Pope Francis, some say, has joined with enemies of the Catholic Church to endorse the global warming agenda. CFACT policy analyst Marita Noon reports on how other Christians are convinced this is a bad move.
CFACT advisor Marita Noon says that 2015 promises to be a dark year for those who have benefitted from massive subsidies for wind, solar, and biofuels -- the public is tiring of the cost and the failed promises -- and of higher food costs. There will surely be a massive fight between Washington and the states over this -- but wait and see.
With Louisiana looking to trim a budget deficit (partly caused by Obama energy policies), the state legislature is considering a dramatic cutback in subsidies for rooftop solar installations -- subsidies that in one documented case amounted to $33,000 of the cost of a $40,000 system. The customer was quite happy, noting that after a 5-year amortization for his $7,000 investment, his energy is now free. But who is amortizing the $33,000 that taxpayers paid for? If it took 5 years to amortize $7,000, then it must take nearly 30 years to amortize the true cost of the solar installation -- longer than the lifespan of the solar units.
Five years after BP's Deepwater Horizon fire and explosion, the Gulf of Mexico is recovering nicely, and so are the people of Louisiana whose livelihoods were impaired as much by President Obama'sm unnecessary drilling moratorium as by the oil that washed ashore following the incident. The industry, too, has tightened its rules governing offshore drilling, making it even safer than before.
The American people are increasingly not buying into the global warming (er, climate change) scary scenarios, but the Green Left, led by Al Gore, is responding by turning up the heat -- and increasingly seeking to silence opposition they cannot control. That this is a losing technique escapes notice because they believe that nobody cares enough about stopping them to resist and overcome the firings, threats of prison time, and even worse from the shrill sirens of statism.
CFACT contributor Marita Noon points out that wind and solar power are free, but converting them to usable energy typically requires fossil fuel backup systems because neither wind nor solar is 24/7n reliable. Pointing out these facts -- and the higher energy costs for the poorest among us -- typically is met with ugly rhetoric, character assassination and such like, because wind and solar companies and the die-hard supporters of renewable energy cannot refute the facts.
Iran stands to gain much from its efforts to manpulate the prie
“Businesses that sell to foreign markets put more people to work in high-quality jobs, offering more Americans the chance to earn a decent wage,” claimed the Obama Administration’s Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker in a March 18 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) opinion piece. She makes a strong case for U.S. exports: “jobs in export-intensive industries pay up to 18% more than jobs not related to exports.” Her premise is: “The U.S. economy ended 2014 on the uptick, and exports added to the momentum.” Noticeably absent is any mention of the potential for “high-quality jobs” and economic “uptick” that would come from [...]
If the U.S. continues on its current path, electricity rates are going to skyrocket (as President Obama promised) and there will be massive power outages because of the shutdown of coal- and natural gas-fired power plants. Energy poverty is America's future -- and we know this based on the German experience. There, because of the nation's high renewables requirements, electricity prices have already more than doubled -- and Germans are building new coal-fired power plants to address the intermittency of solar energy (which is often nonexistent in winter).
Oil prices at the pump fell hard, then began creeping back up -- even though crude oil prices have not rebounded. One reason is an explosion at an ExxonMobil refinery in California that has bumped that state's price by 20 cents a gallon, but if the steelworkers union strike expands the impacts could grow . Meanwhile, the Saudis, who concocted the scheme that saw the dramatic drop in prices, are happy to see the rise in the price at the pump.
The enemies of fracking, the Keystone pipeline, and other fossil fuel related activities start with wild-eyed "Deep Green Resistance" types who oppose the entirety of Western civilization (even agriculture), include those with vested interests in alternative energy sources, and even include foreign governments (like Putin's Russia), who recognize that cheaper oil and gas prices will hurt their economies and weaken their grip on nearby dependent countries. Naming enemies empowers those who want to defeat them.
President Obama will soon have to decide whether to please big labor or Big Green -- and his risk is that if he chooses Big Green over big labor and then the labor unions push Democrats who depend on their votes to vote to override his veto of the Keystone Pipeline authorization, he loses big time. The clock is ticking -- and the stakes are high. Meanwhile, President-in-waiting Hillary Clinton is silent ... perhaps fearing the same Hobson's choice. The huge drop in the oil price -- which some now claim is a further reason to ignore Keystone -- is on the verge of a quick rebound thanks to Obama's feckless foreign "policy." Stay tuned!
OPEC's Secretary General Abdulla al-Badri last month predicted oil prices will rebound to as much as $200 per barrel, a figure CFACT advisor Marita Noon suggests could only come about if terrorism and internal strife force shutdowns of major oil-producing states such as al-Badri's native Libya and other Middle Eastern nations vulnerable to radical assaults. Otherwise, Noon notes, as soon as the price jumps about $70 per barrel, the nimble U.S. wildcatters will step up their production again and hold the oil price well below al-Badri's predicted $200 per barrel.
CFACT policy analyst Marita Noon reports that President Obama's made dash to prevent U.S. oil and gas activities in the very profitable Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) may stem more from Russian money funneled to U.S.-based environmental nonprofits -- and the desire of the President to please such groups -- than from any intelligent rationale for declaring these rich lands off limits to the minimal development needed for resource extraction. Russia, meanwhile, is conducting military-scale operations in a possible effort to take physical control of the entire Arctic region.
With several options available to support the nation’s highways, Congress needs to create, innovate, and unify in fixing problems—like the HTF—and show America that they can do it without raising taxes.