From Karl Peterjohn of the Kansas Taxpayers Network.

How Much More Will Electricity Cost In Your Future?
Karl Peterjohn, Kansas Taxpayers Network

Governor Sebelius and her bankrupt Secretary of Health and Environment Rod Bremby (Bremby filed for personal bankruptcy over a year ago) now appear to have stopped the Kansas house from joining the Kansas senate in overriding her veto of the coal power plant expansion in western Kansas. The legislature’s final attempt at legislating a solution that would expand electrical power generation in the western half of Kansas is headed for another gubernatorial veto. The Kansas House of Representatives appears to be well short of the 84 votes needed to override her veto.

A number of legislators from northeast Kansas as well as mainly Wichita Democrats have mustered up enough house votes to kill this $3.6 billion power plant project. The May 13th death of Rep. Ted Powers, R-Mulvane, who voted to override this veto, makes a sine die override even more unlikely.

Eastern Kansans who seldom venture into western Kansas unless they are driving on I-70 to Colorado felt little direct concern on this 2008 legislative issue. That allowed the well-organized urban-based environmentalists to convince enough big city legislators from both parties to sustain Sebelius’ veto in the house.

Eastern Kansans’ power generation was not at immediate risk. Neither were their utility rates. That will change and this unpleasant and very expensive change is coming soon.

If you want details on the national plan and how this is becoming Kansas’ environmental policy the Capital Research Center (CRC) has provided the details. There is a national plan established by ultra-left wing environmental groups and CRC’s April, 20008 report (see www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/v1207000450.pdf) details this effort. The liberal environmental foundations are funding this state level plan to impose Kyoto Treaty like cuts in carbon energy emissions.

This will result in a huge rise in electricity costs as well as making other power sources more expensive. It will help push gasoline and other petroleum prices higher. This will be accomplished through entities like the Pennsylvania based Center for Climate Strategies that is helping establish new carbon controls by administrative edict over Kansas state policy.

Soaring utility costs will limit economic growth in a way that will restrict the economy while dramatically raising prices across the board. Here’s how it will happen.

What Governor Sebelius is trying to do at the state level in the 21st century with new restrictions on carbon based energy will soon lead to new carbon taxes. It is possible that new carbon taxes will appear at both the state and federal levels. Along with the tax hikes will be emission restrictions. Don’t forget that whenever you exhale or burn a log in the fireplace, you are emitting carbon.

Bremby’s edict is similar in impact to what former President Clinton achieved when he vetoed oil drilling in Alaska in 1995. It took roughly a decade for the lack of oil drilling to impact the U.S. oil prices. In contrast, today the demand for electrical power is growing. There is pressure on prices but major increases have not occurred. You can expect the rising demand for electricity to hit much more quickly than oil prices did a decade ago. Don’t forget that oil fell to record lows in the late 1990’s a couple of years after Clinton’s anti-energy veto.

The demise of the Holcomb power plant expansion when combined with new “carbon emissions” edicts from regulators like Bremby will negatively impact the Kansas economy in the future. This is a continuation of Democratic Party energy policies. At the beginning of the Clinton presidency, the Congress narrowly rejected the Clinton administration’s new carbon tax. This is likely to reappear in Washington next year.

The Holcomb power plant battle was not an aberration or isolated event. It is the energy tip of the “man made global warming” hoax (ironically occurring while parts of Kansas have been at or near freeze warnings well into May) that is centralizing all economic power and authority with state or federal levels of government in our state. The governor’s new energy council will include industry leaders who need to be worried about their carbon emissions.

Several established Kansas businesses are already expanding elsewhere like Bombardier and Spirit AeroSystems going to North Carolina. Cessna, whose President Jack Pelton will head up the governor’s new energy panel from the private sector, will now expand in Kansas after the state agreed to subsidize this expansion. So now, the state will be picking “winners and losers” in our economy.

Westar Energy, the electrical power company that owns a number of Kansas coal fired power plants, is now seeking higher electrical rates to pay for new pollution equipment costs from the KCC. They need to do this since their existing coal fired power plants are not nearly as low pollution as the Holcomb expansion would have been. Westar now needs Bremby to renew their existing permits to continue operations. Bureaucratic coercion is now codified in Kansas under Queen Sebelius.

House Speaker Rep. Melvin Neufeld, R-Ingalls, has campaigned for the Holcomb plant expansion and against this arbitrary power grab by Bremby and his boss. This is a problem in Neufeld’s southwest Kansas district where the nearby Hugoton gas field slowly declines in production. Neufeld has warned that Bremby’s bureaucratic edict against Holcomb has pushed a possible oil refinery, a $10 billion project with 1,500 new full time jobs, out of state too. Neufeld has copies of documents concerning the permitting process from Bremby’s office concerning this project. Naturally, liberal newspapers like the Wichita Eagle criticized Neufeld for pointing out this loss.

Another irony about power generation and carbon emissions was the fact that both houses of the legislature overwhelmingly passed state legislation to try and locate a new agricultural-terror research facility in Manhattan this year. This new federal facility would need a special electrical power plant to be allowed to operate. Since this was a government facility, unlike the private co-op, the carbon dioxide being generated from this proposed new back-up electrical power plant was not a problem. The carbon it emits comes from natural gas and not the politically incorrect coal too.

Governor Sebelius quickly signed this authorizing legislation into law. If it is government, it is good. If it is private, let’s stop it. Here is another example of government economic hypocrisy.

Kansas has started a new era. The price of living in Kansas is going to soar while you will be facing stagnant incomes as politicians in Topeka and their out-of-state environmental foundations control economic activity by regulatory edict.

While the rest of the world grows, China alone has built or is building hundreds of new power plants, many of which will be coal fired. Jobs will continue to flow out of the U.S. Kansas and the other 49 states will increasingly find themselves and our economy in green handcuffs. That will result in a lot of Kansans eventually finding themselves in the same bankruptcy line behind the already bankrupt Rod Bremby while Governor Sebelius makes plans for her next job in Washington.

On May 1, 2008, the Americans For Prosperity Hot Air Tour made its stop in Wichita, Kansas. It was too windy for the big hot air balloon (who could have guessed that might be the case in the Kansas springtime?) but the speakers spoke as planned, and that's the important part of this event.

Some photos that I took may be viewed here.

Some of the material from AFP:

Climate alarmists have bombarded citizens with apocalyptic scenarios and pressured them into environmental political correctness. It’s time to tell the other side of the story.

Climate Schemes Mean Higher Taxes

• A cap-and-trade system would amount to a $1.19 trillion tax hike over the next ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
• Energy taxes would drive gas over $8.00 per gallon and more than double electricity bills, according to a study by the American Council for Capital Formation.
• Revenue from energy taxes or permit sales will be used by bureaucratic central planners to pick politically-favored but horribly ineffective alternatives, like ethanol.

Cap-and-Trade is a Massive Job-Killer

• The hundreds of billions of dollars of economic activity destroyed by the cap-and-trade tax scheme translate into millions of lost jobs for American workers.
• We would trade millions of productive private sector jobs, for a smaller number of jobs created by a government regulatory scheme.

Climate Alarmism Threatens Freedom

• The inevitable result of energy regulation is centralized control of the economy and our lives. The government has already banned incandescent light bulbs even though replacements, compact fluorescent bulbs, contain toxic mercury.
• California wants to place radio control devices in thermostats so the government can set the temperature in homes and businesses.
• Higher energy costs will increase the price of any product that is transported to market; these effects will ripple through the economy. Food prices have been especially hard hit, with milk prices up 20% in the last year.
• State climate panels want to return to 55 MPH speed limits.

Radical Proposals will have Very Little Impact

• Cap and trade policies are already failing to reduce CO2 emissions in Europe. In fact, emissions covered under their legislation in Europe have gone up according to the think tank, Open Europe.
• Even if the cap and trade scheme actually reduce emissions in the United States – despite failures in Europe, climate models show that the reductions would have an impact of approximately 0.1 degree Celsius in the year 2100.

Low-Income Families will be Hit Hardest

• Low-income families pay a much larger share of their income on goods that will be affected by these policies.
• Higher energy and food prices are a genuine hardship for low-income Americans, even if they are an affordable indulgence for Al Gore, who already spends tens of thousands of dollars on his home energy bills.

Remarks delivered at a public hearing for the Sedgwick County solid waste management plan, April 24, 2008. Sedgwick County, Kansas, home to the City of Wichita, is considering a mandatory household recycling program. Or, perhaps people won't be forced to recycle, but they will be required to pay for the cost burden that recycling places on communities.

You may listen to this article in audio form by clicking here.

The economist Frederich Hayek tells us that the price system communicates all the information we need to know about the relative value of things. The price system allows people who don't know each other to coordinate their activities in the most effective and efficient way possible. The price system is truly a miracle.

If you want to see what happens when the price system is not allowed to work, usually because a government attempts to manage prices, just look at the former Soviet Union and other planned economies. The economist Thomas Sowell relates this story:

The last premiere of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, is said to have asked British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: How do you see to it that people get food? The answer was that she didn't. Prices did that. And the British people were better fed than those in the Soviet Union, even though the British have never grown enough food to feed themselves in more than a century. Prices bring them food from other countries.

The price system can do its work only when free people trade with each other freely under a system where property rights are respected. Any attempt by governments to manage prices leads to inefficiencies that manifest themselves as shortages, waiting lines, surpluses, and black markets. The emergence of these problems lead to calls for even more government interventionism to fix the very problem the government caused by interfering with the price system. It can be a never-ending cycle.

How does this apply to recycling in Sedgwick County?

In some cases the price system tells us that recycling is a beneficial use of resources. About 75% of automobiles are recycled, and used cardboard is often recycled in commercial settings. That's because the price paid for these recycled items is high enough that, in these contexts, recycling can be profitable. That's the price system at work. It tells us that the best use of an old car is to recycle it, and the same goes for cardboard boxes at the grocery store.

A household setting is different. Households usually have to pay to engage in recycling. The prices that recyclers can get for these recycled goods doesn't cover the cost of collecting them from households, as evidenced by the fact that in Wichita households must pay someone to pick up recyclables. That's the price system at work again. Its sober assessment is that in the context of households, recycling is a waste of resources. That waste can be tremendous. Orange County, Florida, for example, spends roughly $3 million per year to collect recyclable goods from households, but sells them for only $56,000.

What about running out of landfill space? If landfill space were truly scarce, the price system would tell us so, because landfill operators -- if there is a free market for landfills -- could charge high prices for accepting trash. But evidently, they can't.

So the price system tells us sometimes recycling is a good use of resources, and sometimes it isn't.

A mandatory recycling program or one where people have to pay fees even if they don't actually recycle their household goods amounts to the government attempting to override the price system. It is attempting to manage the price system through government interventionism. These policies, should Sedgwick County implement them, will cause citizens to suffer the same inefficiencies that all planned economies have demonstrated, if on a smaller scale.

In this article, Karl Peterjohn states that the professional staff at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment approved the permit for a new coal-burning electricity plant in Kansas, but the agency's Secretary, Rod Bremby, overruled that staff. It seems as though he and Governor Kathleen Sebelius were trying to stake new political ground in America. Why they would want to do this is not clear to me and many other Kansans. China builds a new plant like the one proposed for Kansas every seven to ten days. India builds many, and so do some other countries. Since it's not called global warming for nothing, it doesn't matter where these plants are built. They all affect the global atmosphere, as far as carbon dioxide is concerned, in precisely the same way. So two Kansas politicians, cheered on by a few newspaper editorial writers, place the Kansas economy at great risk for what benefit? Perhaps in a few years, on a hot summer day when little wind is blowing, the chillers at the Wichita Eagle building on East Douglas will slow to a crawl, the editorialists' computers switch to battery back up power with only a few minutes left to finish the day's work, and no electricity is available to run the printing presses or the servers hosting the Eagle's web site. But at least we in Kansas spewed only 0.01% as much carbon into the atmosphere as did the new Chinese coal plants.

Regulatory Uncertainty Weakens Kansas’ Economy
By Karl Peterjohn, Kansas Taxpayers Network, www.kansastaxpayers.com

The regulatory uncertainty created by Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) Secretary Ron Bremby’s decision to deny a permit to Sunflower Electric’s proposed power plant places the Kansas economy at risk and should be obvious to everyone. Sadly, this everyone does not include the Wichita Eagle’s editorial board’s February 27th editorial.

Electric utilities are already highly regulated by the state as well as federal rules and edicts. Sunflower Electric’s proposed coal fired electrical power plant expansion had been through numerous permits and regulatory requirements. The professional staff at KDHE had recommended approval based upon the criteria elected officials had placed in Kansas law.

Secretary Bremby decided that he would add new criteria that no federal or state elected officials had approved. Kansas became the first state to declare that carbon dioxide emissions are pollutants. That became his basis for denying a construction permit.

Lost in the debate over the building of a coal-fired electricity plant in Kansas is the fact that China builds a plant like this every week to ten days, according to the New York Times. Nonetheless, newspaper editorial writers like Randy Scholfield of The Wichita Eagle want to saddle Kansans with higher utility bills and a stifling regulatory structure. There is no doubt that other forms of producing electricity are more expensive than coal. Mr. Scholfield's newspaper is full of stories of woe about how people can't pay their bills when the price of natural gas or gasoline goes up. Yet, he is willing to ask them to pay more for something of dubious value. At the same time, his position holds the real possibility of reducing economic growth in Kansas, which should lead to more tales of woe for the Wichita Eagle to report.

Even the New York Times recognizes that wind power can't be our sole, or even major, source of power. As it reported on February 23, 2008: "Despite the attraction of wind as a nearly pollution-free power source, it does have limitations. Though the gap is closing, electricity from wind remains costlier than that generated from fossil fuels. Moreover, wind power is intermittent and unpredictable, and the hottest days, when electricity is needed most, are usually not windy."

Thank you to Karl Peterjohn of the Kansas Taxpayers Network for the following explanation.

Are You Polluting Kansas?
By Karl Peterjohn, Kansas Taxpayers Network

It is a biological fact that every time Governor Sebelius breathes, she exhales carbon dioxide. Every editorial writer at the carbon dioxide phobic Wichita Eagle also exhales carbon dioxide with every breath.

Are they polluting? All mammals exhale carbon dioxide and the plants that inhale carbon dioxide (CO2) need this compound to grow. This is part of the photosynthesis that is the foundation for life on earth. This is basic biology. CO2 has never been made a pollutant by the action of either the state or federal elected officials. Now the advocates of man-made global warming claim that it is. That is now Governor Sebelius’ and her staff’s official position.

Those sounding the alarm over global warming are full of evidence of rising temperatures and man's contribution to them. Rarely, however, do I read of what these advocates proscribe as the cure for global warming, and if one is given, we don't often hear of the grave damage the cure would do to our economy and standard of living.

The following article by George Resiman explains what caps on carbon dioxide emissions mean in terms of our economy. I wish that Roderick L. Bremby, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, had read this article before making his recent decision denying the applications to build two coal-fired plants in Kansas. His reasoning for the denial: "it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing."

I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Professor Reisman this summer, and I attended several of his lectures at Mises University in Auburn, Alabama. I am reading, slowly but surely, his monumental book Capitalism, which he inscribed for me. His website at www.capitalism.net and blog at www.georgereisman.com are valuable resources. You can read the full version of this article at http://georgereisman.com/blog/2007/05/global-warming-is-not-threat-but.html.

Global Warming Is Not a Threat But the Environmentalist Response to It Is

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released the summary of its latest, forthcoming report on global warming. It’s most trumpeted finding is that the existence of global warming is now “unequivocal.”

Although such anecdotal evidence as January’s snowfall in Tucson, Arizona and freezing weather in Southern California and February’s more than 100-inch snowfall in upstate New York might suggest otherwise, global warming may indeed be a fact. It may also be a fact that it is a by-product of industrial civilization (despite, according to The New York Times of November 7, 2006, two ice ages having apparently occurred in the face of carbon levels in the atmosphere 16 times greater than that of today, millions of years before mankind’s appearance on earth).

If global warming and mankind’s responsibility for it really are facts, does anything automatically follow from them? Does it follow that there is a need to limit and/or reduce carbon emissions and the use of the fossil fuels—oil, coal, and natural gas—that gives rise to the emissions? The need for such limitation and/or rollback is the usual assumption.

Nevertheless, the truth is that nothing whatever follows from these facts. Before any implication for action can be present, additional information is required.