All Pain, No Gain ... by Paul Driessen

All Pain, No Gain

Restricting and taxing energy use to prevent speculative climate disasters will be disastrous
By Paul Driessen
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“Electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under cap-and-trade,” President Obama has admitted. “Industry will have to retrofit its operations. That will cost money, and they will pass that cost on to consumers.” Cap-and-trade, Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) eagerly observed, is “the most significant revenue-generating proposal of our time.”

Not one congressman even read the numbingly complex 1427-page Waxman-Markey global warming bill, before the House of Representatives voted on it. A new version of the Kerry-Boxer Senate bill provides no details about how carbon allowances would be allocated under a mandatory emissions reduction program.

The process recalls Churchill’s description of Russia: “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Here we are dealing with estimates wrapped in assumptions inside speculation – based on assertions that Earth faces a manmade climate disaster.

The only thing known with certainty is that cap-tax-and-trade will inflict intense pain for no environmental gain – on regions, states, communities, industries, companies and families. It is a complicated regulatory scheme that penalizes businesses and people who use electricity and other forms of energy derived from oil, gasoline, natural gas and coal.

Cap-tax-and-trade would place limits on how much carbon dioxide America would be allowed to generate, and the limits would decrease drastically over time. Companies and utilities would be issued permits, saying how much CO2 they can put into the air each year. If they cannot stay within that limit, they will have to switch to wind, solar, nuclear or geothermal energy (assuming those sources can be built, in the face of regulation and litigation); capture the CO2 and store it somewhere (via technologies that do not yet exist); or buy more permits from US or foreign companies that don’t need as much energy (through a new international financial, trading and carbon derivatives market).

Cap-and-trade restricts and taxes hydrocarbon energy use. Because 85% of America’s energy is hydrocarbons, prices will soar for everything we heat, cool, drive, make, grow, eat and do. The impacts will be especially painful in states that depend on coal for 50-98% of their electricity, refine petroleum for the nation’s vehicles, and manufacture products that improve, enhance and safeguard our lives.

The complex system will be administered by profit-seeking carbon management and trading firms, regulated and policed by thousands of government bureaucrats, and paid by every family, driver, business, school district, hospital, airline, traveler and farmer.

The ostensible goal is to stabilize planetary temperatures, climates and weather patterns that have never been stable, by slashing carbon dioxide emissions 83% below 2005 levels by 2050.

The last time America emitted that amount of CO2 was 1908! Once we account for the far lower population, manufacturing, transportation and electrification levels of a century ago, 2050 carbon dioxide emissions would have to equal what the United States emitted after the Civil War!

That would require monumental changes in lifestyles and living standards. It would mean politicians and unelected pressure groups, bureaucrats and judges will limit or dictate home building, heating, cooling and lighting decisions; transportation and vacation choices; how food can be grown and shipped; what kinds of products can be purchased and how they must be manufactured; and how much energy must come from subsidized, unreliable renewable sources.

Restrictions and taxes on fossil fuels will hit our manufacturing heartland especially hard, as it is heavily dependent on coal and natural gas. The American Council for Capital Formation calculated that Waxman-Markey would spike Indiana’s electricity prices nearly 60% by 2030 – increasing school and hospital energy costs 28-42% and causing numerous jobs to be exported to Asia, where there will be few restrictions on CO2 emissions. Numerous other states would be similarly hard hit, says ACCF.

Other experts have calculated that cap-and-trade would destroy millions of American jobs … raise energy costs for the average US family by $1,400 to $3,100 per year … and send overall food and living costs upward by $4,600 annually. Will you be able to afford that?

Poor families may get energy welfare. Wealthier families can absorb these costs. But cap-and-trade will severely affect middle class families. They would be forced to pay skyrocketing energy and food costs, by cutting their college, retirement and vacation budgets. Hospitals and school districts would have to raise fees and taxes, or cut services. Cities and states would have to cover rising welfare and unemployment costs, as tax revenues dwindle. Tourism-based businesses and economies would get hammered.

Switching to renewable energy does not merely increase costs and reduce reliability. It also affects the environment. Ethanol mandates would mean growing corn or switchgrass on farmland the size of Montana, and using vast amounts of water, fertilizer, diesel fuel, natural gas and insecticides.

Wind and solar power would mean covering millions of acres of scenic, habitat and farm land with huge turbines and solar panels. Hundreds of millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, fiberglass and “rare earth” minerals would be needed to build them and thousands of miles of new transmission lines to get the expensive renewable electricity to distant cities. Because the turbines and panels only work 30% of the time, back up natural gas generators would also be needed, meaning still more raw materials.

Even worse, all this pain would bring no benefits. Using global warming alarmists’ own computer models, climatologist Chip Knappenberger calculated that even an 83% reduction in US carbon dioxide emissions would result in global temperatures rising just 0.1 degrees F less by 2050 than not cutting US carbon dioxide emissions at all.

That’s because CO2 emissions from China, India and other countries would quickly dwarf America’s job-killing reductions. These nations are building a new coal-fired power plant every week and putting millions of new cars on growing networks of highways – to modernize, reduce poverty, improve human health, and ensure that families, offices, schools and hospitals have electricity. Germany plans to build 27 new coal-fired power plants by 2020, and Italy expects to double its reliance on coal by 2015.

Moreover, the 0.1 degree temperature reduction assumes rising CO2 causes global warming – a belief that thousands of scientists vigorously challenge, because there is little actual evidence to support the thesis.

Of course, some will gain from penalizing, taxing and hyper-regulating our economy. Al Gore and others involved in emission trading stand to make billions, from trillions of dollars in cap-and-trade transactions. Coastal states and companies that don’t rely on coal will benefit, as will companies that get excess or low-cost emission permits and can sell these allowances for handsome profits. Well-paid bureaucrats will have “green jobs” – as will scientists, eco-activists and renewable energy companies, who will share $6-10 billion annually in taxpayer cash, as long as they continue to conduct climate research, issue dire warnings about global warming cataclysms, and build wind and solar projects.

Besides massive pain for no gain, cap-tax-and-trade will create an intrusive Green Nanny State that destroys jobs, reduces personal freedoms, and hobbles economic opportunities and civil rights.

Our Earth is cooling. Our economy is in the tank. Congress and the White House need to stop hyperventilating about global warming, and let the free market get our economy back on track.
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Paul Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which is sponsoring the All Pain No Gain petition against global-warming hype. He also is a senior policy adviser to the Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power - Black Death. This article first appeared on World Net Daily: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=115253

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How Is Obama Doing So Far?

So… How’s Obama Doing??? HUH???
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet***********************************

Awful! Just awful! That’s how he is doing!

In a few short months, just over half a year in office, Obama has managed to wreck the economy, and lay an unspeakable tax burden on our children, our grandchildren, and quite possibly - our great-grandchildren, as well.

Obama, in league with Pelosi and Reid and their fellow socialists in the US Congress, have sure as heck brought change, all right! Boy, have they EVER!

As we look back over the past seven months, now, we can see the devastation left in the wake of the liberal/socialist/”progressive” battlestar as it smashed its way through an unsuspecting America looting the treasury as it went.

Why, just look at the money the Obama government has spent! Worse even than the squandered money is the power they have accrued unto themselves. As they repealed welfare reform and scared the American people half to death with their manic drive to chain America’s sick and elderly to a socialized form of healthcare we Americans don’t want and forcing worried American citizens to take to the streets of the capital city in a mass protest scheduled for September 12th.

Oh, but that is just a part of the sorry story of America’s worse president - ever! There is the Cap and Trade bill, which, if passed through the US Senate, will drive every American’s gas, fuel oil, and electricity costs through the roof. At the same time, industry will be dealt a lethal blow forcing many industries to close plants and lay off workers thus driving up unemployment and demoralizing some of the most productive workers on the planet.

And look what he has done for America overseas. He has managed to tick-off the UK and India and is doing a major “suck-up” job on our enemies such as Russia, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela to our south, just to name a few.

Over at the Federal Communications Commission, the stage is being set to institute a stealth Fairness Doctrine to clear the radio airwaves of conservative talk shows. Of course, they will deny it, but when you fan away enough of the smoke, you can see it quite clearly.

What we are seeing develop, dear reader, is a country far different from the America with a representative republican form of government the forefathers of this once great land envisioned when they founded it. What we are seeing is a socialist state aborning! Socialism is the incurable cancer of nations. It rots the soul, the spirit, and the heart out of all nations so hapless as to allow it to get a foothold within its government. You have heard it said that the very foundations of America are under attack. And it is true.
As we survey the wreckage of this beloved land we would suggest that those of you who believe in the power of prayer, should begin fervently to pray to God to intervene and save this last great hope of mankind on this planet. America has never, I repeat, never been in the peril she finds herself today, not even during the Great War for Southern Independence, nor the Second World War, nor the 40-year-long Cold War when soviet missiles were pointed down our throats from only ninety miles away.

It is becoming clearer as the days of the Obama Administration increase that the American electorate has made a monumental blunder - a historic mistake – and, as a result, we have an anomaly in the oval office. It is beginning to appear that the only recourse we have is to plead with the Republican senators to shut the US Senate down and allow no legislation to pass until after the next election in 2010. It can be done procedurally and as an American citizen concerned over what I see as a socialist takeover of this nation, I personally plead with the Republican minority leader in the Senate to do just that.

In the meantime I will resort to that age-old practice of calling on Providence, in His mercy, to intervene and save America from herself.

J. D. Longstreet.

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Forests of Concrete and Steel

Forests of Concrete and Steel
By Paul Driessen
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“Many words could describe wind energy and green jobs. “Sustainable” is not one of them.”
Paul Driessen
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Boone Pickens, Nacel Energy, Vestas Iberia and others have been issuing statements and running ads, extolling the virtues of wind as an affordable, sustainable energy resource. Renewable energy reality is slowly taking hold, however.

Spain did increase its installed wind power capacity to 10% of its total electricity, although actual energy output is 10-30% of this, or 1-3% of total electricity, because the wind is intermittent and unreliable. However, Spain spent $3.7 billion on the program in 2007 alone, King Juan Carlos University economics professor Gabriel Calzada determined.

It created 50,000 jobs, mostly installing wind turbines, at $73,000 in annual subsidies per job – and 10,000 of these jobs have already been terminated. The subsidies have been slashed, due to Spain’s growing economic problems, putting the remaining 40,000 jobs at risk.

Meanwhile, the cost of subsidized wind energy and carbon dioxide emission permits sent electricity prices soaring for other businesses – causing 2.2 jobs to be lost for every “green” job created, says Calzada. Spain’s unemployment rate is now 17% and rising. That’s hardly the “success” story so often cited by Congress and the Obama Administration.

Across the Channel, Britain’s biggest wind-energy projects are in trouble. Just as the UK government announced its goal of creating 400,000 eco-jobs by 2015, major green energy employer Vestas UK is ending production. All 7,000 turbines that Downing Street just committed to installing over the next decade will be manufactured – not in Britain, but in Germany, Denmark and China.

For businesses, existing global warming policies have added 21% to industrial electricity bills since 2001, and this will rise to 55% by 2020, the UK government admits. Its latest renewable energy strategy will add another 15% – meaning the total impact on British industry will likely be a prohibitive 70% cost increase over two decades. This is the result of the government’s plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions 34% below 1990 levels by 2020, and increase the share of renewables, especially wind, from 6% to 31% of Britain’s electricity.

These cost hikes could make British manufacturers uncompetitive, and send thousands more jobs overseas, the Energy Intensive Users Group reports. English steel mills could become “unable to compete globally, even at current domestic energy prices,” says British journalist Dominic Lawson; “but deliberately to make them uncompetitive is industrial vandalism – and even madness … a futile gesture ... and immoral.”

On this side of the pond, President Obama and anti-hydrocarbon members of Congress are promoting “green” energy and jobs, via new mandates, standards, tax breaks and subsidies. However, the United States would need 180,000 1.5-megawatt wind turbines by 2020, just to generate the 600 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity that compliance with the narrowly passed Waxman-Markey global warming bill would necessitate, retired energy and nuclear engineering professor James Rust calculates.
This would require millions of acres of scenic, habitat and agricultural lands, and 126 million tons of concrete, steel, fiberglass and “rare earth” minerals for the turbines, at 700 tons per turbine; prodigious quantities of concrete, steel, copper and land for new transmission lines; and still more land, fuel and raw materials for backup gas-fired generators. America’s new national forests will apparently be made of concrete and steel.

Those miners and drillers would likely be reclassified as “green” workers, based on the intended purpose of their output. However, the raw materials will probably not be produced in the States, because so many lands, prospects and deposits are off limits – and NIMBY litigation will further hamper resource extraction.

Air quality laws and skyrocketing energy costs (due to carbon taxes and expensive renewable energy mandates) will make wind turbine (and solar panel) manufacturing in the USA equally improbable. Thus, manufacturing could well be in China or India, and most “green” jobs could be for installers, as Spain and Britain discovered.
Posturing has already collided with reality in Texas, the nation’s wind energy capital. Austin’s GreenChoice program cannot find buyers for electricity generated entirely from wind and solar power. Its latest sales scheme has been a massive flop: after seven months, 99% of its recent electricity offering remains unsold.

Austin officials admit that “times have changed,” and the recession and falling energy prices may make it impossible for the city to meet its lofty goals. The company’s renewable electricity now costs almost three times more than standard electricity, and even eco-conscious consumers care more about the color of their money than the hue of their purported ideology.

Even worse for global warming alarmists and renewable energy advocates and rent seekers, global warming patterns have reversed during the past decade. Satellite data reveal that the planet is cooling, despite steadily rising carbon dioxide levels, and summertime low temperature records are being broken all over the United States.
“You'd better hope global warming is caused by manmade CO2 if you're investing in [renewable] sectors,” says Daniel Rice, the past decade’s best-performing US equity fund manager (BlackRock Energy and Resources Fund). But evidence for manmade catastrophic global warming is dissipating faster than carbon dioxide from an open soda bottle on a hot summer day.

The crucial fact remains: wind and solar are simply not economical without major government subsidies or monstrous carbon taxes. Moreover, cap-and-tax legislation currently being promoted in the House and Senate is “not enough to do anything” about supposed global warming disasters notes Rice.

“All it does is provide Obama a pass to Copenhagen,” where the UN will host a climate change conference in December, Rice says. And those subsidies and taxes would drive energy prices still higher, killing jobs and skyrocketing the cost of everything we eat, drive, heat, cool, grow, make and do.

Congress and the Administration are dragging their feet on nuclear power, closing off access to more resource-rich lands, and imposing layers of new regulations on oil, gas and coal energy – denying Americans these vast stores of energy and hundreds of billions in revenue that developing them would generate. Meanwhile, slick wind turbine ad campaigns promote expensive, heavily subsidized, unreliable technologies that only climate activists and company lobbyists would describe as sustainable, affordable, eco-friendly or socially responsible.

The ads and lobbyists seek more mandates, tax breaks and subsidies. Wind promoters want to quiet opponents long enough to get energy and climate legislation enacted – before Americans realize how it would drive the price of energy still higher, kill jobs, curtail living standards and liberties, and raise the cost of everything we eat, drive, heat, cool, grow, make and do.

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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power • Black Death.
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