The Waxman-Markey climate bill, soon to be considered by Congress, will harm all Americans. Here’s a look at what it would cost Kansans. Two examples:
Higher cost for energy. “An average family could pay an additional $1,500 a year for energy.”
Fewer jobs: “For Kansas this could mean a loss of 22 thousand jobs just a few years from now. If those jobs were lost today it would increase Kansas’ unemployment rate from 6.1 percent to 7.6 percent.”
Is there any doubt that the crusade against global warming is motivated as much by politics as by anything else?
The Competitive Enterprise Institute has uncovered an effort within the Environmental Protection Agency to suppress “scientific analysis of climate change because of political pressure to support the Administration’s policy agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.”
Further: “The study the emails refer to, which ran counter to the administration’s views on carbon dioxide and climate change, was kept from circulating within the agency, was never disclosed to the public, and was not added to the body of materials relevant to EPA’s current ‘endangerment’ proceeding.”
A CEI official said this: “This suppression of valid science for political reasons is beyond belief. EPA’s conduct is even more outlandish because it flies in the face of the President’s widely-touted claim that ‘the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.’”
A Washington Post headline from March stated “Obama Aims to Shield Science From Politics.” I guess they didn’t read that at the EPA.
ABC News quoted Obama earlier this year as saying this: “Because the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”
You can read CEI’s testimony, complete with the emails that prove its assertion, by clicking on Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act, Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2009-0171.
The radical environmentalist group Earthjustice is again meddling in Kansas energy policy. They’ve sent a “warning letter” to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. You can read it at Proposed Kansas Coal Plant Draws Warning Letter.
Earthjustice opposes the building of a coal-fired power plant in Kansas. Our former governor Kathleen Sebelius, because she opposed the plant, was a darling of Earthjustice. See Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius at Earthjustice.
Earthjustice is simply misinformed in many ways. For example, the press release states: “The truth is building a new, dirty coal plant really only serves the interest of a few while overlooking the virtually free wind energy resources of Western Kansas.”
Consider that the “virtually free” wind energy is supported by a federal subsidy with each spin of the turbine blades.
Consider that Westar’s investment in wind power plus the natural gas plants necessary to back up the unreliable wind has caused the utility to ask for several rate increases in the past few years.
What was that about “virtually free” again? The inexpensive energy a coal plant would produce is a benefit to all Kansans, especially low-income Kansans, as they can least afford the expensive energy produced by alternative sources.
Then, the press release states “The Holcomb coal plant will send most of its power out of state while leaving pollution all over Kansas.”
The writer doesn’t state specifically what type of pollution she means. But the plant was not refused a permit because of what we traditionally consider pollution: sulfur dioxide, mercury, etc. That’s because coal plants now are quite clean with regard to these pollutants.
So that leaves carbon dioxide as the “pollutant” in question. Which, of course, isn’t a pollutant at all. And if it’s a problem, it’s a problem on a global scale, not just “all over Kansas.”
Hopefully our governor will disregard the call of the leftists at Earthjustice and let Kansas get on with its business.
One of the powerful stories radical environmentalists — or any environmentalists for that matter — tell is how the river in Cleveland caught on fire. Water burning: that’s a real environmental disaster. Government must step in and do something!
Today the Competitive Enterprise Institute tells the true story. It turns out that it was not capitalism gone wild that caused the fire, but too much government and lack of property rights.
Washington, D.C., June 22, 2009 — Today is the 40th Anniversary of the famous Cuyahoga river fire in Cleveland, Ohio. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is celebrating the anniversary, because it “led to positive results, including creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and passage of major environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act in 1972 [which meant] we paid attention to how much pollution manufacturers were putting into waterways like the Cuyahoga. The legislation set limits on pollution, and gave EPA the power to fine industry for violating those limits.”
Yet this received wisdom mischaracterizes what happened in 1969 and the reaction to it. Thanks to the work of free-market environmental scholars like Prof. Jonathan Adler of Case Western University (a former CEI scholar), we know the truth about the Cuyahoga River, which includes facts like:
Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Iain Murray wrote about the Cuyahoga River Fire in his 2008 book, The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About-Because They Helped Cause Them. Murray said “the Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969 is an environmentalist myth. It is a myth because it was a minor incident, and it is a myth because it actually demonstrated government’s role in environmental degradation.”
Murray added that “real riparian property rights would have stopped the fires from ever happening. You don’t spit on your own doorstep. Instead, Cleveland declared common ownership and invited spitting.”
Global warming alarmist James Hansen, inflation, Facebook, paygo deception.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Kansas liberal Republicans, student rights, greenwashing, historic preservation, Sotamayor.
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.
“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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
A video claiming that American-style capitalism is ruining the earth is making its way into our nation’s schools as “a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation,” according to a story on the front page of the New York Times in May.
It’s produced by one Annie Leonard, described in the Times as “a former Greenpeace employee and an independent lecturer.”
It’s a depressing video to watch. For example, extraction is equal to “natural resource exploitation” which is the same as “trashing the planet.” Leonard says “We are running out of resources. We are using too much stuff. … We are trashing the place so fast, we are undermining the ability of people to live here. … We’re using more than our share.”
But then I realized that many of the claims are exaggerated or false. Here’s an example of one of the many dubious claims Leonard makes: “Where I live, in the United States, we have less than 4% of our original forests left.” While this may be true, it’s misleading. She wants you to believe that after logging companies cut trees, they leave the land bare. The reality is the companies replant and manage the forests. So yes, they’re not the original forests. They might even be better.
She leaves out the fact that these forests provided raw materials for heating our homes, for building those houses, and for printing books and newspapers.
During production, “we use energy to mix toxic chemicals in with the natural resources to make toxic contaminated products.” Somehow this leads to whole wasting of communities. Also, the amount of pollution admitted to by industry is probably less than actual emissions, because well, you know how industry is.
Then there’s distribution. It’s a problem because big box stores don’t pay their employees well and they skimp on health insurance as much as they can.
She wonders how a radio can be sold for just $4.99. The answer, of course, is exploitation. She didn’t pay for the radio. Others did, by being exploited. (An example is workers paying for their own health insurance.)
She makes more dubious claims, such as 99% of the “stuff” that is “run through the system” is “trashed” within six months.
It’s all a plan, Leonard says, to make consumption of consumer goods the cornerstone of our lives. It’s accomplished through planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence. That’s where we’re persuaded to throw out stuff that is still useful, but not fashionable.
The progress in computers is criticized because what changes in a new computer is just a small chip in the corner. I think she’s referring to the processor, which leaves out all the advances in other parts of a computer, such as memory, storage, and communications. She learned this at “a workshop called ‘The Literal and Figurative Story of the Computer’ at the Environmental Grantmakers Association’s annual retreat in Mohonk New York in September 2005.”
Advertising, she says, is designed to make us unhappy with what we have, so that we go shopping. That leads to a spending treadmill.
“Yes, yes, yes, we should all recycle,” but it’s not enough, according to Leonard. Even if we could recycle 100% of our household waste, it wouldn’t be enough because of all the waste generated upstream in the production process. “70 garbage cans of waste were made upstream just to make the junk in that one garbage can you put out on the curb.” Really?
Here’s what the Heritage Foundation’s blog had to say about this video: “The Story of Stuff highlights the very extreme left’s Greenpeace view of America. Essentially it tells the story of how America is not a nation to be proud of, and in fact, your child should be ashamed for living in it.”
This video is really a masterful piece of propaganda, and I mean that in the worse sense of the word — an impartial presentation of information meant to influence. The stereotyped images used in the drawings that make up the film are sure to impress young children.
The video’s anticapitalist message fails to recognize all the good that capitalism has done to raise the standard of living in the countries where it has been allowed to flourish. The grim picture that Leonard paints is largely a result of exaggeration and falsehoods. To the extent that harm has come to the environment in America, things are getting better. We in America, because of the tremendous wealth that capitalism has provided, have the luxury of considering the impact of our lives on the environment. In countries that don’t have freedom and capitalism, concern for mundane things like daily bread and heat take precedence over the environment.
If you decide to watch this video, I recommend as an antidote reading Some Fundamental Insights Into the Benevolent Nature of Capitalism by George Reisman, in which he states: “Capitalism is a system of progressively rising real wages, the shortening of hours, and the improvement of working conditions.”
Another good essay to read is Everything You Love You Owe to Capitalism by Lew Rockwell.
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.