude.”

That’s true. China is investing in clean energy, at the same time they are exploiting every possible opportunity to exploit their own resources.  The United States is funding part of their green job investment with the interest payments from the money that China is loaning us.

If the President and his progressive allies allowed the U.S. to exploit our own resources, there would be no need to  spend that $1 billion on foreign oil.

“...The transition away from fossil fuels will take some time, but over the last year and a half, we have already taken unprecedented action to jumpstart the clean energy industry. As we speak, old factories are reopening to produce wind turbines, people are going back to work installing energy-efficient windows, and small businesses are making solar panels. Consumers are buying more efficient cars and trucks, and families are making their homes more energy-efficient. Scientists and researchers are discovering clean energy technologies that will someday lead to entire new industries.”

Here is the  truth about alternate energy Obama forgets to mention. With the exception of  nuclear energy, no alternate energy has been developed that can run this nation as effectively or efficiently as fossil fuels. Nothing even in the same neighborhood. If the economy is “switched over” before a legitimate alternative is developed, the catastrophically higher prices will collapse the economy.

The President is a recent convert to nuclear power, but not a serious one. He has not allowed the approval process to be streamlined, or a way around the objections of his environmental buddies. So even the one real alternative energy cannot be exploited quickly.

“…Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill – a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.

Now, there are costs associated with this transition. And some believe we can’t afford those costs right now. I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy – because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.”

The bill passed by the House represents the largest tax increase in American history. It also uses  government regulation  essentially  take over every industry that uses fossil fuel (wait, every industry uses fossil fuel).

More than Obamacare, cap and trade represents a takeover of the American economy, that will retard economic growth, and push the already bankrupt federal budget over the edge.

“Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development – and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development.”

And some just want to know where the government is going to get the money? It looks like China will get more US interest payments so they can invest in green energy.

“The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon.”

Holy Cow, what an original thought!. “If we can land a man on the moon, why cant we find green energy?” Maybe I can use that line for a future post. I will  have to remember that one.  As I will remember the President’s entire speech.  Who knew that one Obama could fit so much bull into just eighteen minutes. The President may get a slight bump from this, but within a week, the stench of the rotting Presidential bull will drive Americans away from the lies he told tonight.

California’s Air Resources Board (CARB)—long considered a foe of conservatives nationwide— has shelled out close to $800,000 to bolster its latest pet “green” initiative, Capitol Confidential has learned.

A study released last month, which draws positive conclusions regarding CARB’s favored “feebates” program, cost a whopping $796,641 according to a document found at CARB’s own site.  That has some observers scrutinizing CARB’s activities thinking it could come under renewed and sustained criticism.

California is currently mired in a fiscal morass that seems almost intractable, with many in the Golden State blaming overspending by government for the state’s fiscal woes.  Assembly Democrats have proposed plugging the state’s budget hole via $9 billion in loans, whereas Senate Democrats want to suspend $2 billion in corporate tax reductions, among other measures; the state budget deficit, meanwhile, is reportedly as big as $19 billion.

The “feebates” program is a CARB priority, however.  The agency sees slapping a tax on new, higher-emissions cars purchased by Californians, while offering a rebate on new, lower-emissions cars, as a key to combating climate change.

But California’s steps to curb climate change, including AB 32, have recently been taking a lot of incoming fire with the state’s finances, and economy, in the hole.  “There is a sense, even among some Californians who generally do consider themselves ‘green,’ that they’ve gone too far,” a California political source told Capitol Confidential.  “CARB in particular has come in for a lot of criticism, and their dropping this sort of money on a study that seems designed to validate their pre-existing conclusions is probably not going to help, especially when voters are angry about 12 percent-plus unemployment and the budget situation.”

Moreover, the substance of the “feebates” program is likely to anger fiscal conservatives, as well as automakers.

Anti-tax advocates say it will raise taxes both directly—i.e., for purchasers of less efficient cars—and indirectly.  In France, where “feebates” have also been used, critics say rebates wound up exceeding taxes paid, and the result, says one individual tracking the proposal with whom we spoke, has been generalized taxpayer subsidization of the program.  In Canada, meanwhile, the “fees” arising under their “feebates” program have reportedly been kept in place, but expensive rebates were ended.

Automakers, for their part, seem to see the proposal as unnecessary and redundant.  According to Dave McCurdy, President and CEO of the Auto Alliance, “automakers are [already] investing heavily in more fuel-efficient autos” which should mean that what some describe as government coercion is not in fact necessary to get consumers to purchase more fuel-efficient vehicles that emit less.

Still, CARB is expected to pursue the “feebates” program, relying on its costly survey to justify its actions.

So. The White House sent EPA chief Lisa Jackson over to HuffPo to slam (smear?) the Murkowski resolution set to be voted on in the Senate on Thursday, which is designed to block a Power Grab by EPA and thereby to maintain our Constitution’s separation of powers.

The White House then followed this by threatening to veto the resolution if it passes.

In both cases, Team Obama tie S.J.Res. 26 to the Gulf oil spill and argue that, by blocking EPA’s claimed authority to regulate greenhouse gases, this exercise of the Congressional Review Act would cruelly block the administration’s diligent and dedicated campaign to reduce our dependence on oil and reduce the risk of such spills in the future.

Huh? Far from sounding familiar (at least, before this newest revision of the reasons for the “global warming” agenda was rolled out last week), this should sound somewhat newfangled.

In fact here we see that the “global warming” agenda — that had already morphed into a “climate change” agenda before it was an energy tax to create new jobs (because we all know that’s what tax increases do, silly) — is actually aimed at stopping oil spills. And we’ve always been at war with Eastasia, Winston.

What we have now is a pristine case study of there being no good reason for an agenda, as proved by the fact that the reason for the agenda (read: excuse) keeps changing.

In what was surely little more than an exercise in cynicism, I performed a quick search to see just how deeply embedded are these real reasons for what has for years been a “global warming” regulatory agenda. It turns out that EPA forgot to cite them as the reason for, or even related to, its “Endangerment Finding” (that the Murkowski Resolution would block).

OK. To be generous beyond a fault, let’s say they cited these real reasons one half of one time. In 52 deathless pages of background and “global warming” hysteria.

Go ahead. Perform a word-search yourself. You’ll see the following:

“warming” — 82 invocations

“temperature” — 117 invocations

“climate change” — 259 invocations

“dependence” (or “independence”; or “depend” in any relevant way) — 0

“spill” — 0

“drill” or “drilling” — 0

“oil” — 1 relevant usage, but which, well… refers to a different rulemaking altogether, as part of EPA’s lengthy discourse of the regulatory context (see very bottom of page 5 of 52).

“automobile” — see “oil”, above; the same discussion dragged “fuel economy” into the mix.

It turns out that at the time, in promoting the “Finding” that the Murkowski resolution seeks to block, the administration actually forgot to make what are now apparently its marquee arguments for the thing. At least, to listen to their keening in opposition to the measure.

Quite a week these people are having. Quite a week. Stay classy, Team Obama.

For those of you who watched “Hannity” on Fox News last night and wondered why an “eco-entrepreneur” was left to address President Obama’s claim that the Gulf spill just means we need his cap-n-trade scheme, with no other guest, it was because a storm here in Central Virginia had me all made up pretty and sitting in the chair with the satellite connections fried out.

That was global warming, of course. Or George Bush.

But here is essentially the rejoinder that you would have heard:

Obama’s argument made in Pittsburgh goes that, with BP having been reckless and the administration incompetent…if you carry the 1 and tally it up it means a massive new tax increase on all of us to make energy more expensive.

This just makes sense in the land of never letting a crisis go to waste.

Which should remind us how to know there’s no good reason for an agenda: when the reason for the agenda, or rather the excuse, keeps changing. Now the global warming tax, which was then a climate change tax, then somehow a job-creation energy tax is now an energy tax to show how engaged and angry President Obama is at BP’s oil spill.

But in his Pittsburgh remarks announcing this new logic, the president failed to note the disconnect in lashing out at BP by… passing a light-switch tax that John Kerry admits BP helped write, and is the most aggressive lobbyist for. Yeah, take that BP!

Instead, he said “The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century.” No. That would be too good for them. Instead, he seeks to hold them hostage to his beloved windmills, which are technology of, at best, the century before that.

And if decades of eight dollar gas and windmill schemes would prompt invention of pixie dust or flying cars and our final victory over those stubborn laws of physics, wouldn’t that sort of happened in Europe after decades of such nonsense? Instead, all it has brought them is chronic double-digit unemployment, flight of manufacturing jobs (including steel jobs to Carroll Country, KY)  and now bankrupt nations, as even the Spanish socialist government has admitted.

But none of this takes away from the disconnect between one company’s negligence and one administration’s incompetence meaning we get stuck with a huge energy tax, killing jobs and harming seniors and the poor while driving us closer to Europe’s disastrous model.

The truth of course is that this is just a cynical Power Grab using whatever excuse they can find to repeat Europe’s economic disaster here as part of their fundamental transformation of America.

For those of you who watched “Hannity” on Fox News last night and wondered why an “eco-entrepreneur” was left to address President Obama’s claim that the Gulf spill just means we need his cap-n-trade scheme, with no other guest, it was because a storm here in Central Virginia had me all made up pretty and sitting in the chair with the satellite connections fried out.

That was global warming, of course. Or George Bush.

But here is essentially the rejoinder that you would have heard:

Obama’s argument made in Pittsburgh goes that, with BP having been reckless and the administration incompetent…if you carry the 1 and tally it up it means a massive new tax increase on all of us to make energy more expensive.

This just makes sense in the land of never letting a crisis go to waste.

Which should remind us how to know there’s no good reason for an agenda: when the reason for the agenda, or rather the excuse, keeps changing. Now the global warming tax, which was then a climate change tax, then somehow a job-creation energy tax is now an energy tax to show how engaged and angry President Obama is at BP’s oil spill.

But in his Pittsburgh remarks announcing this new logic, the president failed to note the disconnect in lashing out at BP by… passing a light-switch tax that John Kerry admits BP helped write, and is the most aggressive lobbyist for. Yeah, take that BP!

Instead, he said “The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century.” No. That would be too good for them. Instead, he seeks to hold them hostage to his beloved windmills, which are technology of, at best, the century before that.

And if decades of eight dollar gas and windmill schemes would prompt invention of pixie dust or flying cars and our final victory over those stubborn laws of physics, wouldn’t that sort of happened in Europe after decades of such nonsense? Instead, all it has brought them is chronic double-digit unemployment, flight of manufacturing jobs (including steel jobs to Carroll Country, KY)  and now bankrupt nations, as even the Spanish socialist government has admitted.

But none of this takes away from the disconnect between one company’s negligence and one administration’s incompetence meaning we get stuck with a huge energy tax, killing jobs and harming seniors and the poor while driving us closer to Europe’s disastrous model.

The truth of course is that this is just a cynical Power Grab using whatever excuse they can find to repeat Europe’s economic disaster here as part of their fundamental transformation of America.

Widely reviled by the left, Bush’s faith-based initiatives were claimed to be evidence that Bush was a “religious zealot” trying to destroy America with evil Christianity. Now, two years into the Obama administration, we are seeing what Obama intends to do with his continuation of Bush’s faith-based offices: he wants to use them to push the religion of Greenicanism on America’s churches.

This month Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships issued its final report of recommendations and the result is nothing short of astonishing. (download .pdf file)

The question that immediately comes to mind, of course, is if the left will explode in excoriation of Obama’s faith-based policies as it did with Bush’s?

The left was out of its mind over Bush’s ideas. In 2004, for instance, the website TheocracyWatch.org hyperbolically said, “Under the Bush administration, our country is experiencing a major transformation from a secular to a religious government. The President’s faith-based initiative is central to this transformation and raises serious questions about church-state separation.” This was the left-wing talking points du jour on Bush’s faith-based programs.

It wasn’t just the left, but even from the libertarian side Bush’s ideas were attacked. Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute said that the faith-based initiative was a “direct violation” of the Constitution.

And the media universally hated the idea. Lew Daly of Boston Review magazine tried to color Bush’s program as a “seismic change in American politics,” and for The New York Times Ron Suskind breathlessly burbled that Bush had, “created the faith-based presidency.” And those were what passed for the civil proclamations, others were more nutty by claiming that Bush was a religious zealot that was destroying the country through that evil Christianity stuff.

Candidate Obama was widely expected to dispense with the faith-based office. But in 2008 when the AP reported that Obama intended to leave the Bush faith-based programs in place, the left was apoplectic. Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State criticized Obama over it. “I am disappointed that any presidential candidate would want to continue a failed policy of the Bush administration,” Lynn said. “It ought to be shut down, not continued.”

After the AP’s report candidate Obama himself spun reports as a distortion. In July of 2008, Obama addressed the issue in a speech in Zanesville, Ohio.

“Now, make no mistake, as someone who used to teach constitutional law, I believe deeply in the separation of church and state, but I don’t believe this partnership will endanger that idea – so long as we follow a few basic principles. First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them – or against the people you hire – on the basis of their religion. Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs. And we’ll also ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work.”

As with most things that Obama says, this claim that was then. While Obama is following the left-wing penchant to eschew actual religiosity, Obama has apparently decided that his own special brand of religion would be what is promulgated with his continuation of Bush’s faith-based policies. The money he’s spending to “proselytize” his green ideas apparently doesn’t strike him as a violation of his 2008 proclamations.

Recently Meghan Clyne wrote an excellent piece in the Weekly Standard that detailed how Obama is using his faith-based program to push global warming, climate change, and green initiatives on America’s churches and he’s doing so by brazenly coupling his faith-based council with the Environmental Protection Agency.

Apparently, the president’s council envisions the “partnership” between government and religious institutions as a means of spreading the administration’s environmental warnings, rather than just a way to help churches feed the hungry and clothe the poor. Faith-based organizations, the report notes, can take “a prominent leadership role in influencing policy, education, and action in those areas.”

…The council hopes the new EPA faith office will also help churches and other nonprofits improve “access to financing,” including “establishing revolving loan programs or working with utility companies to help finance greening building projects.” The ultimate aim of all this government-supported retrofitting is clear: “Regional staff would work to engage local faith-and community-based groups to help meet Obama administration targets for greening buildings and promoting environmental quality.”

So, Obama wants to use federal subsidies offered through he EPA and his faith-based outreach to get churches to promulgate the green faith.

Of course, it’s hard to see Obama’s use of faith-based initiatives to push his environmental message and spending millions of tax dollars to do so differs in any material way when measured by the left’s anti-Bush yard stick when they criticized his policies. The left universally cried that Bush was cynically using religion to further his political policies. No one can look at Obama’s current policies and see any reason to excuse him from being smeared with the same brush the left used to tar Bush.

Clyne also makes a seminal point. “Perhaps it’s only reasonable that global-warming activists would turn to God for help as the scientific case for their position collapses,” Clyne wrote. It’s all as if “Climategate had never happened,” she says.

It is indeed.

This week, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) will host a press conference announcing the fifth reinvention of “cap-and-trade” global warming legislation since 2003, the “American Power Act”. Call it the American Power Grab Act, instead, for reasons that will become obvious momentarily.

The orchestrated spectacle, with a cast expected to be in the dozens and which all involved appear convinced will persuade you of the justness of their cause, is in fact a manifestation of all that is wrong with Washington and what Americans have become increasingly enraged by.

At this press conference, Sens. Kerry and Lieberman have both already indicated, they will insist that their scheme isn’t “cap-and-trade” because they aren’t going to use that term this time around. Kerry has even said that “this is not an environment bill.” It seems that the public aren’t buying that argument, either, so it’s really about whatever appeals to you. Just not what it was about the previous four times they’ve tried to slip this Power Grab past you. Except I’ve seen a copy of the bill. Yes it is cap-and-trade. And worse.

For this latest effort to hide an enormous tax and wealth transfer — a unilateral move that guarantees jobs will be shipped to China, India, Philippines, Mexico and elsewhere — – these lawmakers will be surrounded by numerous representatives of Big Green. That includes not just the wealthy pressure group industry but many among “Big Business”, numerous of whom are the benefactors enabling those pressure group chiefs’ huge salaries and vast PR budgets to scare you into accepting an agenda that uses the state to, oddly enough, enrich these same companies. Huh.

Sen. Lieberman has repeatedly teased the breadth of the organized scrum as proof that the scheme is now a good idea.  Absent from his cheerleading is the fact that you are not represented at the table when your wealth and future prospects were being divvied up.

The reason for so many businesses leaping onto the stage today is also the dog that surely will not bark when the media report on industry’s touting of an enormous energy tax and wealth transfer from individuals: why do they support this?

The answer is because they have been promised a slice of the spoils taken from the average taxpayer and ratepayer. I detail who these companies are and how they hope to cash in on this scheme in my new book “Power Grab“. For example, consider Exelon. This Chicago-based utility, which today is expected to be represented both individually by its CEO and by its trade association the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), expects more than one billion dollars in increased profits for no additional capital investment if the scheme announced today passes. Their only cost would have been the lobbyists.

That’s just one company. But the windfall, arranged by politicians, comes from average American families. The company even admits the whole sordid mess in a Forbes article from earlier this year:

“Exelon needs that legislation to happen sooner rather than later. Without a carbon price of some sort, Exelon’s fortunes aren’t so bright…. ‘The conundrums are real,’ [Exelon CEO John] Rowe acknowledges. ‘There’s nothing that’s going to drive Exelon’s profit in the next couple of years wildly. It just isn’t going to happen.’

Except, of course, carbon legislation. And because of that, the company views spending on lobbying for legislation almost like a capital expense….

Exelon has very deep ties to the Obama Administration. Frank M. Clark, who runs ComEd, helped advise Obama before he ran for President and is one of Obama’s largest fundraisers. Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, worked as a consultant to Exelon. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, helped create Exelon. Emanuel was hired by Rowe to help broker the $8.2 billion deal between Unicom and Peco when Emanuel was at the investment bank Wasserstein Perella (now Dresdner Kleinwort). In his two-year career there Emanuel earned $16.2 million, according to congressional disclosures. His biggest deal was the Exelon merger.”

The article details how Exelon wrote the provisions allocating the energy use “allowances”, or ration coupons. Others, including (according to Sen. Kerry) BP, wrote the provisions applying to oil companies, to ensure costs are passed straight through to you.

I lay the particularly odious example of Exelon — and those of others on the dais, ranging from Duke Energy to GE to “Chicago Climate Exchange” members — bare in “Power Grab“. Before your elected representatives impose this on you later this year, as soon as by the July 4 congressional recess, educate yourself on the rhetoric and ruses employed to part you from your money and, if history is any guide, threaten your family’s lives and indeed your livelihood altogether.

So about two weeks ago Sen. John Kerry, a lead author of the looming Kerry-Graham-Lieberman global warming/cap-and-trade legislation said about his bill, to disassociate from Earth Day loopiness: This is not an environment bill.

No kidding. No one on the planet claims it would change the climate in any way our most sophisticated instrumentation could discern. It’s about power. Hence the title of books like “Power Grab“.

Today we read in E&E Daily, from another co-sponsor Sen. Lindsey Graham: “It’s not a global warming bill to me. Because global warming as a reason to pass legislation doesn’t exist anymore. ”

Oddly, both remarkable statements have been ignored by the establishment press, slavish as they are to also seeing this agenda through to the end because, as Sen. Tim Wirth said in 1988 and Barack Obama in his 2010 State of the Union address, even if you don’t buy the excuse, their agenda is still “the right thing to do.”

As I have been saying for some time and just published a book making the case: the issue is not the issue. The global warming then climate change then, uh, it’s jobs, that’s it, jobs, or maybe national security or…I dunno, what appeals to you? … agenda for promoting the energy-scarcity list of mandates, wealth transfers and lifestyle restrictions were just excuses for doing what these people have long insisted they, as your betters, be able to do to you.

Get this reality now, or wake up one day and wonder why you didn’t before it was too late.

E&E Daily reports that, speaking before a lobbying group gathered to promote more ethanol-style boondoggles (but for windmills), “Sen. John Kerry is predicting widespread support from electric utilities, chemical companies and Big Oil as he enters his seventh month of closed-door negotiations on a comprehensive energy and climate bill that still hasn’t made its way into public view.”

Along the way Kerry says some very silly things as putative lead author of this, the Senate’s cap-and-trade bill now being styled as an “energy” bill on the heels of a memo by pollster Stanley Greenberg that the public weren’t buying “cap-and-trade” or “global warming”. As quoted by E&E:

“Ironically, we’ve been working very closely with some of these oil companies in the last months,” Kerry said, referring to BP, ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell PLC. “And I want to tell you they’ve acted in good faith and they’ve worked hard with us to try to find a way to get us to a solution that meets all of our needs. And I believe, when we roll out a bill, and we will very, very soon, we’re going to have a unique coalition.”

Actually, Baptist and Bootlegger coalitions are not remotely unique, as Kerry presumably knows full well. But this whole setup has been telegraphed for some time, and I detail the whole scam, just in time, here.

The truth is that Kerry’s partner in drafting this bill, BP, lost the plot some years ago in its zeal to pretend it was “Beyond Petroleum” (check its balance sheet to see the reality). Working closely with none other than Enron, BP focused on getting the Kyoto treaty and cap-and-trade schemes with subsidies for their otherwise failing wind and solar boondoggles. Along the way BP chased out their most talented people by telling them the future lay elsewhere.

And for more than six years they’ve been “soiling the nest for everyone”, according to an old friend who now works in the petrochemical industry, by, well, killing workers and messing up the joint with exploding plants, rigs and leaking pipelines. The Deepwater Horizon incident is not an offshore drilling issue; it’s a BP issue. Offshore drilling has a spectacular safety record in recent decades, and BP has a wretched one. This latest BP event is consistent with only one of those.

So along comes John Kerry and Harry Reid, desperate to cram-down the Obama priority of a scheme to move key energy use decisions from individual producers and consumers to the state. To get industry support — and, they’ve made clear, to call off the dogs of planned advertising blitzes by the American Petroleum Institute and Chamber of Commerce — Reid openly admits to having brought those constituencies behind closed doors to ask them what they need to support the bill.

What both interests need is to escape pass the burden of a gas tax hike straight through to you with no hit on them. Remember, the gas tax is on top of the light switch tax that Obama vowed would cause your “electricity prices [to] necessarily skyrocket”.

Kerry’s co-author, Sen. Lindsey Graham, has insisted that the gas tax, alternately styled as a “carbon linked fee” (tying the tax amount to the price of the electricity “allowances”, or ration coupons) will not be in the bill as introduced. That’s fine, so far as Kabuki theater goes: Reid has made clear he is the one writing the bill that will come to the floor, and has (again) suspended the committee process to avoid troubling public scrutiny and input.

If you would like to sniff the rat hiding in this scheme about which we have been told for years won’t actually cost you anything, well, look at the new claim that a lot of the money it won’t cost you will be given back. So long as you meet the description of who needs the “rebate”. Which you won’t:

“‘Two-thirds of every dollar raised in the course of this effort goes straight back to the American consumer on their energy bill,’ Kerry said. ‘You’ll actually look at your energy bill and it will say, “Your bill would have been this, but now it’s this, because you’re getting a rebate.”‘

Kerry said that ‘after a year or two, 100 percent goes back to the American consumer.’ And in the meantime, he said funding would be directed toward energy efficiency and research and development on new energy technologies.”

Ahhhh. “Big Oil” has been working closely with Kerry to draft a bill to…make sure the government takes your money to give it all back. That sounds like a perfectly reasonable explanation and logical use of a company’s lobbying dollars. Maybe they can come to town to help me on a zoning issue I’m having, too?

Is it possible, as this sounds, that Kerry really has no comprehension of how these schemes have been designed, so far, to work? Even though this is the government we’re talking about, no scheme takes X from you only to give X back, whether after the (risible) “one or two years” or otherwise.  Some of you will get some of it back; others will get a lot of your energy tax money “back” as a wealth transfer.

That is, I suggest you’re being spun. What this really means is a new addition to the existing “refundable tax credit” (wealth transfer from taxpayers to non- or very low federal income tax payers): everyone’s electricity bills spike enough to cause you to use appreciably less energy.

Because this is regressive — hitting seniors and the poor hardest — some people get money back. Obviously if everybody did then there’s no point in taking the money to begin with. Your tax hike is being transferred to “green technology” interests like, well, BP and the windmill lobby. And to other people, in the form of a “rebate” that happens to be more than they were charged with these energy tax hikes.

And you thought things couldn’t get worse in Washington.

So we know that Sen. Lindsey Graham has stormed away from today’s scheduled 11 a.m. Eastern Senate press conference stage, and taken with him his support climate legislation, putting on hold what will surely in this latest form also represent the biggest tax increase in our history. All of which is, of course, “for now”.

No, that won’t last. But the unfolding/ongoing theater deserves commentary for when it returns.

This is the same bill that John Kerry now says was put off until this week from last so the voters didn’t confuse it around “Earth Day” as an “environmental” measure, and that Graham now says is an “energy independence” bill. This is even though the bill was breathlessly touted instead by all of its supporters just months ago as what it is designed to be: a “global warming” law to address what they apparently no longer view as that big an issue.

Or else they took Stanley Greenberg’s advice and realized you aren’t buying and are scrambling to re-brand their Power Grab. And this seems more likely given what we know about the bill is that it’s core design remains, with tweaks aimed at luring political support by various constituencies –

First, about this dance, Rich Galen wrote in his Mullings blog last night that “So, by putting off – perhaps until the next Congress – meaningful legislation which might have led to reducing our dependence on foreign oil, in favor of legislation which may maintain our dependence on foreign workers Harry Reid and Barack Obama have chosen convenient politics over good policy.”

To which I respond (and did to Rich), this conclusion of course assumes/accepts the climate/energy bill was “good policy”. With that questionable — we don’t know what’s in it other than cap-n-trade for electricity, but Reid announced a suspension of the committee process and spent ten days bringing in constituencies asking what they need in return for supporting cap-n-trade, so we have an idea it ain’t all that good policy — I’d say the more appropriate trade was the politics of one base for those of another.

Reid it seems is working to excite (and register more of) the Hispanic base in Nevada, a base which experienced among the three fastest growth rates “among competitive states” between the 2006 and 2008 election cycles (as I read on Mullings).

Oddly, in today’s WSJ we read the strange assertion “‘We can’t pass it without’ Mr. Graham, [Sen. Joe] Lieberman said. ‘We need him to come back.’” (The Journal uses a parenthetical to replace ‘it’ with ‘the climate and energy proposal’, which editing I ignore here, as it is unwarranted for reasons noted above.)

Lindsey Graham is unlikely to bring many if any other senators with him on this bill. So that belief expressed by Sen. Lieberman is probably not one premised in a vote count, but rather the cutesy “tripartisanship” label the Three Amigos attached to themselves to give a tax increase what passes for cachet in Washington.

Lieberman’s comment seems to be a sign that only with the protective cloak of Republican political cover — to go along with the business support being purchased with your (new) energy tax dollars — will the Left move forward with a long-held wish-list to “organize society” while raising hundreds of billions in revenues on the path to coercing you out of your lifestyle if ostensibly, and somewhat miraculously, save the planet slash create energy independence.

Also, the bill was just crafted behind closed doors, and Graham’s objection is that it’s much further along than immigration which still has to go through the committee process — which Reid suspended for the climate bill. Then Graham says in the Journal piece that “‘Moving forward on immigration—in this hurried, panicked manner—is nothing more than a cynical political ploy,’ Mr. Graham said Saturday in his statement, citing the ‘hundreds of hours over many months’ that he spent trying to pass immigration legislation in 2007.”.

Ahem. Cap-and-trade, despite Graham’s assistance, failed on the Senate floor with the fewest votes in three stabs at ramming it through, if in a less hurried and panicked fashion than the present attempt, which occurred in 2003, 2005, and yes in 2008. Graham’s argument is a tad weak and runny.

My take on his walkout is that Graham feared putting this bill out there only to not ram it through, but instead leave it to be scrutinized.

And people are cynical about Washington.

National Journal ran a piece yesterday (behind a paywall) by the German Marshall Fund’s Bruce Stokes, making the arguments that will be ratcheted up in the Senate beginning on Monday in favor of mandating windmills and solar panels: if we don’t mandate them, we not only won’t be using them but we won’t be making them either! This dire situation will leave the Chinese only themselves to sell the things to. Carry the one and you see how that harms our competitiveness.

Where to begin? At the root of this ritual case is a strange notion that being a leader in something – here, it’s windmills or solar panels – is intrinsically a desirable end. As I discuss in “Power Grab”: if we’re not the world’s windmill king…so what? It’s a windmill. It is not, as President Obama said, a new technology”, one of his rhetorical repetitions the curiosity of which should require no elaboration. Windmills are not a strategic industry. We have centuries of fossil fuels.

And after all this time windmills have come about as far as they can and will come with the possible exceptions of improvements in efficiency at the margins(solar is spectacularly worse). The laws of physics will not be repealed, the wind cannot be made to blow any more or regularly, and you will not decrease the host of very troubling NIMBY and other issues elaborated here by George Will.

Even rabid demander of such mandates, Obama’s Science Czar” (and population nut) John Holdren implicitly acknowledges the falsehood of the sales pitch that we can replace energy sources that work with windmills and solar panels. This leaves us with the principal argument in favor of these costly schemes, reported by E&E News last week as even acknowledged by Brookings Institute economist Adele Morris, as “the immediate need to reduce emissions”.

That’s about Strike Five I think, given that not only does no one say any posited emission reductions—under Kyoto, or cap-and-trade legislation – would remotely, detectably impact the climate, but the world’s most aggressive windmill and solar panel schemes have not in fact reduced emissions. Obama models Spain and Denmark are Europe’s two biggest Kyoto violators, seeing emission increases of over 40% under the treaty’s relevant period (vs. in the mid-teens for us).

These schemes have yet to result in the closure of one fossil fuel plant. That’s not for lack of trying, spending, or mandating (and the concomitant harms to competitiveness and family budgets, as I also detail in “Power Grab”). The, ahem, “backup” still has to exist, and do most of the work. This is all pain, no gain, just as would be requiring you buy two cars because the first one only runs every fifth day.

Still, we are told again in NJ that, apparently, requiring such redundant costs is good for the economy. Then comes argument made most aggressively, that failing to mandate these inefficiencies – remember, the premise includes an admission that without mandates, they will not come, saying quite a bit about their net benefits – will result in our becoming less competitive.

That’s absurd. It’s clear even in Stokes’ piece that what they’re really saying, without saying it, is that we would only become less competitive in the things we have decided not to mandate and without which mandates will not be in demand. We aren’t competitive in producing Concordes or civilian hovercraft, either.  Thank goodness we left that to Europe, too.

So the final claim is the resulting failure to create jobs in these industries. Of course, even mandating windmills and solar panels would only ensure more jobs in those industries (other than installation) in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere where they are now being made due to comparative advantages. Larding on more costs of production here with renewable mandates won’t improve that situation.  Which raises the most glaring in this irritating free ice cream pitch is the willful blindness to the costs of these mandates.

If you really believe that hurricanes and the Chicago Fire were good for the economy because, look, you saw how it put people to work, then the NJ article and green-jobs mantra are both compelling. But the fact that at this late hour this sort of fantasy-making remains the lead argument for demanding we leap forward to old energy technologies shows you just how dire things are, and hints at how bad they will get if the rationers succeed.

And they begin their effort to do so in the Senate, by whatever means necessary (the committee process has already been suspended by Harry Reid) on Monday.

It’s appreciably more difficult for Washington politicians to amaze Americans who paid any attention at all to what has been transpiring in Washington. And that number is growing. But the Democrats are giving it their best shot.

Read this just out from Politico, explaining that the Senate’s committee process simply must be suspended to jam through Obama’s energy/cap-and-tax Power Grab, because it is so expansive that it would invoke the jurisdiction of six Senate committees. These include the tax-writing Finance Committee, because cap-and-trade and the new gas tax (styled by some cheerleaders who think you’re stupid as a “carbon-linked fee”).

So, again, Harry Reid is going to write a couple of thousand pages — and try to buy off the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with revenues taken from you — in closed-door, back room deals. The ability to do so is one reason the bill in its House version grew to 1,400 pages, bigger and bigger with each closed-door deal. There are so many ways to design this takeover and the wealth transfers and lost freedoms involved, and to hide and target the hurt.

If that sounds like the health care takeover, it should. It’s the same thing. As the perpetrators admit to Politico. So possibly C-SPAN might ask to be involved. Surely the White House can come up with a better response than last time.

I’ve mentioned that “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America” was just published this week, right? That’s the only reason I can say something nice about these people and their tricks. They prove me right. So cause problems by reading what they don’t want you to know.

For example, although the popular discussion in Washington is now trending toward the likelihood of a European-style Value Added Tax (VAT), this is being rhetorically cushioned with the explanation that it is the only politically viable or even foreseeable way to raise the revenue that Obama’s Leviathan State requires. That’s untrue.

Team Obama is hiding its cap-and-tax cram-down behind closed doors because, as documents I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act — drafted within days of Obama’s victory in preparation for just such a moment — reveal, the bureaucrats believe they can  plunder an equivalent of the entire corporate income tax haul per year from cap-and-trade, designed the way Obama has called for it.

That is $400 billion per year. That’s several percentage points of GDP. That’s the biggest tax increase in American history in constant dollars, by far. All of which I detail in Power Grab.

Meanwhile, as Reid et al. plot to continue the hijacking of democracy, EPA is conducting a video contest soliciting public video entries that support growing the regulatory state, on the odd argument that regulations already touch almost every aspect of your life. Oh. Then surely more is better.

And responding by providing the requested video advocacy is just the sort of helpful grassroots activity that community organizing is all about. And probably just what the “stimulus” bill had in mind when it dedicated millions in wealth transfers to the same groups. As I also detail in Power Grab. You are taking my hard-earned money to pay people to speak out in favor of you taking more of my hard-earned money. I hate to be so Bob Dole but, where’s the outrage?

As you’ll see in Politico, the Democrats’/Lindsey Graham’s argument distilled is that such an enormous undertaking would overwhelm the poor dears, so Harry Reid and whomever he brings back into the room with him need to hammer the couple of thousand pages out. It’s for everyone’s own good.

I remind you, that’s their defense.

Maybe, instead, these perils are ones that our Founders would have read as indicating that you either a) do this with particular attention to the Constitution’s clear presumption of transparent and accountable policymaking, or b) you don’t do it at all.

So, we see here proof that they really are that radical. And they’re scared that their opportunity to “organize society” is short-lived and is creating a backlash, such that they’d better cram as much down now as they can.

This isn’t news. But this latest Power Grab is. So far the Republicans have raised eyebrows but not their voices. Will they shut down the Senate in protest, or at least to stall this and draw attention to the sleaze being employed to no media opprobrium — all of the proper people know that this is a very fashionable issue, so long as the windmills are placed out there next to the unwashed.

Will you let them get away with it? Or, as I hopefully note at the end of my book, will you have something to tell your kids and grandkids that you did in this war?

The ultimate in Obama’s Big Government schemes that still await us is the “global warming” agenda, a necessary component of which is the “green jobs” boondoggle. “Green jobs” is certain to be a central part of the Senate’s stab at cramming down “cap-and-trade”, commencing with introduction of the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman legislation now moved back to a week from tomorrow (to divorce itself from the originally intended association with the loopiness of Earth Day).

Deconstructing the Big Lie of “Green Jobs” is the focus of a key chapter in my new book just out today, “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America.” Go grab it.

Legislating “green jobs” programs means incurring massive debt to pay for make-work as part of a campaign mandating enormous inefficiencies on the economy. It therefore also ultimately means concomitant taxes. It kills real jobs in a trade off for far fewer temporary jobs, largely make-work and at enormous per-job subsidies. This creates a “bubble” that must be constantly pumped full of taxpayer cash simply to maintain it, also ensuring a bust to go with any putative boom.

Read the below excerpt from Power Grab expanding a bit on this appealing sounding (”jobs”!) sales pitch for statutorily mandating enormous inefficiencies on the economy — heck, read the whole book — and you will have a substantially better idea why Barack Obama surrounded himself with Greek columns at his DNC coronation in Denver. That’s the sort of debt we’re talking about. The fella’s prescient, I’ll give him that much. Now, from Power Grab Chapter 5, “Green Jobs and Scam: The Wholesale Fraud of ‘Green Jobs’”:

Consider the Center for American Progress’s (CAP) Andrew Light, whom I will use as our green guinea pig for these purposes, having by chance viewed him repeating his movement’s vacuous catch-phrases to Fox News late in Obama’s first year in office while I was pulling material together for this book. There he stammered, either naively or disingenuously, “you, sort of, if we’re gonna move the world towards a fundamentally new suite of mechanisms for creating energy, that’s, you need people to do that and that, that’s how you make, you’re gonna create jobs.”

Is it possible that the greens actually think that that is the sum total of these mandates’ impacts?

Of course not. These people are ideologues, not complete idiots (even if they seem to think you are). If mandating things is beneficial to employment and the economy, why stop at adding these new great ideas? Let’s mandate many, many more things in the name of global warming. If we wanted to “move” the world onto (feel free to say force, or otherwise use the full weight of government to coerce), say, a vegan diet and stop all of that destructive bovine flatulence, why, that would create jobs making tofu and selling it in vegan food stores, too. Same is true for rickshaws instead of automobiles, both of which are logical extensions of the “green jobs” case. We’d be the richest country in the world, if only we could get beyond old ways of thinking and our resistance to success. There are no downsides at all to this free lunch, and all it will produce is jobs, jobs, jobs.

Readers over the age of thirty may recall that this sort of ministration of the economy by our superiors has been tried in East Germany, and worked so well they had to build a wall to keep all the millionaires in.

Further, this philosophy is absurd on its face given that it tells us that Hurricane Katrina, the Chicago Fire, and other horribles global warming is supposed to bring more of, are actually good for the economy. …

Then there’s the free-lunch fallacy on which “green jobs” depends and which our policy sages ignore. After in effect mandating the destruction of windows in order to replace them, everyone is left with a full window pane if lighter in the wallet, liberated from the confiscated wealth they would have put to productive uses. But, that wealth was transferred to the Burgemeister’s glazier brother in law, in whose faltering alternative-window business the town’s former vice president heavily invested before running around warning townspeople about the horrors of old windows causing hellfire to be rained down on the village. Which, under this theory of economics, would actually be beneficial.

“Green jobs” legislation would be the ultimate cash for clunkers program, except that cash for clunkers applied to automobiles simply moved September’s likely vehicle purchases up to August without actually creating new demand. Green jobs programs do create new demand, if via mandates, for that which otherwise is not demanded (hence the mandate). Therefore, this involves moving forward purchases not of what would be purchased later, but what was unlikely to ever be purchased. Imagine not incentivizing car purchases, but mandating them—for the Amish.

So, there’s a feel for Power Grab. Upset Team Obama and rush out and grab one at your local retailer today, or get it online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Borders.

Remember the summer of 2009, when the Obama administration tried to push through a cap and trade bill?  It passed the U.S. House, and it’s been sitting in the U.S. Senate ever since, where I expect it will stay.   In short, it failed to pass muster with federal leaders who perhaps recognized that its passage would be both detrimental to our limping economy and to their political futures if they supported it.

Fast forward to 2010.   New Mexico has decided to go it alone and unilaterally pass its own Cap and Trade program, making it the only state in the country to ignore the federal decision on this issue.  More specifically, NM Governor Bill Richardson and his lame-duck administration have decided to use administrative process alone to force through Cap and Trade, and even bypass our state legislature.

This is the second time the Richardson administration has ignored the legislative process to force through rules that cripple our state’s energy industries.  I’ve decided to do something about it.

To stop this abuse of executive authority, I filed a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) on Monday, April 12^th to stop the Governor and his crew.  The legal action requests a temporary restraining order against the administration, allowing the state legislature to consider the regulation in January 2011.

Following the federal failure to pass Cap and Trade, most states began to see the wisdom of re-evaluating cap and trade regulations.  Some involved in the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) are even backing out, largely because of the anticipated costs.  Arizona, citing the recession, has pulled out of the cap and trade emissions program involving several Western states and Canadian provinces. Utah is following suit: in February the state House voted to urge the governor to withdraw from the WCI.

In New Mexico, our current administration, which includes Lt. Governor Diane Denish, is fighting against the national will.  Our leaders continue to push through potentially unlawful and inane regulations that threaten to completely destroy our state’s fragile economy, despite the fact that the oil and gas, utility and extractive industries are the economic back-bone of our state.  Putting an end to this kind of madness is the reason I filed my restraining order and one of the reasons I’m running for Governor of New Mexico.

First, they forced through a regulation called the “pit rule” that has already forced many small oil and gas producers to move operations across state lines into Texas or Colorado.  A boon for surrounding states, but detrimental to our state. New Mexico’s treasury is currently feeling the effects of the pit rule. In the past, the state could depend on oil and gas royalties to keep the big spending going.  Now, those rigs have moved elsewhere, and citizens are finally feeling the financial impact of unnecessary special interest environmental regulations.

Second, an environmental group has called for a cap on greenhouse gas emissions. The Governor-appointed Environmental Improvement Board (EIB) is currently running a public hearing charade around the state on this petition.  It is a charade because the EIB chairman is a lobbyist for one of the very environmental groups seeking the petition.   Talk about conflict of interest.

The third blow to our energy industry now comes from yet another government agency.   In March, the state’s Environment Department (NMED) published proposed regulations that could establish an emissions cap and trade program without ever being subjected to legislative review and approval.   That’s right, whether voters like it or not, and whether our elected legislators like it or not, the Richardson/Denish Administration will still force through Cap and Trade.

With a decision due in June, the timing of this regulation does not give the citizens of New Mexico and interested groups enough time to consider such broad and sweeping regulations that will drastically affect the state’s economy. Keep in mind that Governor Richardson’s term ends on December 31. Obviously the clock is ticking on the Richardson/Denish administration to leave some environmental legacy on the state, at any cost.

Are you angry yet?  I am, and I’m just getting started.

On Monday when I showed up at the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe to file the petition, the first judge refused to sign it.   The second judge also refused to sign it, but has granted a hearing scheduled for next week.

When people ask me, “isn’t this a political stunt?”  My straightforward answer is “yes.”  If that’s what it takes to bring attention to this issue, I’m okay with that. This injunction and this action is to stop a potential train wreck and the dictatorial abuse of administrative rule-making that circumvents the state’s legislative process.

We don’t allow it on a national level.  We didn’t allow it before 2003.  We shouldn’t allow it to happen here and now, either.

As far as white people go, you couldn’t get much whiter than Teddy Kennedy. He was utterly luminescent. Running around in his boxer shorts, chasing the college girls his nephew William brought home that night, he must have appeared almost ghost-like. Yet when he proposed Nationalized Healthcare, we soundly rejected it.

I can’t think of a bigger white cracker redneck than William Jefferson Clinton. He grew up in a trailer, and had a pick-up truck lined with Astroturf. While he was fooling around in the Oval Office, his wife tried to get Nationalized Health Care passed. America hated that idea so much, that we turned over the House and Senate to the Republicans for the first time in 40 years.

But now that Barack Obama has managed to shove a deplorable piece of questionably constitutional legislation through the corrupt purchasable legislature, we are tarred as racists for criticizing his actions.

We weren’t even allowed to hope he failed. That remark caused a lot of ruckus over the past year. For some reason if you don’t want the President’s agenda to pass, you are rooting against the Nation. Yet for eight years our opponents were allowed to get away with the remark: “I support the troops but I don’t support the mission.”

It always sounded kind of dumb to me, like “I support the Cubs, I just don’t want them to win the World Series” (and in my lifetime, they’ve yet to disappoint). Now when we on the Right say that we support the President, but not his policies, we are ignorant bigots. Which brings us around to the most common rationale you hear on the Left. “They’re only opposed to Barack Obama’s health bill, because they don’t want a black guy in the White House.”

I beg to differ.

The only reason why we might support Barack Obama, is because he is black. His presidency is proof that there is one less barrier standing in the way of racial equality. Now we have evidence that anyone in America can rise to the White House, regardless of race or religion. (Well almost. The American Electorate is still a little hinckey about Jews and Mormons.)

We are not opposed to a black guy in the White House; we just don’t want THAT black guy. I would be delighted to see Clarence Thomas run for office, although I wouldn’t want to see what was left of the Constitution, after he resigned his seat for as long as it would take to get elected.

I don’t like Obama’s ideas about Health Care, or Climate Change, or the Economy or pretty much everything else He has proposed. I didn’t like it from Al Gore, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid either. The things he has already passed have done enough damage to this Nation, I don’t want to see any more of his nightmares legislated in to reality. We have been quite specific about the substantial list of things we’re opposed to.

I think the entire Administration is a bunch of power-hungry Communists, that still want revenge on the United States for embarrassing the Soviet Union’s great social experiment. From that remark, you can clearly see that I oppose power-hungry communists.

Opposition is equal and opposite to support. So if the only reason that people on the Left can see for our opposition to Obama, is his color, then apparently they voted for him because he is a black guy. “Yes We Can” was the slogan of the campaign; I guess the full sentence was, “Yes We can elect a black guy President.”

According to Tavris Wade, introductory textbook “Psychology,” projection: “…is always seen as a defense mechanism that occurs when a person’s own unacceptable or threatening feelings are repressed and then attributed to someone else.”

Projection is exactly what happens when Democrats accuse Conservatives of racism. Republicans fight for the individual rights, so they see every American as a unique individual. Democrats fight for group rights, so your average Democrat only sees groups, differentiated by gender, race, and sexual preference.

Their power structure is based on granting privileges to special distinct groups. In this way they have assembled coalitions of minorities, LGBTs, Africa-Americans, Hispanics (which is actually a group of many different cultural identities, lumped together only because they talk the same.)  This political strategy has worked its way into the thinking of every Democrat. So naturally they assume that Republicans have the same bias.

It explains a lot. Because it was obvious to anyone paying attention, that Barack Obama didn’t have the qualifications for the Presidency. Here is a community organizer with very little on his resume. He voted present numerous times during his tenure as a State lawmaker, and his Presidential run was the first election cycle he actually had to campaign.

It puzzled those of us on the right why he had such support. He had less administrative experience than Sarah Palin, and it would appear a little less intelligence. The people, who are criticizing Sarah for a few crib notes in the palm of her hand, have known for two years that our President reads every thought off of a teleprompter word for word.(even the typos.)

So why did they vote for him? Perhaps, he won for the same reason he was given a Nobel Prize: because he is there. His very presence is worthy of awards.(Apparently his votes of “Present’ in the Legislature were far more substantial than I imagined.)

He wasn’t elected for his vision. His health care plan, wasn’t substantially different from the one Hillary proposed, or the one Teddy Kennedy proposed. His contribution to the debate was his ability to silence the opposition with political correctness. Their talking points were scripted long before the November election even happened. The prejudices that Republicans hoped were lapsing, Democrats were waiting to exploit.

It could be that I’m an old fashioned guy, who remembers back when soccer games were scored, but I think that being given an unearned award is a little demeaning. It’s almost as if he’s being treated like a contestant in the Special Olympics, where everyone gets a medal just for competing.

The President himself once compared his bowling to the Special Olympics; turns out, his entire Presidency is like his bowling (his approval rating isn’t far from his bowling score).

Perhaps instead of the White House, we should have just given him a bowling trophy.

After the divisive debate over health care “reform” and the problems that are already emerging from it (see young people, the states, AT&T, Verizon, John Deere, Caterpillar, etc.) you would think The One and Congress would take a breather. Wrongo! Here comes another hard left. A new “bipartisan” Cap and Tax bill is on the way.

Three senior US lawmakers are piecing together a sweeping bipartisan energy and climate bill, which looks set to include sweeteners to galvanize support among Republicans and industry groups…

The senators have hosted meetings with industry groups over the past two weeks, revealing details about their plan that would cap carbon emissions while expanding offshore oil drilling and nuclear power generation.

We definitely need to expand offshore drilling and remove some of the regulations that make it so hard to build a nuclear power plant, but it’s not worth the unnecessary increase in cost every American will pay for our energy (and everything that uses energy) that will come with the rest of this bill.

Will these “sweeteners” to get industry to go along include corporate welfare?

According to people briefed by the senators, the bill aims to cut carbon emissions from 2005 levels by 17 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050, largely by implementing separate caps on utilities and manufacturers. The federal government would sell separate pollution permits to each sector, using a “hard price collar” to limit greenhouse gas allowances to between $10 and $30 per ton, and committing to flood the market with credits if the price ceiling is exceeded…

The senators hope to send details of the bill to the Environmental Protection Agency this week. The bill is likely to be introduced by late April.

There is no need for any Cap and Tax bill. Let’s keep our focus on real pollution, not what we breathe out. Our water and air is now cleaner than it was in the 70s. Our politicians are acting as if the manmade global warming scandal didn’t happen. They are ignoring polls of scientists, Americans, weather forecasters and even the Germans who say the science isn’t settled. And we’re picking it up again just when the French are dropping it. We’re moving to the left of France!

If Congress doesn’t pass a new law devastating our energy production and our economy, the enviroMentals are ready to go around the people.

Environmentalists, unable to squeeze “cap and trade” rules through the U.S. Senate, have a new strategy for combating what they believe is man-made global warming:

They’re going to sue…

The environmentalists allege that individual companies are responsible for climate change because they have emitted greenhouse gases during the course of their operations. Those gases, they say, have “harmed” them by fostering Hurricane Katrina, eroding the shorelines of America’s coasts and causing global warming.

They are using the tort of “public nuisance” as the basis for these suits. They say it doesn’t even matter if all the companies complied with the clean water and air act, they are still guilty because the earth has warmed. Of course they can’t prove the CO2 emissions caused global warming, or Hurricane Katrina or that reducing these CO2 emissions would do anything to stop future warming. But that’s not really the point. They simply want to harass these companies into out of court settlements and scare every business into toeing the manmade global warming line.

There is also a real possibility some crazy judge will go against common sense and precedent and side with the Goreaphiles.

It’s time to stand up and stop the madness.

Don’t forget to check out the Big F@#&* Deal this week and a new term to fan the flames of class warfare.

After the divisive debate over health care “reform” and the problems that are already emerging from it (see young people, the states, AT&T, Verizon, John Deere, Caterpillar, etc.) you would think The One and Congress would take a breather. Wrongo! Here comes another hard left. A new “bipartisan” Cap and Tax bill is on the way.

Three senior US lawmakers are piecing together a sweeping bipartisan energy and climate bill, which looks set to include sweeteners to galvanize support among Republicans and industry groups…

The senators have hosted meetings with industry groups over the past two weeks, revealing details about their plan that would cap carbon emissions while expanding offshore oil drilling and nuclear power generation.

We definitely need to expand offshore drilling and remove some of the regulations that make it so hard to build a nuclear power plant, but it’s not worth the unnecessary increase in cost every American will pay for our energy (and everything that uses energy) that will come with the rest of this bill.

Will these “sweeteners” to get industry to go along include corporate welfare?

According to people briefed by the senators, the bill aims to cut carbon emissions from 2005 levels by 17 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050, largely by implementing separate caps on utilities and manufacturers. The federal government would sell separate pollution permits to each sector, using a “hard price collar” to limit greenhouse gas allowances to between $10 and $30 per ton, and committing to flood the market with credits if the price ceiling is exceeded…

The senators hope to send details of the bill to the Environmental Protection Agency this week. The bill is likely to be introduced by late April.

There is no need for any Cap and Tax bill. Let’s keep our focus on real pollution, not what we breathe out. Our water and air is now cleaner than it was in the 70s. Our politicians are acting as if the manmade global warming scandal didn’t happen. They are ignoring polls of scientists, Americans, weather forecasters and even the Germans who say the science isn’t settled. And we’re picking it up again just when the French are dropping it. We’re moving to the left of France!

If Congress doesn’t pass a new law devastating our energy production and our economy, the enviroMentals are ready to go around the people.

Environmentalists, unable to squeeze “cap and trade” rules through the U.S. Senate, have a new strategy for combating what they believe is man-made global warming:

They’re going to sue…

The environmentalists allege that individual companies are responsible for climate change because they have emitted greenhouse gases during the course of their operations. Those gases, they say, have “harmed” them by fostering Hurricane Katrina, eroding the shorelines of America’s coasts and causing global warming.

They are using the tort of “public nuisance” as the basis for these suits. They say it doesn’t even matter if all the companies complied with the clean water and air act, they are still guilty because the earth has warmed. Of course they can’t prove the CO2 emissions caused global warming, or Hurricane Katrina or that reducing these CO2 emissions would do anything to stop future warming. But that’s not really the point. They simply want to harass these companies into out of court settlements and scare every business into toeing the manmade global warming line.

There is also a real possibility some crazy judge will go against common sense and precedent and side with the Goreaphiles.

It’s time to stand up and stop the madness.

Don’t forget to check out the Big F@#&* Deal this week and a new term to fan the flames of class warfare.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is known for its relentless pursuit of initiatives to combat pollution and emissions it deems harmful, including carbon dioxide. However, one of its efforts designed to counter climate change has the agency attracting incoming fire, with critics charging that CARB is more concerned about the prospect of global warming than protecting the public from felons.

At issue is a CARB measure known as the “Cool Cars” rule that requires the application of certain additives to window glass. The theory behind the mandate is that reflective windshields will prevent cars from overheating, and thus reduce reliance on air conditioning, which affects how much fuel is burnt by a car. Proponents of climate change theory attribute changes in temperature to human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels, whereas skeptics charge that such theory amounts to a load of hot air.

What is certain in the debate over this mandate is that CARB’s action has a lot of people hot under the collar: While the glaze ostensibly prevents excess solar heat from entering cars, critics say it also seriously degrades the signal sent by a whole host of electronic devices, including GPS navigation systems, cellular phones and—perhaps most critically— ankle monitoring bracelets worn by felons, which utilize GPS technology.

On that point, which regulators and legislators have to-date not acknowledged, law enforcement groups and victim rights advocates have been expressing “grave concerns” about the new regulation. In a recent letter obtained by Capitol Confidential, the California Police Chiefs Association, the California Narcotics Officers Association and the California Peace Officers’ Association cautioned that the new regulation “threatens to undermine an already imperfect monitoring tool.”

Warning that prison overcrowding and budget shortfalls necessitate the release of additional felons, none of whom could be properly monitored under the regulation, the glaze would “virtually vitiate the effectiveness of GPS monitoring.” “At a time when the public safety of California communities is being challenged as never before,” the letter reads, “the crippling of important GPS monitoring and the utility of cellular phones to seek emergency assistance is not helpful.”

In line with the disconcerting reminder from law enforcement that “horrific crimes” take place when the GPS signal of ankle monitoring devices are dropped, Crime Victims United of California also wrote state regulators last month that the group had “serious concerns” with the new initiative. “Given the difficulty in adequately monitoring the prison, jail and parolee population as it is this regulation should be halted immediately as it will result in even greater problems for the state in monitoring its GPS population,” the group’s president wrote. “[T]his approach to global warming is unacceptable and has crime victims in an uproar.”

Typically, criticisms of California’s approach to combating the perceived threat of climate change have tended to center on the impact of state initiatives on jobs. Just this week, California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office indicated that the state’s climate change policy would likely lead to “modest” job losses in the short term.

This new uproar could, observers say, result in CARB easing its “Cool Cars” regulation.

This week (March 3, 2010) was the deadline Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) set for Mark Crisson, President and CEO of the American Public Power Association (APPA), to explain why APPA is urging Senators to support Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s Congressional Review Act resolution to veto the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. The Senate may vote on the Murkowski resolution as soon as next week.

Now, aside from the merits of the issue, which I’ll get into in a moment, Waxman and Markey’s behavior is out of line. Waxman and Markey (W/M) are Members of the House of Representatives. What business is it of theirs if the APPA lobbies Senators about a bill pending in the Senate? Senators can conduct their own inquiries without any assistance from W/M. And why didn’t W/M copy Sen. Murkowski or at least Senate Energy Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) on their Feb. 25 letter to Mr. Crisson? Failure to “cc” any of the principals in the Senate flouts one of the most basic rules of legislative courtesy.

Besides being busybodies, Waxman and Markey are bullies.

In their letter to Crisson, Waxman and Markey demand that he “clarify exactly APPA’s position on EPA’s scientific finding,” and either “provide the scientific basis” for disputing it, or explain why APPA is urging Senators to disapprove the finding if it has no scientific “bases” for disputing it.

There is in fact a strong scientific basis for disputing EPA’s endangerment finding. Peabody Energy presents the evidence in exquisite detail in their petition for a reconsideration of the endangerment finding. The basis that eludes Waxman and Markey may be summarized in one word: Climategate.

EPA’s endangerment finding relies heavily on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Scientists at the heart of the Climategate scandal include several lead authors and contributors to the IPCC reports. They massaged data to produce pre-determined conclusions, ignored data that did not fit into a “nice tidy story line,” conspired to bias the peer-reviewed literature by preventing “skeptics” from publishing, and violated freedom of information laws to prevent critics from checking their data and methods.

These behaviors produced a secretive, agenda-driven process that flouts EPA’s own standards of “transparency and openness,” making the IPCC reports unsuitable as a basis for EPA policy decisions.

However, although the scientific shortcomings of EPA’s endangerment finding are serious, Mr. Crisson need not engage in this debate, because the Murkowski resolution does not take a stand on EPA’s “science” one way or the other.

W/M would like nothing better than to spin the Murkowski resolution as a benighted attempt to determine scientific truth by voting. Ironically, W/M do much the same by continually invoking the alleged “consensus of scientists,” as if a head count could settle scientific controversies. But that’s a topic for another day.

My free (and unsolicited) advice to Mr. Crisson – and anyone else debating opponents of the Murkowski resolution – is to clarify what the resolution is and isn’t. It is not a referendum on EPA’s “science.” Rather, it is a referendum on whether bureaucrats with a vested interest in expanding their power, aided and abetted by trial lawyers and eco-pressure groups with no political accountability to the American people, should make climate and energy policy for the nation. It is a referendum on the constitutional propriety of EPA dealing itself into a position to implement regulatory policies Congress never approved when it enacted and amended the Clean Air Act.

A bit of background is in order here. If allowed to stand, the endangerment finding will compel EPA to establish greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards for new motor vehicles. That, in turn, will automatically make carbon dioxide (CO2) “subject to regulation” under the Clean Air Act’s pre-construction and operating permit programs. As even EPA acknowledges, stretching those programs to include CO2 would lead to “absurd results” manifestly contrary to congressional intent.

For example, EPA would have to apply pre-construction permitting requirements to tens of thousands of previously non-regulated small business, and operating permit requirements to millions. The permitting programs would crash under the own weight, freezing construction activity and thrusting countless businesses into legal limbo during the worst recession in 50 years.

The endangerment finding is also precedent for economy-wide regulation of greenhouse gases under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) program. Logically, EPA would have to set the NAAQS for CO2 below current atmospheric levels. Even a global depression lasting several decades would not be enough to bring America (and the world) into attainment with such a standard, yet the Clean Air Act obligates states to attain “primary” (health-based) NAAQS within five or at most 10 years.

To have its cake and eat it (regulate CO2 without hammering small business and igniting a political backlash), EPA proposes in its Tailoring Rule to exempt small sources of CO2 from the permitting programs. This breach of the separation of powers may or may not survive judicial scrutiny. But even if it does, EPA’s proposed small business protections would terminate in six years. Moreover, the Tailoring Rule in no way reduces the threat of NAAQS regulation. The Murkowski resolution, on the other hand, would nip all this mischief in the bud.

How? The Murkowski resolution would veto the endangerment finding’s “legal force and effect.” And that is all it would do. It takes absolutely no position on the scientific validity of EPA’s reasoning or conclusions, as anyone can see who actually takes the trouble to read the text, which is only one sentence long.

And, just in case you’re wondering, Sen. Murkowski is not a global warming skeptic, nor is she opposed in principle to greenhouse gas regulation. She simply believes that climate policy is too important to be made by anyone except the people’s elected representatives.

It is thus a complete misunderstanding to claim, as Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and others do, that the Murkowski amendment is equivalent to Congress voting to overturn the Surgeon General’s report in 1964 finding that cigarette smoking causes cancer. The Surgeon General’s report was simply that – an assessment of the scientific literature. It had zero legal force or effect. In fact, the Surgeon General proposed no remedies at all. It was Congress, not the Surgeon General or any executive agency that, in 1965, required cigarette packages to carry a health warning, and that later prohibited cigarette advertising on television and radio.

If the endangerment finding were simply an assessment of the scientific literature, the Senate would have no business voting on it. But it is much more than that. It is the setup for EPA to take control of vast portions of the economy. It is the trigger for a cascade of regulations potentially more costly than any climate bill or treaty Congress has considered and either rejected or declined to enact or ratify.

W/M need to chill. Whether anyone – the APPA, other trade associations, or Members of Congress – agrees or disagrees with EPA’s “science” is irrelevant. Do W/M support politically accountable policymaking or bureaucratic end runs around the democratic process? Do they think EPA should be allowed to amend the Clean Air Act and violate the separation of powers to avoid the political fallout from regulatory excesses (“absurd results”) that the agency’s “science” would unleash on the American economy?

Finally, do W/M favor establishing NAAQS for CO2?  If not, just how do they propose to avoid this “absurd result” if the endangerment finding is allowed to stand?

Too bad W/M get to ask all the questions and don’t have to answer any. Their questions are designed to bully and intimidate – and distract public attention from serious threats to our economy and our democracy, threats the Murkowski resolution would remove.

Al Gore emerged from his undisclosed location and took to the op-ed page of the New York Times:

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skepticsmay not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Read the whole piece of performance art here. No doubt Al Gore believes that the really important thing here is that the ‘global consensus’ remains unchanged. For him and other climate-profiteers, science has been flipped; it is the conclusion, not the premises, which is set in stone. If some facts fall apart, they’ll just find some new ones to prop up their proposals.

Al Gore emerged from his undisclosed location and took to the op-ed page of the New York Times:

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skepticsmay not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Read the whole piece of performance art here. No doubt Al Gore believes that the really important thing here is that the ‘global consensus’ remains unchanged. For him and other climate-profiteers, science has been flipped; it is the conclusion, not the premises, which is set in stone. If some facts fall apart, they’ll just find some new ones to prop up their proposals.

During his campaign for Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli committed himself to acting with an aggressive conservative agenda. He promised voters that he would the office to aggressively fight governmental overregulation and interference wherever he could find it.

In other words, he pledged to use the office of Attorney General for good, rather than evil. After just over one month in office, he’s off to one hell of a start.

Last week, AG Cuccinelli boldly petitioned the EPA to convene a proceeding to reexamine their “Endangerment Finding” which claims that human activity has increased atmospheric greenhouse gases to a point that people’s lives are at risk. As such, they claim, the federal government must impose new caps on emissions and other climate protection policies in the energy sector.

Cuccinelli believes, rightly, that regulations based on the findings of the EPA in this sketchy case would be both legally questionable and detrimental to Virginia’s economy. (Much of the research that the EPA has based these findings upon has come from the questionable climate-gate materials). Accordingly, the AG also has petitioned a federal appeals court to review the EPA’s findings.

Keep an eye on this guy. He means business. And by picking these kinds of necessary fights, he’s certainly going to need backup.