Unless President Obama stops unilaterally forcing UN climate policy on America, and directs his EPA to back down on harsh regulations and grant power plants a reprieve, blackouts are all but guaranteed.
In the midst of beheadings, Russia's troop buildup inside Ukraine, and Ebola cases skyrocketing, Hillary Clinton made the claim that climate change “is the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face as a nation and a world.” How bizarre! Even in Germany, where subsidies have built a gigantic solar industry, solar produced only 0.1% of the nation's energy in the month of January. America, notes Marita Noon, has abundant coal, oil and natural gas resources that we ought not squander.
CFAC advisor Larry Bell says that we ought to beware of marketing terms such as “clean,” “renewable,” and “sustainable.” While those words may seem very nice, they have routinely been co-opted and redefined through misleading “Green” messaging campaigns. For example, corn ethanol yields less energy than is required to grow and produce it. Wind turbines are bird and bat executioners. Solar plants take up so much land that reptiles and other animals suffer. Plus, solar and wind are inherently intermittent,
The EPA's proposed Clean Power Plan, which by setting strict limits on the life-giving gas carbon dioxide would effectively shut down coal-fired power generation in the U.S., is an unconstitutional overreach, according to CFACT advisor Marita Noon. Noon quotes Justice Scalia's decision that blocked EPA's "tailoring rule": "The power of executing laws…does not include a power to revise clear statutory terms that turn out not to work in practice.” NOTE: You can still send in written comments to the EPA regarding this job-killing, economy-killing regulation.
The Margarita Declaration is an extremely sour note in the history of the United Nations -- declaring that the only way to protect the climate is to destroy the capitalist system. The world of course would have to be led by a massive central governing body -- the UN itself, of course!
While many are celebrating (and others condemning) Australia's vote to repeal its carbon tax, Marita Noon points out that the country's Renewable Energy Target must also be repealed in order to reverse the 70% increase in Australian energy bills that has come from this infatuation with "Green" policies.
Larry Bell finds that there is "not even a smidgen of evidence" to support the theory of climate change caused by carbon dioxide as a major threat to humanity. Indeed, an EPA internal report acknowledges that "there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based upon a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”
Marita Noon provides a laundry list of reasons to ignore calls from fire-breathing wind power shills who want to reinstate the wind power production tax credit -- and thus rip off the U.S. Treasury to build noneconomic wind farms that also cause health and safety problems and still rely on backup generation due to the intermittent nature of wind speed.
Rep. Ed Whitfield was set to grill Janet McCabe -- the EPA Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation -- on the factual accuracy of statements in the agency's proposed rule governing carbon dioxide regulations for power plants. If only he also had called to testify a representative from the American Lung Association - which has received 591 EPA grants totaling over $43 million plus over 2,800 foundation grants totaling $76 million to ensure that they will never question the EPA's faulty science.
With the President and the unaccountable regulatory agencies joined by the Supreme Court in declaring Congress to be irrelevant in governing America, it is time for Congress to raise itself up from the dead and reestablish itself as the sole creator of new laws. Given that too many in Congress have gone along with this massive Presidential (and regulatory) power grab, this may require sweeping out a lot of dead wood from both chambers.
James Rust, taking a note from Peter Glover's article about Russian energy imperialism, suggests the U.S. should step up its own energy production and liberalize our oil and gas export laws to provide Europe with the means to thwart Russia's bold geopolitical strategy. Of course, the Europeans might do well to reverse their own anti-energy-production policies. The key is to remember that fossil fuels production is a manufacturing process that drives economic growth.
Marita Noon notes that the Obama Administration, responding to Big Green billionaires, has stepped up his emphasis on climate policy just as Secretary of State John Kerry is calling climate change a "weapon of mass destruction." While Obama is spending a billion taxpayer dollars, Green billionaire Tom Steyer is throwing another $100 million into the 2014 elections to support candidates who will vote the alarmist line. Yet Noon sees this new power play by Democrats as an opportunity for the opposition to cash in on resentment of higher energy prices and higher prices for consumer goods due to higher energy prices.
President Obama pledged that under his administration electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket -- presumably so that wind and solar could become more acceptable financially as alternatives. The problem, notes Professor Larry Bell, is that renewable energy does not work that well with the existing power grid system in the U.S. To accommodate increasing wind and solar, Germany will have to spend up to $96 billion in transmission and distribution system upgrades in the next decade. Imagine what the cost would be for the U.S., with is massively larger population and acreage.
With domestic oil and natural gas production soaring thanks to fracking, the nation is taking a harder look at subsidies and mandates for so-called "Green" energy. EPA for the first time proposed to reduce the amount of ethanol that has to be added to gasoline. An Arizona state agency just added a $5.00 monthly fee for solar customers to help pay for use and maintenance of the state's power grid. And 52 House members have signed a letter calling for the end of the wind production tax credit just as the sixth 20,000-pound turbine blade broke off in Illinois and sent shrapnel 1,500 feet away from the turbine hub -- two to three times the legal setbacks for homes and highways.
Is taxpayer money spent on Green energy hurting both the economy and environment? Well that’s the assertion of economists from the group PERC, who in a recent study found that for every $100 billion a government spends on so-called “clean energy,” that nation’s GDP is likely to decrease by nearly a half a percent.