CFACT research and commentary published in major newspapers.
It is one thing for EPA to further restrict emissions of air toxins and contaminants -- It is far different to claim that science justifies a war on carbon dioxide emissions.
As President Obama has learned, the human calamity in Syria does not yield to easy solutions. Putting on a pair of climate blinders is the last thing we should do if we truly care about the suffering of the innocent in Syria.
While other countries are changing course and shedding the unsustainable policies, America stands apart from them by continuing to push, as the Washington Post editorial board encourages, building “the cost of pollution into the price of energy through a simple carbon tax or other market-based mechanism.” President Obama’s nominee to chair the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Ron Binz, believes in regulation and incentives to force more renewables and calls natural gas a “dead end.”
Net metering has been around since the early 1980s when solar panels were expensive and few people had them. But the dynamics changed drastically when states began passing renewable portfolio standards (RPS) that required predetermined percentages of electricity be generated from renewable sources—some even specified which sources are part the mix and how much of the resource was required. For example, in my home state of New Mexico, the Diversification Rule requires that 1.5% of the RPS must be met by “distributed generation” (read: rooftop solar). Arizona requires 30% of the RPS be derived from “distributed energy technologies” (once again, rooftop solar).
Energy is a big part of the entire Middle East discussion. Many people believe that if the U.S. were not dependent on OPEC oil, we’d have no involvement in the centuries-old tribal conflicts. Any vote for the President’s plan should be tied to decreasing dependence, increasing independence—or, more accurately, North American oil security. Two specific policy directives are needed. First, tie any authorization of military action in Syria to approval of the Keystone pipeline,.... Second, allow access to domestic oil and gas resources and expedite drilling permits on federal lands.
“Renewable energy” is a deliberate false labeling strategy, designed to curry favor with trendy urbanites who are ignorant about energy and economic reality. The real cost to U.S. economic growth, jobs and living standards from following the Green Brick Road to ecological paradise is equally beyond their ken.
Since 2009 American taxpayers have shelled out $14 billion in cash payments to solar, wind and other renewable energy project developers. This includes $9.2 billion to 748 small and large wind projects, and $2.7 billion to more than 44,000 solar projects, which will add just 48 terawatt- hours of electricity. Just as in Europe, without all that help, U.S. wind and solar wouldn’t have survived, and very likely won’t in the future. In December 2010 the Wall Street Journal reported American Wind Energy Association CEO Dennis Bode warning that without the extension of the Federal 1603 grant program investment credit, the wind industry would “flat line” or slope downward.
Obama doesn’t believe in the technology, creativity, and entrepreneurial spirit of Americans, Pendley told me. He believes in big government and its regulations. Pendley points out how he’s given the environmentalists a seat at the table where Reagan denied them the moral high ground. When the environmentalists—who for the previous two decades had been cloaked with an aura of inevitability, invincibility, and infallibility—said they “spoke for the planet and the needs of all living things not human,” Reagan responded: he “spoke for the dream of the American people and for the unborn generations to be free and prosperous.”
Spencer pointed out: “The magnitude of global-average atmospheric warming between 1997 and 2012 is only about 50% that predicted by the climate models.… The level of warming in the most recent 15-year period is not significantly different from zero, despite this being the period of greatest greenhouse gas concentration. This is in stark contrast to claims that warming is ‘accelerating.’”
Once again, the $2.6 billion Cape Wind construction is illustrative of how the overlaps can give the developer more in taxpayer-funded benefits than the project’s actual cost. Federal incentives, including a $780 million energy investment credit, a DOE loan guarantee, and accelerated depreciation could be more than $1.3 billion—or more than 50% of the project’s cost. But, this just represents the federal package. Add in state incentives and the combined total could be $4.3 billion—exceeding the projected cost by 167%. Cape Wind claims to create only 50 permanent jobs—which would equal a staggering $86 million per job.
The New York Times appears to have finally recognized that the feverish climate fervor behind these Green grab gambits is overheated. They reported on June 6 that, “The rise in the surface temperature of Earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace.”
Current EPA regulations are already closing coal-fueled power plants at an alarming rate—which New Mexico Public Regulations Commissioner Pat Lyons calls “the real energy crisis that no one is talking about.... Progressive thought leaders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhous state: “Energy poverty causes more harm to the poor than global warming” and cheap energy “makes the poor vastly less vulnerable to climate impacts.”
As Maurice Strong who spearheaded the 1991 Rio Earth Summit wrote in the U.N.’s Conference on Environmental Development (UNCED) report: “It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle-class … involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, ownership of motor vehicles, small electric appliances, home and work place air- conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable .… A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmental damaging consumption patterns.”
Even the most die-hard alarmists have finally recognized that average global temperatures have hardly budged since 1997, even as atmospheric levels of plant-fertilizing CO2 climbed steadily. For many areas, the past winter was among the coldest in decades; the USA and Britain just recorded one their coldest springs on record; and satellite data show that Earth has actually cooled slightly since 2002.
The problem with regard to consistency get larger as we come to realize that whatever they support is permitted; whatever they oppose violates the Precautionary Principle. They support windmills; therefore there is no violation. They oppose fracking; therefore it violates the principle.... In the view of activists and regulators, regulations exist to delay, block or destroy things they oppose. The fact that regulatory actions may well cause prolonged energy deprivation, poverty, unemployment, disease, malnutrition or premature death is irrelevant to them.