Voice For Liberty

Tag: Climate change

  • Articles of interest

    Chemical security, national health care, global warming cost, school order.

    Extending security standards better decision

    A letter in the Montgomery Advertiser makes the case for extending the present Chemical facility anti-terrorism standards. Legislation is under consideration that would give government the ability to regulate processes and technologies.

    “Although we believe CFATS should be reauthorized and made permanent, we do not support current draft legislation that replaces CFATS and extends the power of the DHS to dictate how a product is made. Decisions pertaining to feedstocks, processes and products should be left to the engineers and safety experts at local facilities.”

    The Stealth Single-Payer Agenda

    George F. Will’s column explains that while President Obama and Congress are presently considering a “public option” health care plan, this is just the first step on the road to a single-payer plan. “The puzzle is: Why does the president, who says that were America ‘starting from scratch’ he would favor a ‘single-payer’ — government-run — system, insist that health-care reform include a government insurance plan that competes with private insurers? The simplest answer is that such a plan will lead to a single-payer system.”

    The Big Chill
    Congress shouldn’t fight global warming by freezing the economy.

    In a Wall Street Journal column, Pete Du Pont explains the enormous cost of the Waxman-Markey global warming bill and how little warming it would stop. “Manzi estimates the additional economic costs of the bill would be 0.8% of gross domestic product, while the economic benefits would be just 0.08% — so the costs would be 10 times the benefits. The cost of reducing emissions turns out to be greater than the cost they impose on societies. According to a 1999 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimate, the emissions cuts the Kyoto Protocol would have required in 2010 were likely to reduce America’s GDP by $275 billion to $468 billion, or $921 to $1,565 per person, and of course Kyoto does not apply to fast-growing developing countries such as China and India.”

    Taking back control of the classrooms

    “The dirty little secret of America’s schools is that teachers have lost control of the classroom. Disrespect is commonplace. Disorder is an epidemic — 43 percent of high school teachers say they spend more than half their time maintaining order instead of teaching, according to a Public Agenda survey. Learning is impossible in these conditions. One misbehaving student steals the floor, spoiling the learning opportunity for the other 29 students. ‘You know, it really doesn’t take very many kids to ruin a classroom,’ observed David Adams, superintendent of Shelbyville Central Schools.”

    Phillip K. Howard explains that the problem is too much law: “There is a broad perception — by teachers and students alike — that teachers lack the legal authority to enforce respect and order.”

  • Faust-Goudeau’s concern selective

    In today’s Wichita Eagle, Oletha Faust-Goudeau, a Democratic member of the Kansas Senate representing parts of north-central and northeast Wichita, writes this in a letter to the editor:

    I would like to commend Mayor Carl Brewer and the Wichita City Council for having the courage to vote down a rate increase for water and sewer charges for customers in our city (“Water rates to hold steady,” June 17 Local & State). As we continue to face economic down times, I am very concerned about our senior citizens and people with disabilities who are on fixed incomes and struggling to make ends meet. This increase would have certainly added an additional financial burden for them in paying utility bills.

    The proposed rate increase Faust-Goudeau refers to was in the amount of $2.00 per month.

    I suppose it’s admirable that she’s looking out for the interests of her constituents in this matter. But her concern is selective.

    The problem is that Faust-Goudeau voted against the expansion of the Holcomb Station coal-fired electricity generating plant. Her votes mean that Kansas would have to rely on wind power backed by natural gas, which is much more expensive than relying on electricity generated by coal.

    Wind power is very expensive, despite being heavily subsidized by the federal government through the production tax credit.

    It’s so expensive that Westar, the electrical utility that serves Wichita and Faust-Goudeau’s constituents, has had to ask for several rate increases recently. The cost of wind power was cited in some of the requests.

    One of these rate increases was estimated to add $10 per month to the cost of electricity for the average house.

    Part of the reason for the water department’s rate increase request is to fund capital improvements the department needs to make sure it can continue to deliver water now and well into the future.

    Paying much higher electric bills just so we can build more windmills to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, and even if it did exist, can’t be solved with windmills in Kansas: that’s a burden that no one should have to pay.

    Not even Faust-Goudeau herself, no matter how she votes in the Kansas Senate.

  • Articles of Interest

    Global warming alarmist James Hansen, inflation, Facebook, paygo deception.

    The Man Who Cried Doom
    NASA’s James Hansen is the least-muzzled climate alarmist in America

    NASA’s James Hansen was one of the first to warn of the “impending doom” of global warming. How has his message fared over the last 20 years? Here’s what other scientists have said about Hansen: “Hansen’s testimony in 1988 was ‘a huge embarrassment’ to NASA, and he remains skeptical of Hansen’s predictions. … describes Hansen’s belief in a man-made global-warming catastrophe as ‘almost religious’ and says he ‘never understood how [Hansen] got such a strong voice’ in the debate. … puts Hansen ‘at the extreme end of global warming alarmism.’ … Hansen got caught with his hand in the cookie jar in 2007, when Stephen McIntyre, the man who debunked the infamous “hockey stick” graph showing stable Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures for most of the last millennia before a sharp upturn, found a flaw in Hansen’s numbers.”

    The full article from the Weekly Standard is at The Man Who Cried Doom.

    Get Ready for Inflation and Higher Interest Rates
    The unprecedented expansion of the money supply could make the ’70s look benign.

    Arthur Laffer, writing in the Wall Street Journal, warns of inflation and other trouble ahead. The chart of the growth of the money supply looks a lot like Al Gore’s “hockey stick” chart of global temperatures. That chart, we know now, was in error. The chart of the rapid growth of the money supply, unfortunately, is true. Here’s some of what Laffer wrote:

    But as bad as the fiscal picture is, panic-driven monetary policies portend to have even more dire consequences. We can expect rapidly rising prices and much, much higher interest rates over the next four or five years, and a concomitant deleterious impact on output and employment not unlike the late 1970s.

    About eight months ago, starting in early September 2008, the Bernanke Fed did an abrupt about-face and radically increased the monetary base … The percentage increase in the monetary base is the largest increase in the past 50 years by a factor of 10. It is so far outside the realm of our prior experiential base that historical comparisons are rendered difficult if not meaningless.

    Now the Fed can, and I believe should, do what it must to mitigate the inevitable consequences of its unwarranted increase in the monetary base. It should contract the monetary base back to where it otherwise would have been, plus a slight increase geared toward economic expansion. … Alas, I doubt very much that the Fed will do what is necessary to guard against future inflation and higher interest rates. If the Fed were to reduce the monetary base by $1 trillion, it would need to sell a net $1 trillion in bonds. This would put the Fed in direct competition with Treasury’s planned issuance of about $2 trillion worth of bonds over the coming 12 months. Failed auctions would become the norm and bond prices would tumble, reflecting a massive oversupply of government bonds.

    Get your Facebook vanity name tonight

    “Soon you will be able to have a username. Starting on Friday, June 12th, at 11:01pm in your time zone, you’ll be able to choose a username for your Facebook account to easily direct friends, family, and coworkers to your profile.” Facebook’s blog post Coming Soon: Facebook Usernames explains more.

    So the cyberspace land rush is on, at least at 11:01 pm tonight for the Central time zone in America. With some 200 million Facebook users, it probably won’t be easy for most people to be successful in grabbing their own name for their Facebook profile.

    The ‘Paygo’ Coverup
    The Obama pattern: Spend, repent, spend again, repent.

    A Wall Street journal editorial tells how President Obama is promoting “paygo” budgeting.

    Paygo is “very simple,” the President claimed. “Congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere.”

    That’s what Democrats also promised in 2006, with Nancy Pelosi vowing that “the first thing” House Democrats would do if they took Congress was reimpose paygo rules that “Republicans had let lapse.” By 2008, Speaker Pelosi had let those rules lapse no fewer than 12 times, to make way for $400 billion in deficit spending. Mr. Obama repeated the paygo pledge during his 2008 campaign, and instead we have witnessed the greatest peacetime spending binge in U.S. history. As a share of GDP, spending will hit an astonishing 28.5% in fiscal 2009, with the deficit hitting 13% and projected to stay at 4% to 5% for years to come.

    The truth is that paygo is the kind of budget gimmick that gives gimmickry a bad name. As Mr. Obama knows but won’t tell voters, paygo only applies to new or expanded entitlement programs, not to existing programs such as Medicare … Mr. Obama’s new proposal includes even more loopholes …

    The real game here is that the President is trying to give Democrats in Congress political cover for the health-care blowout and tax-increase votes that he knows are coming. The polls are showing that Mr. Obama’s spending plans are far less popular than the President himself, and Democrats in swing districts are getting nervous. The paygo ruse gives Blue Dog Democrats cover to say they voted for “fiscal discipline,” even as they vote to pass the greatest entitlement expansion in modern history. The Blue Dogs always play this double game.

    The main political question now is when Americans will start to figure out Mr. Obama’s pattern of spend, repent and repeat. The President is still sailing along on his charm and the fact that Americans are cheering for an economic recovery. But eventually they’ll see that he isn’t telling them the truth, and when they do, the very Blue Dogs he’s trying to protect will pay the price. And they’ll deserve what they get.

  • Articles of Interest

    Kansas liberal Republicans, student rights, greenwashing, historic preservation, Sotamayor.

    Can we please send Steve Rose to a political science class?

    The northeast Kansas blog Kaw & Border has a few words of criticism for Johnson County Sun publisher Steve Rose. Specifically:

    In this case, the “adjusted fact” was his view that tax cuts have put Kansas in a financial crisis, the few good observations were some long overdue spending cuts, his strawman was the Kansas Chamber and “conservatives”, and his nonsensical point that drastic spending cuts in Calfiornia will be so terrible that Kansans won’t want it and, as he puts it “citizens will rebel, even if it means increased taxes.” He seems to imply that a high tax, high spending state, even one in a budget crisis, is preferable to one where our government spends within our means, people have money in their pockets, and government size is in line with what people really need.

    If it weren’t for the fact this man influenced the opinion of thousands of Johnson Countians who rely on his weekly column for information and insight into what is going on with Kansas politics, we wouldn’t waste our time disecting his drivel.

    Rather, we’d take up a fund to send Mr. Rose to a political science class — because his ignorance of the facts and political realities of the present do a great disservice to his readers.

    Do Student Rights Interfere with Teaching and Learning in Public Schools?

    “We have unwittingly transformed K-12 schools from places where educators are expected to shape character, set boundaries, and foster respect to ones where they are hesitant and unsure of their authority. … The survey firm Public Agenda has reported that 47 percent of superintendents would operate differently if ‘free from the constant threat of litigation’ and that 85 percent of teachers indicate that “most students suffer because of a few persistent troublemakers. … Fully 77 percent of teachers report that ‘if it weren’t for discipline problems, I could be teaching a lot more effectively.’”

    The American Enterprise Institute articles reports more on this topic.

    Claims of ‘Greenwashing’ on the Rise

    “The so-called green movement has sprouted a fresh crop of lawsuits: greenwashing claims, in which companies are getting sued for making bogus eco-friendly statements about their products. Lawyers, environmentalists and marketing groups say that, during the past year, they’ve seen an uptick in greenwashing suits, which are questioning everything from household cleaners to automobiles for their greenworthiness. No surprise, they note, given the thousands of purported green products flooding the market.”

    Consumers and environmental groups challenge eco-friendly statements on products reports on the details of this trend.

    Historic Preservation Tax Credits Under Review in Jefferson City

    More recently, Washington, D.C.-based economist and historic preservation proponent Donovan Rypkema has estimated that during the last decade, state historic tax credits led to more than $2 billion in rehabilitation of old buildings, brought Missourians $1.3 billion in additional income, and helped create 40,000 jobs.

    But critics of tax credits, such as University of Missouri–Columbia economics professor Joseph Haslag, zero in on the total money returned to the state. He figures that the state receives just 3 to 4 cents for every dollar of goods and services produced in Missouri. So, for every dollar of a tax credit, the state would have to produce $25 to $22 of final goods and services for the state to get its money back.

    “I think the only justification for historic preservation tax credits is the existence of an externality — we like to look at old, well-maintained buildings,” said Haslag, who is also executive vice president of the Show-Me Institute. “There is no economic development justification for the preservation tax credit.”

    Read more at Policy Pulse, a publication of the Show-Me Institute.

    Sotomayor’s bias against private property

    From The Washington Times:

    If you thought Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s controversial stances on racial issues were problematic, you should get a gander at the Supreme Court nominee’s apparent hostility to property rights.

    Judge Sotomayor served as the senior judge on one 2006 case, Didden v. Village of Port Chester, which respected University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein described as “about as naked an abuse of government power as could be imagined.” Her judicial panel’s ruling might be the worst violation of property rights ever approved by a federal appeals court. It is part of a pattern of Judge Sotomayor’s pro-government rulings that run roughshod over the most basic of private property rights. …

    These cases are extremely worrisome. Judge Sotomayor’s apparent bias against private property does not recommend her nomination for the nation’s highest court.

    The Sotomayor Rules: Some were made to be broken.

    From Kimberly A. Strassel in the Wall Street Journal.

    Rather, it is Judge Sotomayor’s biography that uniquely qualifies her to sit on the nation’s highest bench — that gives her the “empathy” to rule wisely. Judge Sotomayor agrees: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said in 2001.

    If so, perhaps we can expect her to join in opinions with the wise and richly experienced Clarence Thomas. That would be the same Justice Thomas who lost his father, and was raised by his mother in a rural Georgia town, in a shack without running water, until he was sent to his grandfather. The same Justice Thomas who had to work every day after school, though he was not allowed to study at the Savannah Public Library because he was black. The same Justice Thomas who became the first in his family to go to college and receive a law degree from Yale.

    By the president’s measure, the nation couldn’t find a more empathetic referee than Justice Thomas. And yet here’s what Mr. Obama had to say last year when Pastor Rick Warren asked him about the Supreme Court: “I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don’t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation.”

  • The Threat of Big Brother in Green Clothing

    From the Competitive Enterprise Institute. This organization, particularly its site GlobalWarming.org, is a great place to look for information about the true nature of global warming and climate change. The following announces the release of a video message that spotlights the real threat of global warming fear mongering.

    Sixty Years After the Publication of George Orwell’s Classic, Do We Face a Real “1984”?

    Washington, D.C., June 8, 2009 — Sixty years ago this week, George Orwell’s most important work of political fiction, 1984, was published. Orwell’s novel warned of the centralization of political power and the lengths that a totalitarian regime, led by Big Brother, would go to maintain its control over society.

    On this anniversary, the Competitive Enterprise Institute reminds those who value freedom of a more current threat — the crusade for global governance led by environmental activist groups in the name of combating global warming. With calls for limits on energy use, new global taxes and the regulation of individual behavior, the recent development of environmental policy has tended ever more toward greater government control and less personal freedom.

    “Environmental campaigners have long benefitted from the assumption that they have good intentions,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “Unfortunately, the modern environmental movement has focused increasingly on policies that increase government control over what business can sell, what consumers can buy and what individuals can do with their lives. Truly harmful emissions have been successfully restricted for the most part. But with the war on carbon dioxide being escalated to extreme levels, as demonstrated in the new Waxman-Markey bill, we see expanding government control become a goal unto itself.”

  • More doubt about man-made global warming

    The evidence that global warming is a man-made phenomenon continues to fall under sharp questioning and doubt. Here the Boston Herald editorializes about information presented at the Third International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute and held last week in Washington:

    “New analyses of satellite data could mean that the scenario of a global warming disaster without large reductions in emissions of earth-warming gases could be about to shrink like a cheap suit in the rain.” (Cool it on warming, June 7, 2009)

    The editorial refers to the research of Dr. Roy Spencer, highlighted last week in my post Why climate models are wrong.

    From the Heartland Institute’s site, you can download and view a PowerPoint presentation by Spencer titled Why We Cannot Trust the IPCC Climate Models for Global Warming Predictions. (You’ll need to have PowerPoint installed on your computer to view the presentation. Or, you can download the free PowerPoint viewer from Microsoft by clicking here and following the instructions.)

    The scientific evidence that global warming is a problem primarily created by man’s activity continues to fall under doubt. We have to start asking why so many scientists cling to beliefs that, increasingly, appear to be founded on incorrect assumptions and models.

  • More myths of green jobs

    On its surface, a seemingly strong argument for adopting a national policy of increasing reliance on renewable energy is all the jobs and economic growth that will result. It’s claimed by some that the switch to so-called “green” sources of energy will pay for itself this way.

    But there are many doubters. Here, the Property and Environment Research Center — “the nation’s oldest and largest institute dedicated to improving environmental quality through markets and property rights” — publishes a report titled 7 myths about green jobs.

    Here are some excerpts:

    The costs of the green jobs programs proposed by various interest groups are staggering. For example, the UNEP (2008, 306) report concludes that “No one knows how much a full-fledged green transition will cost, but needed investment will likely be in the hundreds of billions, and possibly trillions, of dollars.”

    The scale of social change that would be imposed is also immense. Green jobs advocates propose dramatic shifts in energy production technologies, building practices, food production, and nearly every other aspect of life. These calls for radical economic changes are wrapped in green packaging. The promise is not only a revolution in our relationship with the environment, but the employment of millions in high paying, satisfying jobs. Unfortunately, the analysis provided in the green jobs literature is deeply flawed, resting on a series of myths about the economy, the environment, and technology.

    To attempt to transform modern society on the scale proposed by the green jobs literature is an effort of staggering complexity and scale. To do so based on the wishful thinking and bad economics embodied in the green jobs literature would be the height of irresponsibility. There is no doubt that significant opportunities abound to develop new energy sources, new industries, and new jobs. A market-based discovery process will do a far better job of developing those energy sources, industries, and jobs than can a series of mandates based on flawed data. The policy debate should be open so we can dispel the myths and focus on facts and analysis.

    Like they say, economics is the “dismal science.” There really is no such thing as a free lunch. Wishing otherwise can’t make it so.

  • Why climate models are wrong

    Could the science behind all the models that predict global warming be wrong? Dr. Roy Spencer believes it is.

    His article A Layman’s Explanation of Why Global Warming Predictions by Climate Models are Wrong takes a while to read, but it’s worth the time and effort. It all comes down to this:

    Thus, the most important debate is global warming research today is the same as it was 20 years ago: How will clouds (and to a lesser extent other elements in the climate system) respond to warming, thereby enhancing or reducing the warming? These indirect changes that further influence temperature are called feedbacks, and they determine whether manmade global warming will be catastrophic, or just lost in the noise of natural climate variability.

    It turns out that “all 23 climate models tracked by the IPCC now exhibit positive cloud and water vapor feedback.” Spencer believes that there is a “mix-up between cause and effect” that results in a positive bias in temperature change. According to his research, publication forthcoming, the feedback is actually negative. In his words, “The negative feedback was so strong that it more than canceled out the positive water vapor feedback we also found.”

    He concludes:

    While there are a number of other potentially serious problems with climate model predictions, the mix-up between cause and effect when studying cloud behavior, by itself, has the potential to mostly deflate all predictions of substantial global warming. It is only a matter of time before others in the climate research community realize this, too.

    Currently we’re being asked to accept huge increases in taxes and energy costs all in the name of saving the planet from global warming. It’s already started, as our local electric utility in Wichita has had to ask for several rate increases to support its efforts in renewable energy — costs it would not have incurred if not pressured by threats from politicians.

    Now it turns out that the science behind these decisions is likely wrong.

    The problem of global warming, to the extent it truly exists and is caused by man, is a problem with a very long time horizon for its solution. We need to slow down and make sure we truly understand the problem and its causes before we make drastic policy changes that will harm our economy and our prosperity.

  • Another Kansas electricity rate hike

    Kansas customers served by electric utility Westar are facing another rate increase.

    It’s a “follow-up” rate increase, coming after several other recent rate increases. The purpose is to pay for “the second phase of its Emporia Energy Center and two Westar-owned wind farms.”

    The rate increase is 1.5%. It amounts to around a dollar or so per month for the average residential customer.

    Westar has described the Emporia plant this way: As a ‘peaking plant,’ Emporia Energy Center is intended to operate during Westar Energy’s highest customer demand conditions, primarily on hot summer days.” Also from Westar: “Our Emporia Energy Center is excellent for following the variability of wind production.”

    This rate increase plus its predecessors are evidence of the fact that renewable energy is expensive. Not only must wind farms be built — that’s the primary expression of renewable energy in Kansas — backup generation must be provided, too.

    That’s because wind power suffers from variability, as Westar admits. In particular, the time when when we need it most (hot summer afternoons) is precisely the time when the wind is least available. So we must plan for how much electricity we will want to have available, and then build conventional generating capacity to meet that need. Wind and solar power can’t be counted in this calculation.

    So it’s just a dollar a month. What’s the problem?

    The dollar per month is just for a residential bill, and just for this rate increase, which is just one of several to pay for wind power. Commercial electricity bills are rising too, which increases costs to business. That means that firms will try to pass along costs to customers. Or firms may look to look to reduce their costs, which usually means layoffs.

    Last year Westar proposed a rate increase of $10 per month for the average household in Kansas. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, at that time campaigning for the Kansas Senate, was quoted as saying “When I’m (campaigning) door-to-door, people say they need help with the utilities.”