Amy Ridenour is the president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. She and her husband David, the vice president of the National Center, are the parents of three third graders. David's comments, like those of other National Center staff members, directors, associates and fellows, often appear in this blog.
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Friday, July 03, 2009
Climate Policy: No Gain, No Pain
Thanks to a head's up from Climate Depot, I read with interest the following on the weakness of the computer models used to predict climate from the Britsh Number Watch website:
Most computer models are nonsense. This does not include those used by engineers in designing airplanes, bridges etc., which are based on detailed experiments on the systems involved and tested in a variety of real conditions before being used.
The reason they are nonsense is that they tend to be based on guesses of the value of coefficients assumed, particularly and disastrously feedback coefficients. There are few, however, that are quite as bad as climate models, where the physics of the interactions between variables and parameters is virtually unknown to mankind.
...Imagine you settled down in your seat in a jumbo jet and noticed a plaque on the back of the seat in front which reads 'This machine was designed with the aid of a super-computer. We did not know the values of all the parameters, so had to guess most of them.' You would get off in a hurry. Yet the world’s political and media establishment are asking you to gamble the economic future of yourself and your descendants on just such a proposition.
Yes, that really is what the global warming debate comes down to. Shall we believe computer models that are at best based on educated guesses (and which disagree with one another), and enact policies that significantly harm the economy based upon them, even knowing that the policies themselves wouldn't affect the climate noticeably?
I say no; it's wrong to hurt people based on a theory you have no idea is correct, especially if you know the solution won't fix the problem even if your theory IS correct.
You've heard of "no pain, no gain" with regard to weight training? The cap-and-trade climate debate is the reverse: "no gain, no pain." That is, as there isn't going to be any noticeable gain from Waxman-Markey and its ilk, why inflict the pain?
Naughty Conservatives Shouldn't Mind Votes for Waxman-Markey (Or So We're Told)
In an error-riddled column posted Wednesday on TownHall.com, the supposedly conservative Michael Gerson has a novel take on the Republican Congressmen who voted for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill: He blames conservatives for minding.
One of his reasons: "It is typical that we praise independent judgment and political nerve in our elected officials -- until they actually show those qualities."
If any conservatives and/or others dedicated to limiting government called on our elected representatives to show "independent judgement and political nerve" in service of anything other than principle, they were wrong to do so.
Gerson doesn't quote anybody, though, and I can see why: There are a lot more quotes available of conservatives calling upon their elected representatives to govern conservatively.
Gerson's try to tar the conservative movement with a hypocrisy tag doesn't work.
Gerson is honest, though, in saying he likes the bill (I find it difficult to believe this man is a conservative).
He likes it because, he says, the global warming theory is the dominant view of the "scientific community" (a brush broad enough to include gynecologists), because "some scientists" warn of "possible 'tipping points'," and because, supposedly, mankind's carbon dioxide emissions have reduced crop yields and driven some species to extinction. How he could possibly know this is not mentioned, possibly because what he claims is beyond the current ability of modern science to prove or disprove.
Gerson says "global warming since the 19th century is undeniable," which is another way of saying the planet warmed as the Little Ice Age ended, though Gerson does not mention that there even was a Little Ice Age (and before it, warmer temperatures, though no SUVs).
Gerson doesn't mention, either, that if concern for crop yields is paramount, a little more CO2 in the atmosphere might be just the thing.
And then there's his comment that warming since the end of the Little Ice Age is "closely correlated with increases in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide," which by itself would prove nothing if it were true, but it isn't.
There's more, such as Gerson's ludicrious comment that in failing to appreciate cap-and-trade, "conservatives seem strangely intent on ignoring the power of markets to encourage... innovation," as if Waxman-Markey had anything whatsoever to do with free markets (oops, Gerson left the word "free" out, so there goes the innovation).
I could go on, but there's really no need. I linked to the version of this column on TownHall with comments. The column is impossible to appreciate, but some of the comments are superlative.
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American Spectator Covers African-American Energy Poll
Thanks to W. James Antle for his story "Lights Out," in the American Spectator, which mentioned The National Center's poll of the African-American community on energy issues.
The article appeared on Rush Limbaugh's "Stack of Stuff" Thursday.
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Many thanks to Mark, whose editorial page is a must-read. If you aren't reading daily now, try it for a week -- heck, try it for a day -- and you will be hooked.
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House Leadership Takes Suicidal Stand Against Its African-American Base - Townhall.com
David Ridenour has a new column published on TownHall.com examining the Democratic Congressional leadership's seemingly suicidal lack of concern for the wishes of its most loyal core constituency, African-Americans.
It begins:
Overly influenced by certain big-name green groups, misled by their own ideology and perhaps also a bit dazzled by the unlikely stardom of failed-politician-turned-climate-hero Al Gore, Democrats on Capitol Hill seem bent on self-destruction when it comes to climate change...
Poll Shows: Black Americans Prefer Delaying Action on Climate Change; Want Economy Fixed First
76% of African-Americans want Congress to make economic recovery, not climate change, its top priority, says a poll just released by the National Center for Public Policy Research.
The U.S. House of Representatives is planning a vote today on the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade climate bill.
The legislation, if adopted, is expected to reduce aggregate GDP by $7.4 trillion in an effort to reduce global warming, based on a Heritage Foundation analysis.
The survey of 800 African-Americans, 80% of which were self-identified Democrats and 4% self-identified Republicans, found significant concern that government action on climate change would have a harmful and disproportionately negative impact on the African-American community.
Among the key findings:
* 38% believe job losses from climate change legislation would be felt most strongly in the black community. 7% believe job losses would fall most on Hispanics and 2% on whites;
* 56% believe Washington policymakers have failed to adequately consider economic and quality of life concerns of the black community when addressing climate issues;
* 52% of respondents don't want to pay more for gasoline or electricity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 73% are unwilling to pay more than 50 cents more for a gallon of gas; 76% are unwilling to pay more than $50 more per year for electricity;
* Black Americans are virtually deadlocked on plans to reduce emissions if it would increase prices and unemployment. 44% opposed reductions under these circumstances, 45% supported them.
* 76% want Congress to make economic recovery the top priority.
The survey was conducted by Wilson Research Strategies and has a margin of error of +/- 3.4%. The questions we asked, plus summary materials, can be viewed at: http://www.nationalcenter.org/BlackOpinion.html.
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Tom Borelli to Tackle Cap and Trade on Fox Thursday
Tom Borelli of the National Center's Free Enterprise Project is scheduled to appear on the Fox News Channel's online "Strategy Room" program on Thursday, June 25 between 9:00 AM and 10:00 AM eastern.
Tom is planning to talk about the Waxman-Markey "cap-and-trade" legislation that could come up for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives as early as this Friday. This bill would regulate the emissions of American businesses, inevitably raising consumer prices for what is predicted as a negligible effect on climate change.
A recent poll commissioned by the National Center's Public Opinion and Policy Center found that black Americans in particular are opposed to such new regulation while the economy is under strain. Of 800 black Americans polled, 76% want economic recovery to be the top priority of lawmakers and 52% do not favor paying even a single penny in higher gas and electricity prices to promote liberal climate change policy.
A press release summarizing the results of the POP Center poll can be found here.
To access the live Internet broadcast on Thursday, click here and then click the "STREAM THIS NOW" headline in the center or the page under the photo.
This post was written by David Almasi, executive director of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Write the author at info@nationalcenter.org. As we occasionally reprint letters on the blog, please note if you prefer that your correspondence be kept private, or only published anonymously.
In a story he tells today in U.S. News and World Report, Peter Roff and his family go out for custard, finding themselves at the same frozen custard store as President Obama and his eleven SUVs and vans (not counting the ambulance).
Peter doesn't begrudge the President his big-vehicle motorcade. He figures the President and the Secret Service need big vehicles.
What he does is wonder is why our mileage-standard-tightening President won't return the favor, because, as Peter put it, "the American family needs large vehicles, too."
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Roll Call reports that negotiations over climate legislation among Democrats on Capitol Hill blew up last night.
This mimics the disorder among members of the Congressional majority on health care. CNN reported today that that the Democrats' plans to advance government's role in health care may be "on the rocks"; that's our sense of things as well.
Believers in a free market should not become overconfident, however; the left still holds most of the cards, and it has shown in the past that it is willing to pass nearly anything, as long as it is left-wing and/or shovels tax money to groups and individuals allied with the left. The Congressional majority will gladly pass bad, even horrendous, bills on climate and health care (indeed, from what I can see, they are only considering horrendous bills), so the odds against our team remain high.
That said, I'm amazed at the incompetence and lack of discipline going on in leftist ranks on the Hill. Congressional liberals were mostly out of power from 1995-2007 (House liberals were the entire time). They wanted to curb our use of energy and increase government's role in health care decisionmaking during that entire period, so why did they not get together and make plans? Work out drafts and get those drafts scored?
The Republican majority in Congress had its problems, but it sure hit the ground running in 1995.
This makes no sense to me.
P.S. One possibility just occurred to me. Possibly the environmental groups, with their hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, did not expend enough effort to get folks together on their version of climate heaven because they figure, if a climate bill passes, they wouldn't be able to do fundraising on global warming anymore. That's just a guess on my part, though. Could be they've just been incompetent.
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The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved the Clean Water Restoration Act by a party-line vote this morning.
This was expected.
Prospects for CWRA on the Senate floor are less predictable. It could go either way, although the left appears to have an advantage given 1) its control of Congress, and 2) the limited public attention (even from conservative media) the onerous provisions of this massive bill are receiving.
On a more positive note, excluding the bigger-the-government-the-better crowd, the more Americans look at this bill, the less they like it. And why would they like it? Who wants to get a federal permit, or the very least have to investigate whether they need a federal permit, just to landscape their own back yards?
It is not as though the original Clean Water Act, which is a powerful law by anyone's definition, has been repealed or expired. We don't need CWRA to have clean water.
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Senator James Inhofe's opening statement on CWRA from the hearing is a useful addition to the debate.
I hadn't previously realized the National Association of Realtors and had come out against the bill (perhaps I should stop reviewing the environmental groups' propaganda sheets, which often claim only right-wing dirty water lovers oppose CWRA).
An excerpt from Senator Inhofe's statement:
I see this bill as a significant part of a hostile agenda aimed squarely at rural America. Whether it’s new energy taxes from cap-and-trade legislation or more unfunded environmental mandates, it’s clear that this bill is yet one more raw deal for rural America.
Allowing EPA and the Corps to exercise unlimited regulatory authority over all inter- and intrastate water, or virtually anything that is wet, goes too far and is certainly beyond anything intended by the Clean Water Act. But, that is what S. 787 does. It vastly expands Federal control of private property, despite assurances contained in S. 787. In fact, the very premise of the bill is to override a State’s fundamental right to oversee waters within its borders and to usurp the power of land owners to manage their property as they see fit. The Constitution never envisioned federal jurisdiction being boundless; it carves out room for state and local governments and private property owners to manage their resources.
Two of my Republican colleagues have filed amendments to S. 787, which highlight some very legitimate concerns with the bill. I have chosen not to try and amend the bill because, frankly, I don’t think this bill is fixable. Allow me to just briefly list some of the groups that have expressed concerns with this bill that are not covered by any the amendments filed today: The Associated Builders and Contractors, the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association, the American Forest and Paper Association, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Association of Home Builders, the National Association of REALTORS, the American Highway Users Alliance, the American Association of Airport Executives, and the list goes on for about 14 pages...
1) Which two states hate the Clean Water Restoration Act so much, their legislatures actually passed resolutions urging the Congress not to enact it?
A. Texas and Oklahoma B. Georgia and Alabama C. Washington and Oregon D. Idaho and Montana C. Rhode Island and Massachusetts
2) Which of the following groups oppose the Clean Water Restoration Act?
A. National Association of Counties B. National Cattlemen's Association C. American Farm Bureau D. National Association of Home Builders E. All of the above
3) Which is more accurate:
A. The original Clean Water Act, which remains in effect, was intended to cover all waters in the United States, but the U.S. Supreme Court limited its scope. The Clean Water Restoration Act would simply restore the original scope of the Clean Water Act.
B. The original Clean Water Act, which remains in effect, limited federal authority to "navigable" waters of the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld this definition. The Clean Water Restoration Act would expand federal authority beyond navigable waters to virtually every drop of water in the United States, including water on private property.
Answer to 1: D - Idaho (House and Senate) and Montana (Senate). Answer to 2: E Answer to 3: B
Quote of Note: Clean Water Restoration Act Means Troubled Waters
"For years, the 1972 Clean Water Act has been misused in the name of protecting America's waters and wetlands. The statute’s original limitation that its key provisions only apply to navigable waters was largely ignored. Instead, the law was broadly applied to a wide variety of circumstances, including remote and inconsequential drainage ditches or temporary puddles and even to completely dry land.
The statute’s complex and costly provisions interfered with the economic use of the lands it encompassed, including farming and ranching operations, construction of housing and other buildings, and domestic oil and gas production.
Fortunately, two Supreme Court decisions, Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. United States in 2001, and Rapanos v. United States in 2006 partially reined in these excesses.
Now, the CWRA seeks to overturn these Supreme Court decisions and make the statute more expansive than ever. In fact, it would turn the Clean Water Act into what some analysts believe to be the most dangerous federal intrusion on private property rights in existence..."
"The Biggest Bureaucratic Power Grab in a Generation"
If you haven't visited the National Center for Public Policy Research's new Clean Water Restoration Act Information page (or even if you have), you can get a good 2 1/2 minute summary of CWRA from Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) from the video above.
Senator Inhofe starts the video with "Rural America, watch out!" and goes on to call CWRA "the biggest bureaucratic power grab in a generation."
If you have a blog or web page yourself, please consider posting this video. Although few people have heard of this bill, Senator Inhofe is not exaggerating about its scope.
It's important that people become educated about CWRA -- the issue is that big.
The American Farm Bureau is reporting, correctly, that if the Clean Water Restoration Act (Senator Russ Feingold's S.787) becomes law, the federal government will claim the authority to regulate "all water" in the United States.
"S. 787 would remove any bounds from the scope of Clean Water Act jurisdiction, so that the regulatory reach of the act would extend to all water -- anywhere from farm ponds, to storm water retention basins, to roadside ditches, to desert washes, to streets and gutters, even to a puddle of rainwater," says a letter signed by the group.
Since its enactment in 1972, the Clean Water Act has regulated “navigable waters,” or waters of the U.S. The proposed legislation would delete the term “navigable” and replace it with “all intrastate waters” and add confusing language allowing the federal government to regulate “activities affecting these waters.” Although technical and hard to get your head around, these terms, if interchanged, would pose serious consequences for most landowners.
The legislation would grant -- for the first time ever -- the Environmental Protection Agency and the Corps of Engineers jurisdiction over all wet areas within a state, including groundwater, ditches, pipes, streets, municipal storm drains and gutters. It would grant these same agencies -- for the first time ever -- authority over all activities affecting those waters, regardless of whether the activity is occurring in water or adds a pollutant. With unfunded mandates, this slippery slope takes away power from state and local jurisdictions, shifting the control to the federal government for development and use of local land and water resources.
What does this mean for the typical residential landowner? Likely, a lot of hassle, expense and time spent in court. The legislation clearly states "all waters." Those of you with farm, stock and even goldfish ponds – beware.
Clean Water Restoration Act Information Webpage Created
The National Center for Public Policy Research has created a webpage with links to resources about the Clean Water Restoration Act.
The page has links to resources about CWRA published not only by the National Center, but by a variety of other organizations as well. If you are a columnist, blogger, speaker or talk show host planning to address the issue, you will find plenty of useful information on the page.
As National Center Senior Fellow R.J. Smith noted below, the legislation is scheduled for a markup and vote in the U.S. Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee on June 18.
Clean Water Restoration Act Scheduled for Senate Committee Vote June 18
An important message from National Center for Public Policy Research Senior Fellow R.J. Smith on the Clean Water Restoration Act, which is less about protecting our nation's waters and more about expanding the federal government's power to regulate private property.
From R.J. Smith:
I received an email at 11:05 p.m. last night from Senate Environment and Public Works staff that Senator Barbara Boxer and company are going to bring the Clean Water Restoration Act (CWRA) up for full committee mark-up and vote in their Thursday 18 June business session scheduled for 9:30 a.m. in the EPW Hearing Room, 406 Dirksen.
This is Senator Russ Feingold's S.787, which was introduced on April 2.
With the Democrats having nationalized the financial, banking and automobile industries -- bringing a strong layer of socialism to the key portions of the US economy -- they are now moving to nationalize the American land and water.
Under the Clean Water Act, the Federal government only had the authority to regulate "navigable waters" and control the discharge of pollutants and dredge and fill activities within those navigable waters.
The so-called Clean Water RESTORATION Act restores nothing. That is a hoax. Instead, it removes the restrictive and limiting terms "navigable" waters and unconstitutionally extends the Federal regulatory authority over ALL waters of the United States. This includes the driest desert areas that may only hold water for a few weeks a year during summer monsoon rains. And it includes completely isolated prairie potholes (small ponds and marshes) with no connection whatsoever to any other waters.
Furthermore, the bill will now prohibit ALL activities affecting all waters of the United States. This means that anything a landowner, a business, a county roads department, a waterfowl conservation program undertakes that could conceivably affect anything that is wet -- will be subject to the discretionary jurisdiction of Army Corps or EPA bureaucrats. They will then be able to make the lives of family farmers, ranchers, tree farmers, home builders -- almost anyone and everyone -- literally impossible. They will have the total power to force every farmer or rancher or ordinary business owner to run a gauntlet of permits, red tape, delays -- that will delay projects long enough and cost so much as to essentially shut down or bankrupt even the most necessary and innocuous projects.
There are copious examples of wetlands horror stories over the last 20 years in which people have been imprisoned and fined staggering amounts for simply building their own home, cleaning up dumps, or creating habitat for waterfowl. And that occurred under the CWA restrictions of "navigable waters" and prohibitions only on discharging pollutants and dredge and fill activities.
Once those constraints are removed by the CWRA, life will quickly become a bureaucratic nightmare with no exit -- particularly so throughout all of rural America. This bill would be much more honestly named "The Rural Cleansing Act of 2009."
This will be a tough battle given that the E&PW Committee make up is 12 Ds and 7 Rs (which includes Senators George Voinovich and Lamar Alexander).
It is important that people who are concerned about this enlist the help of the agricultural community, especially county and state farm bureaus. They should notify not only the members of the Senate E&PW but also the Senate Agriculture Committee.
It is also vital to contact Rep. Collin Peterson Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and request that he ask for oversight hearings on the impact of the CWRA on America's farmers and the nation's food production.
They should also request that the farmers and ranchers they know and their county and state farm bureaus and cattlemen's associations contact the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, asking them to strongly oppose the CWRA.
Addendum (6/14/09): For more information on the Clean Water restoration act, please visit our new CWRA information webpage at http://www.nationalcenter.org/CWRA.html.
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The NRDC would have done itself a favor to stay home from work that day. Heritage's response to the critique so thoroughly nails the NRDC that all the NRDC has done is give the Heritage study more publicity.
For instance, in the second paragraph of its critique, the NRDC complains that the Heritage Foundation analysis of the cost of the Waxman-markey cap-and-trade bill fails to take into account the "cost of inaction," that is, the cost of the bad stuff that would happen if Waxman-Markey is not adopted.
HEL-LO! Anybody home, NRDC? Waxman-Markey, even in a best-case scenario, would have negligible, if any, impact on the climate. And the Heritage Foundation DID mention this, to whit, in the original study:
The impact of Waxman-Markey on the next generation of families is thousands of dollars per year in higher energy costs, over $100,000 of additional federal debt (above and beyond the unconscionable increases already scheduled), a weaker economy, and more unemployment. And all for a change in world temperature that might not be noticeable [emphasis added].
You don't need to take Heritage's word for it, or mine. Even prominent environmental organizations that agree with the NRDC about the global warming theory say Waxman-Markey would not (to their way of thinking) sufficiently affect the climate.
Optimists are saying Waxman-Markey might (believe me, nobody knows) lower world temperatures by half a degree celsius over 40 years or so.
If spending all that money isn't going to solve the alleged problem, then what's the point of spending the money?
By way of congratulations to Heritage, let's recap Heritage's conclusions...
If Waxman-Markey is adopted, by 2035:
The typical family of four will see its direct energy costs rise by over $1,500 per year.
Pain at the electric meter causes consumers to reduce electricity consumption by 36 percent. Even with this cutback, the electric bill for a family of four will be $754 more that year and $12,933 more in total from 2012 to 2035.
The higher gasoline prices will have forced households to cut consumption by 15 percent, but a family of four will still pay $596 more that year and $8,000 more between 2012 and 2035.
In total, for the years 2012-2035, a family of four will see its direct energy costs rise by over $24,000. These inflation-adjusted numbers do not include the indirect energy costs consumers will pay as producers are forced to raise the price of their products to reflect the higher costs of production. Nor does the $24,000 include the higher expenditure for such things as more energy-efficient cars and appliances or the disutility of driving smaller, less safe vehicles or the discomfort of using less heating and cooling.
As the economy adjusts to shrinking GDP and rising energy prices, employment takes a big hit. On average, employment is lower by 844,000 jobs. In some years cap and trade reduces employment by more than 1.9 million jobs.
The negative economic impacts accumulate, and the national debt is no exception. Waxman-Markey drives up the national debt 29 percent by 2035. This is 29 percent above what it would be without the legislation and represents an additional $33,400 per person, or more than $133,000 for a family of four. To reiterate, these burdens come after adjusting for inflation and are in addition to the $450,000 per family of federal debt that will accrue over this period even without cap and trade.
No wonder the NRDC was so desperate to try to undermine Heritage's credibility.
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Writing in the Washington Examiner, columnist Timothy Carney exposes General Electric's penchant for lobbying the federal government to force us to pay for its products.
Carney writes:
GE is not simply taking advantage of subsidies that exist -- the company lobbies, with its $18 million-a-year lobbying outfit, to create or protect these subsidies. On greenhouse emissions restrictions, GE is leading the pro-regulation charge.
But these "green" profits for GE don't come out of nowhere. Regulations force businesses to buy GE's products. Subsidies incentivize them to buy GE's products. In either case, regular people foot the bill -- either through higher prices for electricity, shipping, and manufactured goods, or through higher taxes.
Pathetically but hilariously, Carney quotes the head of GE's "Ecomagination" scam, Steven Fludder, trying to pass off GE's lobby-robbery of taxpayers with a little spin:
I'd prefer not to think of words like 'subsidies' and that type of a construct. I think it is more supporting the creation of scale.
We'd prefer not to think of words like "subsidies," too, Mr. Fludder, if only parasites like General Electric and others who prefer not to earn their bread through honest trade would just mend their ways.
The column quotes Steve Milloy, who co-directs the National Center for Public Policy Research's Free Enterprise Project, which has written extensively about GE's brand of game-the-system legal extortion on its FreeEnterpriser blog, crediting him with coining the term "subsidymagination." (Steve is also the author of the excellent new book about the harm environmental lobbyists due to ordinary folk, Green Hell, and he runs JunkScience.com.)
In the Washington Times today, Jerry Seper writes about a decision by political appointees at the Justice Department to overrule career lawyers, who wanted to prosecute men who allegedly stood outside a Philadelphia voting booth and intimidated voters with a stick.
I think of General Electric as the genteel lobbyist version of the men with sticks. We don't want to buy their products, but if we don't, the men with sticks -- Congress and the regulators backed by the tax men -- will see to it that we do.
I don't believe Obama's appointees are on our side on this one, either.
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Outrage of the Day: Congressmen and Businesses Supporting Economic Suicide Pact
In a press release today, the National Center for Public Policy Research makes the point that the Waxman-Markey "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" (HR 2454) is akin to an economic suicide pact:
Cap and Trade Bill Economic Suicide for Taxpayers and Businesses, says National Center for Public Policy Research
Memorial Day is the target date set by Democrats Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) for passage of a cap-and-trade bill that promises economic hardship for all. The Waxman-Markey "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" (HR 2454) would raise taxes on American families by nearly $3,100 a year, lead to huge job losses, and dramatically raise the energy expenditures of American households.
Under a cap-and-trade policy, companies would be forced to raise energy prices. This would unleash a series of adverse economic consequences and hardships for Americans, as numerous studies dictate.
* The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis determined that Waxman-Markey would reduce aggregate GDP by $7.4 trillion, kill 844,00 jobs and raise the energy bill paid by a typical family by about $1,500 annually.
* A study by the National Association of Manufacturers projected that emissions caps, similar to those previously rejected by the U.S. Senate calling for a 63% cut in emissions by 2050, would reduce GDP by up to $269 billion and cost 850,000 jobs.
* A study conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology determined the restrictions could raise gasoline prices by 29%, electricity prices by 55% and natural gas prices by 15% by 2015.
* A 2007 report by the Congressional Budget Office examining the costs of cutting carbon emissions just 15% noted that customers "would face persistently higher prices for products such as electricity and gasoline. Those price increases would be regressive in that poorer households would bear a larger burden relative to their income than wealthier households would."
Given these dire consequences, some may be surprised that some of the nation's largest corporations are lobbying for this bill. Companies participating in the United States Climate Action Partnership, a lobbying group of over thirty corporations and environmental activist organizations, are trying to profit from a government-mandated "cap and trade" anti-global warming policy by selling so-called carbon credits from reductions in greenhouse gases.
During last week's ConocoPhillips shareholders meeting, Tom Borelli, Ph.D, director of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research confronted ConocoPhillips Chairman James Mulva about ConocoPhillips' involvement in the USCAP. Mulva responded by saying he wanted to be at the table when energy policy decisions were being made. [An audio recording of the exchange is available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uZVcyBfi2M ].
"ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva has also not done his homework," said Borelli. ConocoPhillips has made a significant investment in Canadian oil sands, which release about three times the amount of carbon dioxide as traditional oil. Since cap-and-trade will increase the cost of carbon emissions, Mulva is lobbying to increase the cost of his investment. In addition, his USCAP partner the Natural Resources Defense Council is taking legal action to block the processing of the oil sands at a ConocoPhillips refinery."
"Pursuing legislation that will raise energy prices in the middle of a recession is economic suicide. It exposes the inability of these CEOs to connect the dots between economic growth and their future earnings," Borelli warns. He told Mulva that ConocoPhillips has done a poor job of promoting the "social good" the Company has done in terms of jobs, tax revenues and energy production.
Instead, "USCAP's support of President Obama's energy policy for what they deem as the 'social good,' illustrates the perils of corporatism - and is eerily similar of the warning in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which described the unraveling of capitalism," says Deneen Borelli, a full-time Fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research-sponsored African-American leadership network Project 21.
The National Center for Public Policy Research is a free-market communications and research foundation established in 1982 and located on Capitol Hill. It receives support from over 80,000 individual contributors. Under 2 percent of its revenue is received from corporations.
E-mail any comments to the National Center for Public Policy Research at info@nationalcenter.org. Subscribe to this blog's feed.
And We're Supposed to Believe Their Positions are Based on Principle?
Ross Kaminsky, writing for the National Taxpayers Union Government Bytes blog, laughingly notes which eight corporate members of the pro-cap-and-trade U.S. Climate Action Partnership once were members of the anti-global warming-regulation Global Climate Coalition.
The Government Bytes post is an excellent resource in other ways as well.
E-mail any comments to the National Center for Public Policy Research at info@nationalcenter.org. Subscribe to this blog's feed.
The Extremely Cold Conditions Are Due to Global Warming
The I Hate the Media blog covers the amusing story of the "ecological explorers" who had to give up their expedition to the North Pole intended to draw attention to global warming, due to unexpectedly cold temperatures.
Peter Roff's May 18 U.S. News & World Report blog post about President Obama's speech at Notre Dame quotes the President saying the following about global warming:
Your generation must decide how to save God's creation from a changing climate that threatens to destroy it [emphasis added].
Ridiculous lines such as this should never emerge from a professional speechwriting shop, let alone a presidential one.
If the global warming alarmists ever wonder why polls show declining public concern about global warming, they would do well to consider their use of unbelievable, over-the-top rhetoric as one of the culprits.
E-mail any comments to the National Center for Public Policy Research at info@nationalcenter.org. Subscribe to this blog's feed.
Tom Borelli of our Free Enterprise Project is warning against the folly of adopting cap and trade in a column in the recent issue of Power magazine:
When the housing bubble burst, it exposed an unseemly alliance between special interests and the financial sector. Activists wanted homes for all at any cost, and lenders were happy to oblige despite the inherent risk.
Although the economic devastation this bubble wrought is still not under control, a similar toxic alliance is working on the next one: The green bubble.
Failing companies such as AIG, General Electric, and General Motors, already propped up by tax dollars, have partnered with radical environmentalists in a scheme their CEOs believe will allow them to profit on fears about global warming...
"For liberal elites, belief in gun control and global warming has taken on the character of religious faith. We have sinned (by hoarding guns or driving sport utility vehicles), we must atone (by turning in our guns or recycling), we must repent (by supporting gun control or cap-and-trade schemes). You may notice that the 'we' in question is usually the great mass of ordinary American citizens."
Tom Borelli to Appear on Fox Business Network 8 AM Monday
Tom Borelli, co-director (with Steve Milloy) of the National Center for Public Policy Research's Free Enterprise Project, will appear on the Fox Business Network at 8 AM Monday, May 11.
The topics will include executive compensation and shareholder activism.
Video above is taken from a prior appearance by Tom on the Fox Business Network, discussing shareholder activism and proposed legislation to deal with alleged global warming.
E-mail any comments to the National Center for Public Policy Research at info@nationalcenter.org. Subscribe to this blog's feed.
"Charlie Munger, the second in command behind Warren Buffet at Berkshire Hathaway, says in an interview on CNBC that it's 'almost demented' to pass cap-and-trade given the state of our economy."
So reports Tom Borelli, director of the National Center for Public Policy Research's Free Enterprise Project, on our sister blog, the Free Enterpriser.
For more, including a link to the video, read Tom's "Berkshire's Munger: Cap & Trade Won't Work," here.
After an appearance last month in the halls of Congress, a live "kangaroo" appeared today at a federal hearing in San Francisco to protest the "kangaroo court" atmosphere at an important meeting to discuss the future of national energy policy.
Obama Administration Interior Secretary Ken Salazar presided over a public hearing today that effectively represented only one aspect of the debate over offshore energy development. The kangaroo is meant to point out that oil and gas exploration is being largely ignored in favor of promoting wind power along the Pacific coast.
The kangaroo was seen protesting the hearing outside the Robertson Auditorium on the Mission Bay campus of the University of California, San Francisco (1675 Owens Street) between 11:00 AM and 1:00 PM Pacific Time.
"Oil and gas exploration could create trillions in revenue and tens of thousands of jobs, but this hearing is likely to overlook this economic stimulus package in favor of dubious green technology," said National Center executive director David W. Almasi. "Right now is the window of opportunity. The government is considering the next five-year plan for energy policy. To ignore drilling today is irresponsible, which is why it is considered a kangaroo court and why participants will find a live, bouncing marsupial there today."
Today's hearing is the third of four being conducted by Salazar and the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service. The hearings follow a report issued by the Obama Administration that says Southern Oregon and Northern California are prime areas for wind-energy development. This is despite the acknowledgement that current technology and the ocean terrain in the region are incompatible and that the region also lacks the transmission infrastructure necessary to accommodate any offshore production of wind energy.
To the contrary, the Point Arena Basin off Mendocino County, California is thought to have a more than 1.5 billion barrels of recoverable oil. The California coastline is already the home to many offshore drilling operations.
A kangaroo visit was already made to a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources in Washington, D.C. on March 31. A similar "kangaroo court" on drought conditions in California was being protested at that time. Before last-minute testimony by area congressmen was added, this hearing was expected to be simply a platform for government officials and environmental radicals to promote further regulation of resources in the name of combating global warming.
"As was seen in yesterday's tea parties against out-of-control government spending and taxation, it's clear that people want their leaders to be more accountable," said The National Center's Almasi. "The same applies to the creation of public policy. When crafting something as important as our nation's energy future, a one-sided hearing just won't do. If they continue in this manner, they can expect to be seeing a lot of this kangaroo."
The National Center for Public Policy Research is a non-profit 501(c)(3) communications and research foundation dedicated to providing free market solutions to today's public policy problems. For more information, visit the National Center's website at www.nationalcenter.org or call (202) 543-4110.
Today's Outrage of the Day is news out of Spokane of environmentalist efforts to ban the sale of dishwasher detergent that actually gets dishes clean.
From Nicholas K. Geranios of the Associated Press:
The quest for squeaky-clean dishes has turned some law-abiding people in Spokane into dishwater-detergent smugglers. They are bringing Cascade or Electrasol in from out of state because the eco-friendly varieties required under Washington state law don't work as well. Spokane County became the launch pad last July for the nation's strictest ban on dishwasher detergent made with phosphates, a measure aimed at reducing water pollution. The ban will be expanded statewide in July 2010, the same time similar laws take effect in several other states.
But it's not easy to get sparkling dishes when you go green.
Many people were shocked to find that products like Seventh Generation, Ecover and Trader Joe's left their dishes encrusted with food, smeared with grease and too gross to use without rewashing them by hand...
The article goes on to say that Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, Vermont, Minnesota, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York are joining Washington state in mandating dirty dishwasher dishes, and that there is a bill on Capitol Hill to make the phosphate ban national.
The article also says the affected industry group, the Soap and Detergent Association, at first opposed the ban, but now it has completely surrendered to the point of exhibiting signs of Stockholm syndrome (not the AP's wording).
The piece ends by quoting a Spokane resident who runs his dishwasher longer to make up for what the green groups have gotten mandated by law. That, he says, uses five gallons more water (and more electricity).
So we're basically going to hurt the environment by using more water (longer cycles or hand-washing after the dishwasher finishes) and more electricity in order to help the environment.
Is there any part of our lives that is not now or will not soon be regulated by environmentalists working through patsy legislatures?
On our sister blog, the Free Enterpriser, Tom Borelli notes a new start-up among the phenomenon of businesses set up with a social purpose:
A story published in the New York Times describes the growth of green banks. E3bank recently received approval from the Pennsylvania Department of Banking and if it gets the final ok from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp and by the commonwealth it will be ready for business.
E3bank will incorporate the principles of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to its lending practices in an effort to stimulate the green economy.
"Instead of following the industry standard -- basing loans on a borrower's ability to pay and the up-front costs of the building -- e3bank officers will be authorized to modify debt-to-income and loan-to-value proposals. Financial products would be tailored to account for the up-front costs of more expensive green projects but also factor in cost savings from lower energy consumption that would be netted over the course of the loan."
By lowering lending standards for a social purpose the green banks are repeating the mistake made by the banking industry in pushing mortgages on low income households. Social purpose should not be the criteria for lending money -- only the ability of the individual to repay the loan.
I wonder if the FDIC charges banks more for deposit insurance if they use criteria other than/in addition to the ability to repay when making loans. Since taxpayers are ultimately behind the FDIC, I hope so.
Note: Mr. Frank J. Baldassarre, Jr., the president and CEO of e3bank, has sent us a reply to this post. Readers can find it here.
Outrage of the Day: The Costly Waxman-Markey Global Warming Tax
Last Tuesday, Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) unveiled proposed legislation that, if adopted, would kill (at best) hundreds of thousands, more likely, millions of jobs and put a substantial and highly-regressive global warming tax on every American even as Congressional leaders wring their hands and bemoan the state of our economy.
Adding insult to injury, Waxman made the outlandish claim the monstrosity "will create millions of clean energy jobs," though, admittedly, there are few liberal politicians who have not made the moronic claim that raising the cost of energy will be a net job-creator.
If there is any educated person left who doubts that environmentalists care little about the welfare of ordinary people, even a brief review of this bill should permanently prevent a reoccurrence of that particular hallucination.
Lest I be thought the only one who thinks it would be idiotic for the Congressional majority to nearly bankrupt the nation via a trillion-dollar "stimulus" bill only to immediately intentionally shoot the economy in the proverbial head with a cap-and-trade-plus global warming tax, here are a few other opinions expressed following the release of the Waxman-Markey draft:
"Since 85 percent of U.S. energy demand is met by fossil fuels, taxing the lifeblood of the American economy would have disastrous consequences. The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis' study of the Lieberman-Warner cap and trade bill found aggregate real GDP losses (adjusted for inflation) of nearly $5 trillion -- for comparison, this is equivalent to the economic damage done by over 600 hurricanes. The bill would've also destroyed between 400,000 and 800,000 jobs each year. It should be noted that the targets and timetables in the discussion draft are considerably more stringent than those in Lieberman-Warner and thus would be costlier." -Nick Loris, The Heritage Foundation's The Foundry Blog, March 31, 2009
Add together NASA since its inception, the cost of Hurricane Katrina and spending on the New Deal. Adjust for inflation. What do you get? Not quite the amount of money a cap and trade program would generate in energy taxes on consumers. The $1.9 trillion generated over eight years from a cap-and-trade bill would still be larger than the $1.5 trillion from NASA, the New Deal, and Hurricane Katrina. -Nick Loris, The Heritage Foundation's The Foundry Blog, April 2, 2009
"Many U.S. lawmakers view cap and trade as a politically superior non-tax approach to climate policy. However, cap and trade imposes identical economic burdens on households to a similarly designed carbon tax. ...we present new estimates of the distributional impact of a typical cap and-trade system by income, age, U.S. region and family type. In total, households would face an annual burden of roughly $144.8 billion per year with costs disproportionately borne by low-income households, those under age 25 and over 75 years, those in Southern states, and single parents with dependent children." -Andrew Chamberlain, "Who Pays for Climate Policy? New Estimates of the Household Burden and Economic Impact of a U.S. Cap-and-Trade System," (pdf) Tax Foundation Working Paper No. 6, March 2009
"The bill as drafted clears the way for carbon protectionism. It envisages "rebates" to companies that have to pay higher costs than their international competitors, which amounts to illegal state aid under WTO rules. Further, it directs the President to institute what is laughably called a 'border adjustment' program requiring foreign companies to pay for the cost of carbon. This is nothing more than a tariff aimed at eliminating the competitive advantage of other nations. Taken together, these provisions represent the first shot in what is likely to prove a disastrous carbon trade war." -Iain Murray, Competitive Enterprise Institute, March 31, 2009
"Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) said cap and trade systems would be devastating to coal manufacturing states like Illinois and West Virginia and proposed cap and trade legislation could kill the entire coal mining industry.
'This cap-and-trade scheme may not just reduce Illinois coal jobs further -- it is my worry that this legislation aims to kill the entire coal industry,' Shimkus told CNSNews.com.
Shimkus and Rep. Shelly Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) held a press conference Wednesday to rally support opposing the cap and trade proposals, which they said would lead to both higher energy costs and severe job loss in the coal mining industry..." -Ryan Byrnes, "Cap and Trade Legislation Would Kill Coal Industry, Congressman Says," CNSNews.com, April 2, 2009
"Until recently, much of the debate on climate change focused on the extent of the threat. But now that House Democratic leaders are planning to take up legislation to set up a mandatory cap-and-trade system for greenhouse emissions sometime this summer, opponents are focusing on the cost.
'They seem to give people the impression that it's going to be a huge environmentally friendly free lunch,' said Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis. 'This lunch is not free.'" -Jim Angle/AP, "Republicans Criticize Cost of Cap-and-Trade Emissions Plan," FoxNews.com, April 2, 2009
The Senate has voted 89-8 to oppose cap-and-trade if it raises electricity or gasoline prices.
Of course, cap-and-trade would raise electricity and gasoline prices, so the Senate has effectively just gone on record 89-8 against cap-and-trade.
In 1997, the Senate voted 95-0 for the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which opposed the adoption of any climate treaty that exempted developing nations. As the Kyoto global warming treaty exempted developing nations, Byrd-Hagel was seen as a signal that the Senate would not ratify Kyoto. As a result, though then-Vice President Al Gore signed the Kyoto Treaty on behalf of the United States, the Clinton-Gore Administration never submitted it to the Senate for ratification.
Will Senator John Thune (R-SD)'s amendment be the new Byrd-Hagel? Not without continuing hard work by those of us who don't want electricity and gasoline prices to rise in a wasteful and expensive effort to enrich a handful of businesses and wage a futile effort to control the planet's climate...
The California Drought's Congressional "Kangaroo Court"
The kangaroo waits for the hearing to begin.
The kangaroo listens attentively to hearing proceedings. The National Center for Public Policy Research's Jeff Temple and Devon Carlin are seated to the kangaroo's left.
Devon Carlin provides a report on the U.S. House Resources Committee hearing Monday -- the one to which the National Center for Public Policy Research sent a "kangaroo" (actually, an undercover operative in a kangaroo suit).
By Devon Carlin:
Rural Californians are in their third year of a severe drought, but Congressional leaders seem more fixated on finding a "comprehensive" solution that accommodates endangered species and adheres to the belief in catastrophic man-made global warming than in dealing with very real human suffering.
This was our observation during a March 31 U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources hearing, titled "The California Drought: Actions by Federal and State Agencies to Address Impacts on Lands, Fisheries, and Water Users."
According to the hearing's initial announcement, the hearing was to feature only one panel of witnesses - one overwhelmingly comprised of federal bureaucrats.
To some, this was seen as a "kangaroo court" that would promote the global warming and endangered species gospel with little or no opposition. It seemed to lack everything but an actual kangaroo. But the National Center for Public Policy Research was more than happy to provide one!
As the overflow crowd lined up for entry into the hearing room, the National Center's kangaroo stepped out of a nearby elevator. As participating members of Congress arrived, they certainly noticed the large, brown kangaroo. When acting Committee Chairwoman Grace Napolitano (D-CA) gaveled the hearing to order, our kangaroo was prominently seated in the audience.
As National Center Senior Fellow R.J. Smith pointed out in a press release that was handed out at the hearing:
At the height of a California drought and during a serious recession with massive unemployment in California's Central Valley, one would hope that the Committee cared enough about agricultural workers and minorities to invite as witnesses actual unemployed farm workers from the scores of communities closing down. Let's have an open Committee hearing and hear real people discussing the impacts on their lives from government regulations and massive job losses - instead of more government bureaucrats who are only causing the problem.
The furry, National Center-provided visual reminder - and some last-minute intervention from a bipartisan delegation of Congressmen from districts affected by the drought - helped to provide balance.
While it seemed the Committee's leaders had already made up their minds, they and the witnesses they selected nevertheless ended up receiving an earful about the human suffering brought about by poorly-applied government regulations and what could be done to alleviate the distress.
It was originally announced that testimony would be given exclusively by the panel of representatives of government agencies. Invited agency representatives were Mary M. Glackin of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; J. William McDonald of the Bureau of Reclamation; Candy Thompson of the Farm Service Agency and California Secretary of Natural Resources Mike Chrisman. The lone critic was to be Allen Ishida, a Tulare County Supervisor and farmer.
Things changed due to the last-minute inclusion of a bipartisan panel of Congressmen representing the region worst hit by the drought. This panel was comprised of Representatives Mike Thompson (D-CA), Dennis A. Cardoza (D-CA), George Radanovich (R-CA), Devin Nunes (R-CA), Wally Herger (R-CA) and Ken Calvert (R- CA).
This new panel, unanticipated at the time the hearing was announced (and the kangaroo was called) brought much-needed balance.
All participants appeared to agree that California is in bad shape. The lack of an adequate supply of water in affected areas is putting farmers and ranchers out of work. Their crops aren't growing and livestock are going thirsty. Employment rates in affected areas range from 20 to over 40 percent, and job losses could rise to nearly 80,000. Families are flocking to food lines. Depleted food bank pantries reflect the state's shortage of produce. Incredible numbers of acres are left even more vulnerable to the type of brush fires that consumed more than one million acres last year. Agricultural economic losses are projected to exceed $3 billion by year-end.
What people want to know is what the government is going to do to help. The representatives of the government, and their liberal supporters among the Committee majority, seem committed to a "comprehensive" solution that protect the environment first and merely seeks to aid the afflicted human population. Conservatives, however, offered concrete plans to alleviate human suffering and increase agricultural productivity while minimizing environmental impact.
Congressmen from the affected areas - both on the Committee and on the testifying panel - noted that, despite California's historic familiarity with natural drought conditions, the problem this time is man-made. With rainfall and snow-pack totals nearing the average when compared to recent years, neither nature nor global warming can be blamed for the water shortage.
One of the many regulatory culprits is the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
The Delta Smelt, for example, is a three-inch long fish that has been declared "threatened" under the ESA. Federal water officials reallocated a substantial amount of the water supply to flow out to sea in order to help protect the Delta Smelt. In the process, it recklessly slashed water deliveries to agricultural areas of California.
The local Congressman pointed out factors in the Smelt's population decline that are not man-made, such as larger predatory fish. Representative Tom McClintock (R-CA), who represents the region and is a member of the Committee, noted from the dais that more water diverted for the good of the Delta Smelt has not helped its recovery.
When queried, the government officials, who gave very dry presentations about "comprehensive" relief strategies, offered no precise ways to bring about an end to the human suffering in the region.
Conversely, the lawmakers whose constituents were affected and have a sense of the needs of the region proposed multiple relief plans and suggested reform of the ESA that would bring water back to residents in need and pose a minimal threat to the Delta Smelt population.
In the short history of the Obama Administration, conservatives have been cast as obstructionist and lacking ideas by their liberal counterparts. At this hearing, exactly the opposite was the case.
One proposed idea, known as the "Two-Gates" project, involves the installation of two temporary gates in the central Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. These gates would reduce the number of smelt removed from the Delta, thus permitting water export restrictions to be minimized.
Another proposal was to reform the ESA to overcome an ESA-based lawsuit that forced the Red Bluff Diversion Dam ("RBDD") to cease operating. Prior to the lawsuit, the RBDD performed as an efficient, gravity-fed water diversion. Shutting the existing diversion down has created the need for a comparable alternative. A popular pitch for its replacement is a power-driven, screened pumping plant that would supply 150,000 acres of agricultural land with irrigation water.
These and other relief proposals were called "shovel-ready" and within the scope of projects that could be funded by the recently-passed "stimulus" bill. The committee liberals' response? Representative George Miller (D-CA) mocked members of the Congressional panel who voted against the "stimulus." As for human suffering at the hands of government regulation, he considered that "cherry-picking history." He passed off any blame to a judge, whose decision set the policy.
This liberal disdain is surprising when the drought was called the "Katrina of California" by both panelists and members of the committee alike.
Near the end of the hearing, freshman Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) came right out and asked the direct and nearly rhetorical question that was surely on the minds of many in attendance: "What's more important - people or fish?"
This post was written by Research Associate Devon Carlin. To send comments to the author, write her at info@nationalcenter.org. Please state if a letter is not for publication or if you prefer that it be published anonymously.
"We cannot afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead."
- Celebrity Dr. James Hansen, Goddard Institute of Space Studies, January 2009
NY Times Story Gives Huge Waxman-Markey Global Warming Tax Bill One-Sided Treatment
When the New York Times today told its readers about the massive Henry Waxman-Ed Markey 648-page draft global warming tax bill, it bent over backwards to report the pros and cons of the proposal.
Not.
The March 31 story, supplied by Darren Samuelsohn and Ben Geman of Greenwire:
* Included sponsor Rep Waxman's claim that "this legislation will create millions of clean energy jobs, put America on the path to energy independence, and cut global warming pollution," without a balancing rebuttal or reference to the economic damage passage of the bill would almost assuredly cause.
* Followed that favorable quote by California liberal Democrat Waxman with a favorable quote by California liberal Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
* Followed those two favorable statements with seven sentences quoting Democrats Rep. Charles Gonzales (D-TX), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), and Rick Boucher (D-VA), who have quibbles on the margins about the proposal but who like the concept.
* Followed that with two sentences from the lone voice of rebuttal, the only Republican/conservative quoted, and the only person quoted who addressed the massive negative impact the bill, if adopted, would likely have on the economy, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX).
* Followed the two sentences allocated to Rep. Barton with 32 paragraphs of discription of the bill, none of it a critical analysis.
* Concluded with seven paragraphs headlined "Reactions," which covered quotations and opinions from four organizations on an ideological spectrum ranging from very left-wing to far left-wing: The Environmental Defense Fund, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Oxfam America and Environment America. No economists, energy experts, free-market groups, businesses or business groups or any other individual or institution other than left-wing environmental organizations were quoted or cited.
No one with a straight face could call this a balanced story.
Watch Tom Borelli on the Fox Business Network's "Money for Breakfast" on Wednesday Morning
Note: Due to news coming from the G20 meeting, the Fox Business Network has postponed running the scheduled April 1 interview with Tom Borelli until April 2. We apologize for any inconvenience to our readers who tuned in April 1 expecting to see Tom.
From David Almasi:
Tom Borelli, director of The National Center's Free Enterprise Project, is scheduled to be a guest on the Wednesday morning edition of the Fox Business Network's "Money for Breakfast" program (April 1, 2009). Tom will be talking about the inherent problems with imposing a "cap-and-trade" policy relating to greenhouse gas emissions.
"Money for Breakfast" airs between 7:00 AM and 9:00 AM eastern on the Fox Business Channel. Tom is tentatively scheduled to appear around 7:40 AM eastern. Check your local cable listings for local channel number or click here.
In a recent column on Townhall, Tom wrote about why some big businesses are lobbying for the inherently risky cap-and-trade policy:
...Clearly, these firms have placed a huge wager on cap-and-trade since the legislation will make carbon dioxide a commodity and drive demand for renewable energy sources such as wind turbines and solar panels.
But carbon trading is very speculative at best. For example, JPMorgan is seeking to create carbon emission credits from distributing energy-efficient stoves in Africa. Since the stoves will reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere because they burn less fuel than traditional cooking methods, the company wants to claim the savings as a carbon emission credit. The carbon credits would then be sold in the carbon exchange to a company that is over its government mandated limit...
...There must be something in the water on Wall Street that makes these firms dream up such ridiculous ideas. Creating a market built on a house of cards that man's activity is causing global warming is dangerous enough, but that risk gets magnified when markets are created by assigning an artificial value to a ubiquitous and invisible gas such as carbon dioxide.
Additionally, a National Center poll taken in 2008 found that the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose a cap-and-trade policy. The poll results can be found here
To learn more about the "Money for Breakfast" program, click here.
This post was written by National Center for Public Policy Research Executive Director David Almasi. To send comments to the author, write him at info@nationalcenter.org. Please state if a letter is not for publication or if you prefer that it be published anonymously.
U.S. House Holds Kangaroo Hearing to Fool Public About Causes of California Drought
The National Center for Public Policy Research has sent a 'kangaroo' to a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Resources Committee on climate change and the California drought.
The kangaroo's appearance will to protest the fact that the hearing is expected to ignore the contribution of environmental regulations in exacerbating the drought, and also the fact that only representatives of government agencies, mostly federal, have been invited to testify.
Our press release explains:
'Kangaroo-Court' Hearing a One-Sided View of California Drought
Washington, D.C.: The U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources is holding a one-sided hearing this morning on the California drought that is expected to blame climate change for a critical water shortage while glossing over the role of activist-inspired environmental policies in exacerbating the shortage, according to The National Center for Public Policy Research.
The hearing, entitled "The California Drought: Actions by Federal and State Agencies to Address Impacts on Lands, Fisheries, and Water Users," will be held today, March 31, at 10:30 am in Room 1324, Longworth House Office Building.
Only representatives of government agencies will be permitted to testify at the hearing. Most of the witnesses will be from federal agencies.
To draw attention to the biased nature of the proceedings, The National Center for Public Policy Research will send a representative to the hearing best suited for a kangaroo court - a kangaroo.
"At the height of a California drought and during a serious recession with massive unemployment in California's Central Valley, one would hope that the committee cared enough about agricultural workers and minorities to invite as witnesses actual unemployed farm workers from the scores of communities closing down," remarked R.J. Smith, a Senior Fellow at The National Center for Public Policy Research. "Let's have an open Committee hearing and hear real people discussing the impacts on their lives from government regulations and their massive job losses - instead of more government bureaucrats who are only causing the problem."
California - the nation's largest producer of tomatoes, lettuce, almonds, apricots, strawberries and many other crops - risks agricultural losses of over $2 billion for the upcoming season and $3 billion in total economic losses in 2009. According to a University of California at Davis study, 80,000 jobs could be lost in the Central Valley.
Although global warming is expected to receive much of the blame for this economic disaster, government regulation is a more significant - and preventable cause - of it, according to The National Center for Public Policy Research.
For example, state and federal water officials have sharply cut agricultural water deliveries in California so that more water can go out to sea as part of an effort to protect the Delta Smelt - a three-inch long fish listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. In February, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced a "zero allocation" of water from the Central Valley Project, cutting off the massive federal irrigation system that serves numerous California farms. The supply of water from California's State Water Project is 20 percent of normal.
"By demanding that the water flow into the Pacific Ocean, government meddlers have forced farmers to abandon production, threatening both the nation's fresh food supplies and the jobs of farm workers, many of whom are among the nation's poorest minorities," said Mr. Smith. "Ironically, the cut-off of agricultural water has done nothing to help the Delta Smelt. Every year less water is diverted for agriculture, yet the fish population continues to decline."
The state of California also deserves blame for the water shortage because it has failed to build the water infrastructure necessary for the state's growing population.
Donn Zea, President of the Northern California Water Association, wrote in the March 5th edition of the San Francisco Chronicle that although California's population has doubled over the past 40 years, the state has not meaningfully updated its water storage capacity since 1967. "As a result, when drought hits, we have an amount of water suitable for California in 1960 - not 2009," wrote Mr. Zea.
The Resources Committee - which has a history of promoting global warming alarmism - is expected to explore the dubious link between a modest increase in global temperatures and localized weather patterns devastating California.
"If certain members of the House Natural Resources Committee want the world to believe that a regional drought in an arid area of California is further 'proof' of global warming, then let's hope that they apply the same reasoning to the floods that are ravaging eastern and central North Dakota," remarked Dr. Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow at The National Center for Public Policy Research. "By the thousands, residents of Fargo and Bismarck are trying to protect their cities from the rising waters of the Red and Missouri Rivers. The blocks of ice on the Missouri River north of Bismarck were so huge that explosives were used to blow them up. Will Chairman Rahall invite Fargo's mayor and other North Dakota officials before his committee to testify on how ordinary citizens spent hours in sub-freezing, snowy weather protecting their homes and businesses from the effects of global cooling?"
The National Center for Public Policy Research is a non-profit 501(c)(3) communications and research foundation dedicated to providing free market solutions to today's public policy problems. For more information, visit the National Center's website at www.nationalcenter.org or call (202) 543-4110.
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Here's hoping our 'kangaroo' (actually, a man in a kangaroo costume) is able to draw some attention to government regulations that are needlessly hurting Californians.
On the other hand, he's given the high-profile position of "climate change czar" to former EPA Administrator Carol Browner, whose record leads many to suspect she believes that anti-lobbying laws are there to be broken.
As David Ridenour (full disclosure: my husband) of the National Center for Public Policy Research writes in Monday's Washington Times:
...Throughout her years as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration, EPA officials routinely violated the Anti-Lobbying Act - a law prohibiting federal employees from using agency money for "telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress."
In 1995, the EPA flagrantly violated that law when it lobbied against the Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act, a bill that would have curbed some of the EPA's worst abuses.
As James F. Hinchman, comptroller general of the United States, noted, EPA officials "distributed EPA fact sheets to various organizations ... directly lobbied the Congress." Not only that, but an EPA regional administrator wrote a strong Op-Ed designed to stop the bill's passage.
Four years later, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, West Virginia Democrat, accused the EPA of violating the Anti-Lobbying Act again. Mr. Byrd - who has made a career of steering pork to his state - complained that the EPA's Transportation Partners Program was coordinating and funding anti-road lobbyists against the law and his state's interests. Mrs. Browner was forced to terminate the program.
The following year Mrs. Browner was at it yet again. This time, her agency was accused of allowing special interests to improperly influence last-minute - so-called "midnight" - environmental regulations. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the EPA to preserve communications with such groups. Instead, Mrs. Browner had her computer hard drive re-initialized, wiping it clean. Judge Lamberth subsequently held the EPA in contempt for "contumacious conduct."...
Did President Obama stern admonish Carol Browner that behavior of this sort would not be tolerated in an Obama Administration (and, if so, why take the risk of appointing her at all?)? Or are rules against "outside" lobbyists the only ones Barack Obama wants enforced?
* Note: In my view, the new directive to supposedly limit lobbyist influence on spending of the so-called stimulus won't mean much in the end. Businesses, unions, lobbying firms, lobbyist law firms, state and local governments and special interests wanting a piece of our tax dollars will simply lobby for it using personnel who are not required to register as a lobbyist under the terms of the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (or, in some cases, people who are required to, but didn't). The only way to keep lobbyists from going after federal money is to shrink the pot of federal money available as government-distributed handouts (for instance, by leaving it in the hands of those who earned it in the first place).
Hat tip: I learned about the ACLU's position on the new lobbying directive from the Don Irvine Blog.
Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli's commentary on the inherent problems within the "Pickens Plan" was published in today's Washington Examiner newspaper.
Billionaire T. Boone Pickens claims altruistic reasons for promoting the construction of massive wind farms and converting trucks and fleet vehicles to be powered by natural gas in order to lessen U.S. demand for foreign oil. Deneen points out the plan may result in both misery for politically-weak urban communities and money for Pickens.
Ultimately, she notes, the Pickens Plan may be a test of President Barack Obama's leadership.
In "Pickens Plan is Hot Air That May Burn America," Deneen writes:
Converting vehicles to natural gas taps a resource now used by power plants to generate electricity. To compensate, the Pickens Plan suggests massive wind turbines. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 100,000 such turbines - many the size of 40-story buildings - would be necessary to handle just 20 percent of the nation's electricity needs.
To deliver that power, the Energy Department further estimates 12,650 miles of new transmission lines would be needed by 2030 at a cost of between $64 and $128 billion...
...Pickens compares the proposed new power grid to the construction of the 46,000-mile interstate highway system decades ago. Sadly, back then it was often the poorest neighborhoods selected for eminent domain evictions to make way for new roads.
So-called "negro removal" in Detroit's Paradise Valley and Newark's Central Ward helped spark the July 1967 riots that collectively led to 66 deaths. Highway construction destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes in a process the San Francisco Chronicle in 1959 called "a crime that cannot be prettied up."
Pickens has not assured the public his plan would not repeat this exploitation of minorities and the politically-disadvantaged.
Pickens would also likely profit from his plan, thanks to taxpayer support. He testified before Congress that his plan might succeed only with the wind energy Production Tax Credit (PTC), which was recently extended by the $787 billion bailout bill.
Mesa Power, a Pickens' company, wants to build a 2,700-turbine wind farm in Texas. According to a report by the National Center for Public Policy Research, "Pickens' firm stands to receive between $1.66 billion and about $3 billion in PTC payments alone over 10 years, a significant portion of its original investment."
Regarding the proposal as a challenge for the President, Deneen notes:
Obama's leadership will soon be tested. Will he side with the little guy, protecting their homes and guarding their access to affordable energy? Or will he deliver for special interests like T. Boone Pickens and anti-energy environmental organizations?
If he chooses the latter, it won't be the change so many people thought they voted for last November."
This post was written by National Center for Public Policy Research Executive Director David Almasi. To send comments to the author, write him at info@nationalcenter.org. Please state if a letter is not for publication or if you prefer that it be published anonymously.
NY Times Magazine's Sympathetic Portrait of a Global Warming "Skeptic"
Despite an occasional line likely to raise a conservative's eyebrow ("Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology," for example) writer Nicholas Dawidoff's 8,200-word March 29 New York Times magazine feature, "The Civil Heretic," on world-renowned physicist, Iraq-protesting liberal and "global warming skeptic" Freeman Dyson will be appreciated by many readers of this blog.
Using a comfortable, storytelling style, Dawidoff immediately sets the scene:
For more than half a century the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Princeton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country's most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming "out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned," as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors' letter boxes and Dyson's own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as "a pompous twit," "a blowhard," "a cesspool of misinformation," "an old coot riding into the sunset" and, perhaps inevitably, "a mad scientist." ...Dyson's son, George, a technology historian, says his father's views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone - out of his beautiful mind...
From there Dawidoff tells the story of Dyson's life, intermittently returning to, and ultimately concluding on, the subject of global warming.
Some brief excerpts, not complete, of the global warming sections, as they are likely to be of interest to this blog's readers:
...Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change's "chief propagandist," and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth." Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models...
...Climate models, he says, take into account atmospheric motion and water levels but have no feeling for the chemistry and biology of sky, soil and trees. "The biologists have essentially been pushed aside," he continues. "Al Gore's just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers."
Dyson agrees with the prevailing view that there are rapidly rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere caused by human activity. To the planet, he suggests, the rising carbon may well be a MacGuffin, a striking yet ultimately benign occurrence in what Dyson says is still "a relatively cool period in the earth's history." The warming, he says, is not global but local, "making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter." Far from expecting any drastic harmful consequences from these increased temperatures, he says the carbon may well be salubrious - a sign that "the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse," because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer promoting forest growth and crop yields. "Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now," he contends, "and substantially richer in carbon dioxide." Dyson calls ocean acidification, which many scientists say is destroying the saltwater food chain, a genuine but probably exaggerated problem. Sea levels, he says, are rising steadily, but why this is and what dangers it might portend "cannot be predicted until we know much more about its causes."...
... Beyond the specific points of factual dispute, Dyson has said that it all boils down to "a deeper disagreement about values" between those who think "nature knows best" and that "any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil," and "humanists," like himself, who contend that protecting the existing biosphere is not as important as fighting more repugnant evils like war, poverty and unemployment...
... Climate-change specialists often speak of global warming as a matter of moral conscience. Dyson says he thinks they sound presumptuous. As he warned that day four years ago at Boston University, the history of science is filled with those "who make confident predictions about the future and end up believing their predictions," and he cites examples of things people anticipated to the point of terrified certainty that never actually occurred, ranging from hellfire, to Hitler's atomic bomb, to the Y2K millennium bug. "It's always possible Hansen could turn out to be right," he says of the climate scientist. "If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn't have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He's a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don't have a Ph.D. He's published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven't. By the public standard he's qualified to talk and I'm not. But I do because I think I'm right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it's true my career doesn't depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it's more a matter of judgement than knowledge."
Reached by telephone, Hansen sounds annoyed as he says, "There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson," who "doesn't know what he's talking about." In an e-mail message, he adds that his own concern about global warming is not based only on models, and that while he respects the "open-mindedness" of Dyson, "if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework - which he obviously has not done on global warming."...
... But one evening last month they sat down in a living room filled with [Dyson's wife] Imme's running trophies and photographs of their children to watch "An Inconvenient Truth" again. There was a print of Einstein above the television. And then there was Al Gore below him, telling of the late Roger Revelle, a Harvard scientist who first alerted the undergraduate Gore to how severe the climate's problems would become. Gore warned of the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, the vanishing glaciers of Peru and "off the charts" carbon levels in the air. "The so-called skeptics" say this "seems perfectly O.K.," Gore said, and Imme looked at her husband. She is even slighter than he is, a pretty wood sprite in running shoes. "How far do you allow the oceans to rise before you say, This is no good?" she asked Dyson.
"When I see clear evidence of harm," he said.
"Then it's too late," she replied. "Shouldn't we not add to what nature's doing?"
"The costs of what Gore tells us to do would be extremely large," Dyson said. "By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor. I'm concerned about the Chinese."
"They're the biggest polluters," Imme replied.
"They're also changing their standard of living the most, going from poor to middle class. To me that's very precious."
The film continued with Gore predicting violent hurricanes, typhoons and tornados. "How in God's name could that happen here?" Gore said, talking about Hurricane Katrina. "Nature's been going crazy."
"That is of course just nonsense," Dyson said calmly. "With Katrina, all the damage was due to the fact that nobody had taken the trouble to build adequate dikes. To point to Katrina and make any clear connection to global warming is very misleading."
Now came Arctic scenes, with Gore telling of disappearing ice, drunken trees and drowning polar bears. "Most of the time in history the Arctic has been free of ice," Dyson said. "A year ago when we went to Greenland where warming is the strongest, the people loved it."
"They were so proud," Imme agreed. "They could grow their own cabbage."
The film ended. "I think Gore does a brilliant job," Dyson said. "For most people I'd think this would be quite effective. But I knew Roger Revelle. He was definitely a skeptic. He's not alive to defend himself..."
These excerpts don't do justice to Nicholas Dawidoff's entire piece; I recommend that readers here take the time to read the whole thing.
Kudos to the New York Times Magazine for publishing it.
Addendum: The Center for American Progress Action Fund's Climate progress blog has lost its mind over Nicholas Dawidoff's Freeman Dyson profile, calling Dyson's relatively tame comments about James Hansen (certainly, by the standards of Hansen, who has called for the jailing of certain global warming skeptics) "slander."
Climate Progress also blasts the New York Times' Andrew Revkin for mentioning the Dyson profile on Revkin's Dot Earth Blog, demanding that Revkin "retract his absurdly indefensible assertion that 'On climate, Mr. Dyson may be right…,'" which actually was written by Revkin as "On climate, Mr. Dyson may be right or wrong...," which is rather different, though either version is perfectly defensible.
Everybody who hasn't lost his mind knows perfectly well that climate science isn't settled; even the global warming theory proponents don't agree with one another, which is enough right there to prove that whatever the truth turns out to be (and I doubt very much anyone alive on this Earth today will live long enough to know it), the science isn't settled. If the Center for American Progress thinks the New York Times is too skeptical on global warming and that it's wrong for the Times to write of one of our nation's most prominent physicists that he "may be either right or wrong," then the Center for American Progress has pretty much gone out to lunch, having exited through the door at the far, far left.
Diverse Coalition Appeals to Congress Regarding Unjust Provisions of Omnibus Land Management Act
Readers with an interest in property rights, civil rights or simply staying out of jail for doing something one has no idea is illegal will want to review the coalition letter sent to the Congressional leadership, the Attorney General and to President Barack Obama by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences and the National Center for Public Policy Research during the last 24 hours.
Our respective organizations have diverse viewpoints, but we share a deep and abiding belief in due process under the law. We believe that that Congress should perform careful diligence before adding violations to the criminal codes, that federal crimes should be narrowly defined and show clear criminal intent, and that the use of asset forfeiture must be narrowly tailored so that it does not unduly punish the accused before a trial has proven their guilt. As such we have grave concerns about sections of the pending Omnibus Land Management Act of 2009, which passed the Senate last week as H.R. 146, regarding "paleontological resources preservation."
These sections, now contained in the bill under Subtitle Dof Title VI, seek to empower the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior to"protect paleontological resources on Federal land using scientific principles and expertise." We understand that preventing theft of and harm to important fossils on federal land is a serious objective. However, we are concerned that the bill creates many new federal crimes using language that is so broad that the provisions could cover innocent human error. There is also, in defining the crimes, a troubling lack of words such as "knowingly" that clearly establish criminal intent as a prerequisite for prosecution. As Georgetown University legal ethicist John Hasnas has written, to serve the greater goal of justice, all criminal laws must require the government to establish that "one had to knowingly or at least recklessly act in a morally blameworthy way to be subject of criminal punishment."
H.R. 146 would make it illegal to excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface or attempt to excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface any paleontological resources located on Federal land" without special permission from the government. Penalties for violations include up to five years imprisonment. "Paleontological resources" are loosely defined as all "fossilized remains ... that are of paleontological interest and that provide information about the history of life on earth." We are troubled by this definition that paleontological organizations say could cover many common rocks that adults and children collect. The Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences has warned that with this wording, it is easy to visualize "a group of students unknowingly crossing over an invisible line."
We are also concerned about the bill's prohibition against "false labeling" of fossil specimens, an offense that also carries criminal penalties. The bill makes it a crime to "make or submit any false record, account or label for, or any false identification of, any paleontological resource excavated or removed from federal land." This broad language could criminalize innocent misidentifications, limit scientific inquiry, and infringe on the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech. Fossil labeling is a complex process, and even the top museums of the world have been known to revise labeling in their exhibits upon scholarly review or new facts being discovered ..Thus, the fear of making an honest mistake in fossil labeling or even having fossil identifications proven "false" in light of new scientific discoveries could have a chilling effect on new research in paleontology.
We are pleased that the Senate recently improved provisions regarding forfeiture. Language in earlier versions of the legislation would have allowed government officials to engage in the pretrial seizure of "all vehicles and equipment of any person" accused of theft or harm to a "paleontological resource." Forfeiting a person's property without a conviction undermines the bedrock principle of our legal system: that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Past abuses of forfeiture led to bipartisan passage of the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000, and we had feared that these provisions would go against the spirit of these reforms. The Senate heeded our concerns with an amendment, and as passed on March 20, "vehicles and equipment" were removed from the forfeiture language, so that the forfeiture provisions apply only to the "paleontological resources" taken from federal land. This is a marked improvement, and we would oppose any attempts to reinsert forfeiture of personal property in a revised bill.
Above all, we are concerned that a bill containing new federal crimes, fines and imprisonment, and forfeiture provisions may come to the House floor without first being marked up in the House Judiciary Committee. That committee is tasked with providing centralized oversight of criminal legislation, thereby enhancing the fairness and consistency of those enactments. As such we strongly urge that the criminal provisions of the Omnibus Public Land Management Act be stripped from any final legislation until they are subject to Judiciary Committee review and amendment."
Representatives of the signatory organizations of this letter would be happy to meet with you or members of your staff to address these concerns.
Sincerely,
Caroline Fredrickson Director American Civil Liberties Union Washington Legislative Office
Tracie Bennitt President Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences
John Berlau Director, Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs Competitive Enterprise Institute
Kyle O'Dowd Assoc. Executive Director for Policy National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
David A. Ridenour Vice President The National Center for Public Policy Research
Cc: House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer House Majority Whip James Clyburn House Minority Whip Eric Cantor House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lamar Smith President Barack Obama Attorney General Eric Holder
For more information on this issue, see this blog's previous coverage of this here and here. ________________________________
Massive Omnibus Public Land Management Act to See Another Vote
By R.J. Smith:
Sometime today the Omnibus Public Land Management Act will come up for its final vote in Congress. A courageous band of defenders of energy production, natural resources use, public multiple-use of the public lands, and property rights and private land ownership have tenaciously fought this massive 160+ bill package since the fall of 2007.
On Thursday 19 March the Senate completed the complicated bill switch, replacing H.R. 146 (the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 Battlefield Protection Act) with S.22 and then voting on that. The Senate passed the bill 77-20 (2 NV). 20 GOP voted Nay. 21 RINOs voted Yea to further shut down the West, destroy domestic energy production, lock-up tens of millions of acres of public lands in categories that much of the public will never be able to use. Destroying energy production, mining, timber harvest, grazing, and recreation.
Bad enough in normal times. Unforgiveable in a recession and energy shortage.
In addition to the 1,000 miles of new Wild and Scenic River designations there were 2,800 miles of new National Trails that will have the authority to shut down anything that can be seen from the trails that the Feds disapprove of.
Senator Reid had allowed Senator Coburn to offer 6 amendments, 5 of which were defeated, and one of which the Democrats had agreed to pass on a voice vote.
Coburn's successful amendment was to the Paleontological Resources Protection Act section of the Omnibus which would criminalize any private collection of fossils on the public lands. His amendment removed the criminalization of "casual and unintentional" collection of rocks that may contain a fossil or portion of a fossil. However, any knowing collection of a fossil is now a felony, with the Feds having nationalized all fossils on public lands and essentially closing down amateur and independent paleontological discovery, research and collection on the public lands.
But the most important provision of Coburn's amendment was that it removed the bill's draconian provisions to apply civil asset forfeiture laws to all who collect any fossils -- giving the Feds the authority to seize the vehicles and equipment and even the homes, ranches, farms and lands of amateur and professional paleontologists.
Because the original H.R. 146 had already passed the House, the complicated Senate actions sent the Omnibus and the Battlefield bill back over to the House on Monday, with the House needing only to vote to concur with the amended Senate bill.
Yesterday the House Rules Committee voted to consider it under a closed rule -- eliminating the possibility of a motion to recommit and all amendments to the bill. The House Natural Resources Committee minority members had submitted about a dozen amendments for the Committee to consider, but they were rejected. There will now be a one hour debate on the rule and then a one hour debate on the Omnibus -- and then a simple majority vote, guaranteeing that this monstrous bill will pass.
The Democrat leadership even rejected an amendment to codify the right to carry concealed weapons on National Park and National Wildlife Refuge lands -- one of the last regulations from the Bush Department of Interior. A week ago a U.S. District Court judge issued an injunction blocking the regulation. Reportedly the Democrat leadership promised the pro-gun, conservative and Blue Dog Democrats that they would bring up a stand-alone bill to restore Second Amendment rights. But it is highly unlikely that Rep. Pelosi and other extreme liberals will ever allow such a bill.
The genuine hero in the long convoluted efforts to kill this terrible bill was Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) and everyone should make an effort to thank him. He kept the land-grab bottled up for almost a year and a half.
In the House, Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) and Rob Bishop (R-UT) certainly deserve your thanks for fighting this bill in the House and for attempting to have honest and open hearings and debates on the scores of bills in the Omnibus which the House had never considered or debated.
This is another massive "mystery meat" bill with well over a thousand pages of bills which no one has read or understands. Driven by the shameful lust of Congressional members to bring pork to their districts at the expense of American freedom, energy production and security, natural resources use and the locking-out of more and more of the public from the use of their lands.
It is a step closer to making America a Third World country and a feudalistic nation with the government owning an ever-increasing majority of the land and resources.
This post was written by National Center for Public Policy Research Senior Fellow R.J. Smith. To send comments to the author, write him at info@nationalcenter.org. Please state if a letter is not for publication or if you prefer that it be published anonymously.
Addendum: Here's how the vote ended up. ________________
Today's Outrage of the Day goes to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for his reported intention to try again to get the monster Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 (S. 22) into law without proper deliberation.
Following the bill's defeat last Wednesday (under suspension of rules) in the House, Reid reportedly plans to try again by attaching the huge bill as an amendment to a bill, H.R. 146, "The Revolutionary War and War of 1812 Battlefield Protection Act," that has already received House approval, and is to be voted on early this week in the Senate.
As National Center for Public Policy Research Senior Fellow R.J. Smith pointed out in this extensive commentary last week, it's likely that no one has read the bill-cum-amendment, as it's 1,294 pages long and nine inches thick. There have been no hearings, mark-ups or floor debate about most of it.
More on the Omnibus Public Land Management Act (S. 22)
R.J. Smith has expanded his remarks regarding Wednesday's defeat of the horrible Omnibus Public Land Management Act, yet another huge bill Congress voted on without reading. ___________________________
Omnibus Public Land Management Act Defeated - For Now
A followup to our blog post on the Omnibus Public Land Management Act (S. 22) posted during the wee hours this morning, from the New York Times, by Eric Bontrager:
The House rejected an amended omnibus package of more than 160 public lands, water and resources bills despite a last-minute change designed to ease concerns about the bill.
By a vote of 282-144, the House failed to pass S. 22 (pdf) under a suspension of the rules, which barred any amendments from being added to the bill but also required a two-thirds majority for passage...
Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 on House Floor Today - 170 Bills in One; Half Have Had No Hearings
By R.J. Smith:
S. 22, the giant Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, will go to the House floor today (Wednesday, March 11) under suspension of rules. This means debate will be limited to a mere 40 minutes and amendments will not be permitted. Congressmen will be asked to vote on the bill without knowing what is in the 1,294-page, 9-inch thick bill! Some 170 separate bills have all been rolled into this one omnibus. Nearly half of them have never had any hearings, review or mark-up in the House.
The major concern with the bill is the vast expansion of every sort of Federal land ownership, including new and expanded National Parks, National Trails, National Heritage Areas, National Monuments, National Conservation Areas, National Preserves, National Historical Parks, National Historic Sites, and more.
It creates 82 new Wild and Scenic Rivers including over a thousand miles of rivers.
It will also create millions of acres of new Wilderness Areas.
In addition, S. 22 will give legislative authority and statutory permanence to the National Landscape Conservation System. The NLCS was created by decree in June 2000 by then Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. It effectively removed at least 26 million acres from BLM multiple-use management, giving these lands near-Wilderness status. Federal bureaucrats and environmentalists have longed to give this new land-management system official designation, placing it on a par with the National Park System and preventing future secretaries from opening the lands to even necessary and vital energy exploration.
This massive Omnibus bill would lock up millions of acres of land at the height of an economic recession and at a time the U.S. is struggling to improve energy security. Instead of creating jobs and increasing resources, energy supplies and wealth -- it would destroy them. It will shut down cattle grazing, mining, timber harvest, energy exploration and production and recreation.
And it will add another $10-12 billion of Federal spending.
Hundreds of millions of barrels of recoverable oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas will be locked up. It will kill a vital new Liquefied Natural Gas terminal/port in Massachusetts so that Congressman Barney Frank -- who frequently rails against oil companies for pushing energy prices higher -- won't have it spoil his view.
The Omnibus creates a new Coastal and Estuarine Conservation program as well.
It also includes provsions providing Global Warming and Climate Change programs on public lands.
Under the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act it makes it a Federal crime to collect or pick up fossils or fossilized rocks on any Federal lands. It will become a Federal crime for school children to collect fossilized sharks' teeth. And in a scary twist it would extend civil asset forfeiture, permitting the government to seize ownership of all vehicles and equipment used in the gathering of any fossilized material.
The good news is that because the bill is coming up under suspension, it requires a 2/3 vote of the House of Representatives. This means only 146 votes against the bill will be sufficient to derail it.
Please spread the word about this bill and encourage people to contact their Congressman. Because it is coming up tomorrow, time is of the essence.
Thanks for your help.
This post was written by National Center for Public Policy Research Senior Fellow R.J. Smith. To send comments to the author, write him at info@nationalcenter.org. Please state if a letter is not for publication or if you prefer that it be published anonymously.
Senior Fellow Tom Borelli has an op-ed in the D.C. Examiner: "Congress, corporate lobbyists creating Green Bubble."
It begins:
With President Barack Obama and his allies in Congress pushing for a cap-and-trade regulatory program to reduce greenhouse gases, the future of American energy is at a crossroads — and the creation of an economic “Green Bubble” is in the works.
It’s not surprising that liberal politicians embrace the cap-and-trade cause, but to many it is shocking and surprising to see corporate CEOs joining the crusade. The 21st century business model of these CEOs seems to be: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
But their capitulation is likely to lead to history repeating itself, and not in a good way.
If there’s one lesson we all can take from the housing bubble, it’s this: The pursuit of liberal policy goals is not a sustainable business strategy.
The housing crisis developed after businesses yielded to social activism and the seduction of politically-driven and unsustainable economic incentives. It started with the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977, which encouraged banks to lend in poor neighborhoods. The Clinton administration later lowered credit standards, and set subprime lending quotas for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the leftist advocacy group, also pressured banks to make loans, and Congress skewed laws to encourage lenders to give mortgages to buyers with poor prospects for ever repaying them.
With the game rigged to make unsound lending practices profitable over the short-term, Wall Street was happy to play in this government-constructed casino. For a time, it was a win-win situation.
Profits were made, ACORN was pacified and lawmakers deemed lenders “responsible” for providing loans to low-income households with nary an eye cast to the soundness of it all. But when the over-inflated housing market collapsed, all the fun came to a crashing halt.
Yet, like hard-core gambling addicts, some CEOs haven’t learned their lesson. Instead of returning to selling good products at market prices, they want to go back to the craps table. They’re lobbying Congress to create yet another “bubble” in which government regulatory policy creates artificial value, this time in a ubiquitous gas, carbon dioxide.
Call this forthcoming disaster the “Green Bubble,” for it’s based on the notion that fortunes can be made buying and selling something for which there is no real-world market, greenhouse gas emissions credits...
Outrage of the Day: Al Gore Claims Global Warming Theory is Not a Theory
Al Gore on the global warming theory not being a theory:
"The scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a 'on the one hand, on the other hand' issue. It’s not a matter of theory or conjecture, for goodness sake."
Comment: We all know Al Gore is too attracted to the politics of control and his own celebrity status to accurately report facts about global warming, but it he could at least get the definition of "theory" right.
And sorry, Al. Just because you appear to believe in it with all your heart doesn't mean it's been proven. Even Albert Einstein was satisfied to have developed the Theory of General Relativity. If Einstein could live with the word "theory," you should be able to manage it as well, Al.
Carol Browner: Dictating Climate Policy Like Caesar of Old
An op-ed by David Ridenour on President Obama's choice of Carol Browner to serve as a so-called "climate czar" has appeared in newspapers nationwide, including this version from Investor's Business Daily:
Climate Czar Will Reign Like Caesar Of Old
By David A. Ridenour
President Obama vowed to set a new direction of ethics and transparency in government and with his selection of Carol Browner as climate control czar. Unfortunately, her steadfast belief in the far-left policies of extreme environmentalism make that vow impossible to achieve.
An environmental zealot, Browner has so much baggage she could be an airline. But then, maybe not. For despite Browner's best efforts, some of her baggage simply won't stay lost.
Carol Browner is the right person to drive expansion of the state under Barack Obama.
The Washington Examiner recently discovered that she was one of 15 original members of the Commission for a Sustainable World Society, a branch of the Socialist International, an organization linking socialist and labor parties throughout the world.
Among other things, its Declaration of Principles 'demands compensation for . . . social inequities.' That's another way of saying that if you've prospered because of ingenuity or hard work, be prepared to give a lot of it away to those who haven't.
The issue isn't that Browner is a socialist. We crossed the socialism bridge — a real bridge to nowhere — when we sent a man to the White House who promised to spread our wealth around.
The real issue is the attempt to hide this fact from the public. Browner's photograph, which once appeared alongside that of close Vladimir Putin ally Sergei Mironov, was quietly removed from the Socialist International's Web site after the Examiner's story broke. Much like the trillions of dollars in bailouts and economic stimulus, it's as though Browner never existed.
This isn't transparent government, but all-too-transparent politics. Browner has a lot more baggage, too.
Throughout her years as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration, EPA officials routinely violated the Anti-Lobbying Act — a law prohibiting federal employees from using agency money for 'telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress.' In 1995, the EPA flagrantly violated that law when it lobbied against the Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act, a bill that would have curbed some of the EPA's worst abuses.
As James Hinchman, comptroller general of the United States, noted, EPA officials 'distributed EPA fact sheets to various organizations' and 'directly lobbied the Congress.' Not only that, but an EPA regional administrator wrote a strong op-ed designed to stop the bill's passage.
Four years later, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., accused the EPA of violating the Anti-Lobbying Act again. Byrd — who has made a career of steering pork to his state — complained that the EPA's Transportation Partners Program was coordinating and funding anti-road lobbyists against the law and his state's interests. Browner was forced to terminate the program. The following year, Browner was at it yet again. This time, her agency was accused of allowing special interests to improperly influence last-minute — so-called midnight — environmental regulations.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the EPA to preserve communications with such groups. Instead, Browner had her computer hard drive re-initialized, wiping it clean. Lamberth then held the EPA in contempt for 'contumacious conduct.' As little respect as she's shown for the law, Browner has shown even less for science. During her years at the EPA, agency scientists who didn't toe the party line were subjected to relentless harassment.
David Lewis, an EPA Science Achievement Award recipient, publicly criticized the quality of science used in crafting regulations. In response, the EPA charged Lewis with ethics violations and repeatedly denied him promotion. Although he won whistle-blower judgments against the EPA, he was eventually forced into retirement.
The term 'czar' comes from the Latin word caesar — as in Julius Caesar, the Roman leader who proclaimed himself dictator perpetuo (dictator in perpetuity) and oversaw massive expansion of government bureaucracy.
If a czar is actually what President Obama was looking for, Carol Browner may have been the perfect choice, after all.
Ridenour is vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative, nonpartisan think tank.
Anti-global warming protester uses a "Stop Global Warming" sign as an ice scraper at rally at the U.S. Capitol coal-fired power plant Monday
"We don't want the world to boil, no coal, no oil!"
There was no chance, despite the warning of this protest chant, of anything boiling outside in Washington, D.C. today. Global warming activists who threatened "mass civil disobedience" in the nation's capitol Monday probably never expected to be competing with the biggest snowfall of the season.
Not going to get much power from this snowy solar panel...
Yet this seems to happen every time the global warming activists plan a major event to talk about how hot our planet is going to get. (For more information about this practice, see the children's story "Chicken Little.")
...as the non-functioning light bulbs supposedly powered by that solar panel demonstrate.
Hundreds of activists - mostly students, from the looks of it - were protesting Nancy Pelosi's private coal-fired power plant. It's the plant that powers the Capitol complex. Until recently, Pelosi and company pretended to have a carbon-neutral Congress by using taxpayer dollars to buy "carbon offsets" that essentially gave them little more than peace of mind. This practice has since been discontinued. An analysis found it might not be doing any good, and they no longer have faith in throwing money at their embarrassment (now, if we can get them to expand this line of thinking to their spend-and-tax agenda).
David Almasi and Devon Carlin of the National Center for Public Policy Research
Anyway, the Competitive Enterprise Institute enlisted the help of The National Center for Public Policy Research, FreedomWorks and other groups to point out that coal and oil provide plentiful and affordable energy to average Americans. Energy bills are up this year, and there is no way wind and solar - the darling energy-generation methods of today's protestors - are going to provide people with the amount of energy they need at the prices they can afford.
No one is against new and alternative sources of energy, but it's their way or the highway in the minds of these protestors. If they are successful, expect bigger bills and energy shortages in the future.
This blog post was compiled largely from notes compiled by David Almasi. _________________________
Note in this blog post by environmentalist Bill McKibben the announcement that James Hansen, who directs an agency of the U.S. government, is planning to get arrested in order "to give [Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress] the political space they need to act on their convictions."
McKibben believes those convictions include banning the burning of coal, which provides about half of our electricity, and other radical acts related to combatting the alleged threat of human-caused global warming. Evidently, these guys believe that a few radicals getting arrested will convince Congress to wreck what's left of the economy on purpose.
My sense is that, despite a fairly high percentage of duffuses among Congressional Democrats, they aren't dumb enough to intentionally sabotage economic recovery while spending hundreds of billions that they told the public are being spent to "stimulate" the economy.
There's a reason, you know, that President Obama has signaled to Congress that he will be perfectly happy to wait until 2010 for an anti-global warming bill. My guess is that perfect timing for him is soon enough to appease the left in the 2012 Democrat primary, and late enough that the economic pain of such legislation won't be felt until after the November 2012 election.
But somehow, all that seems almost a side issue, compared to the spectacle that is a government agency head getting arrested by government employees in order to pressure the government to do something it supposedly wants to do anyway.
I'm not sure this really is a government. It looks more like a bad circus.
Addendum, 2/25/09: See Hansen, on videotape, inviting the public to participate in what organizers apparently hope will be the "largest mass civil disobedience for the climate in U.S. history." [Snapshot shown above]
Hansen doesn't claim to be speaking for NASA's Goddard Institute in this video, but it seems inappropriate at best for a government agency head to urge his fellow citizens to break the law. If federal agency heads don't respect the law, why should the rest of us?
Possibly old-fashioned concepts like obeying the law, along with paying for our own mortgages, went out with the Bush Administration.
Roger Pielke, Jr. of the Promethus Blog spotted a little egg on the faces of ex-V.P. Al Gore and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon the other day.
I wouldn't be surprised if he noticed before they did.
It seems the esteemed gentlemen submitted an op-ed to Britain's Financial Times without fact-checking it first (or, more likely, telling the lackey who fact-checks to fact-check the lackey who writes).
The op-ed claims: "In the US, there are now more jobs in the wind industry than in the entire coal industry."
Roger asked:
First, is this in fact true?
Second, if it is true, how can it be that wind can ever be cost competitive with coal? Consider that coal, according to the US EIA was responsible for generating 155,000 thousand megawatt-hours of energy production in November, 2008. Wind was responsible for 1,300 thousand megawatt hours. This means that the US saw about 120 times as much energy produced from coal as wind. If it takes more employees to generate 0.8% of the energy as coal produces, how can it ever be cost competitive?
Something does not add up. Someone please explain this.
Somebody did.
It seems that, for the wind industry totals, the esteemed gentlemen counted every job involved in supplying equipment to the wind industry, including component manufacturing, legal services, marketing, etc., and for the coal industry, the men counted only miners.
Though in this particular revolution, it appears they are starting with children's books published before 1985.
Possibly that's to get us used to the idea.
To be fair, though, Congress didn't only vote to ban books. The legislation behind this, the Consumer Product Safety Modernization Act of 2008, also eviscerates a significant chunk of our nation's cultural heritage, kills jobs (see the links below for stories about what this is doing to some small businesses), and hurts charities.
(If you hadn't yet heard that used bookstores, thrift shops and other establishments have begun throwing out large numbers of children's books, as well as children's clothes, toys and other goods, read this article by the Manhattan Institute's Walter Olson, and then head over to his superlative website, Overlawyered.com, for more details and updates.)
I checked to see if our fearless leader voted for this bill, but he blew off the vote entirely. His chief-of-staff Rahm Emmanuel, then an Illinois Congressman, was an original co-sponsor in the House, and Rep. Bobby Rush, also of Illinois, was the main sponsor.
In the Senate, the only "no" votes were: Allard (R-CO), Barrasso (R-WY), Bunning (R-KY), Burr (R-NC), Coburn (R-OK), Cochran (R-MS), Corker (R-TN), DeMint (R-SC), Ensign (R-NV), Enzi (R-WY), Kyl (R-AZ), Vitter (R-LA) and Wicker (R-MS).)
Folks, this is what big government gets you. Brace yourselves for more.
P.S. If you sell used clothes on EBay, yard sales, etc., beware. The penalty for breaking this law is fines up to $100,000, prison time, or both. You don't have to harm anyone to go to prison.
Watch the Borellis Live Online on Fox's "Strategy Room" Wednesday
By David Almasi:
Project 21 Fellow Deneen Borelli is scheduled to discuss ACORN and the so-called "stimulus" bill and other current events as part of the group discussion on the Fox News Channel's online "Strategy Room" program on Wednesday, February 18 between 9:00 am and 10:00 am eastern.
Tom Borelli, the director of the National Center's Free Enterprise Project, is set to be participating in the"Strategy Room" discussion later on the same day - 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm eastern - to discuss the detrimental economic effects of "cap-and-trade" regulatory policy and breaking news.
To access the live Internet broadcast, click here and then click the "STREAM THIS NOW" headline in the center or the page under the photo.
To learn more about Fox's "Strategy Room" Internet talk show, click here to see an article about the program that appeared in this past Monday's New York Times.
This post was written by National Center for Public Policy Research Executive Director David Almasi. To send comments to the author, write him at info@nationalcenter.org. Please state if a letter is not for publication or if you prefer that it be published anonymously.
Writing on National Review Online, Henry I. Miller excoriates the Environmental Protection Agency.
Here's just a sample:
...The EPA has long been more concerned with public relations than public health. An EPA scheme that was exposed in 2005 planned to divert research funds to pay outside public-relations consultants up to $5 million over five years to improve the website of its Office of Research and Development, conduct focus groups on how to polish the office’s image, and produce ghostwritten articles praising the agency “for publication in scholarly journals and magazines.”
It’s no surprise that EPA must buy good press. The agency is relentlessly inept and corrupt, and motivated by radical ideology rather than a genuine desire to protect the environment. It serves not the public interest, but the most extreme and doctrinaire environmentalists.
The EPA’s payola scheme is similar to the agency’s longstanding practice of buying influence by doling out hundreds of millions of dollars each year to non-profit organizations—money that, according to the inspector general and Government Accountability Office, is dispersed with no public notice, competition, or accountability. Specifically, they documented systematic malfeasance by regulators, including: (1) making grants to grantees who were unable to carry out the terms of the grants; (2) favoring an exclusive clique of grantees without opening the grants to competition; (3) funding “environmental” grants for activities that lack any apparent environmental benefit; and (4) failing to ensure that grantees performed the objectives identified in the grants.
Misconduct, mendacity, and conflicts of interest are just business as usual at the EPA...
With all the other governmental disasters going on, scandals that are business-as-usual at the EPA can fly under the radar. Kudos to Henry Miller for shedding light on this subject.
When University of Washington Professor Eric Steig announced in a news conference and paper published in the January 22 edition of the journal Nature that he and several colleagues had removed one of many thorns in the sides of climate alarmists -- in this case, evidence that Antarctica is cooling -- he received extensive worldwide attention in the mainstream press.
But when a noteworthy error was found in Stieg's research less than two weeks after it's publication, of the mainstream press, only an opinion column in the London Telegraph and a blog associated with the Australian Herald Sun carried the news.
The Stieg paper's release was covered by 27 newspapers, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times, by CNN, by the Associated Press, by NPR and quite a few others (see reviews of the coverage at the end of this post).
After independent analyst Steve McIntyre discovered a noteworthy error in the data, and released his results on his influential blog Climate Audit beginning on February 1, based on a Nexis search I conducted February 6, none of these outlets chose to inform their readers.
Here's how the Stieg research showing supposed warming was received by the mainstream press:
NPR covered it twice (a January 21 package by Richard Harris and a January 23 Ira Flatow interview of Steig), with no hard questions either time (Flatow called Steig's paper "probably historic").
A January 22 piece in the Seattle Times by science reporter Sandi Doughton contained this little editorial:
By bringing Antarctica in from the cold, the new study could undermine the small cadre of global-warming skeptics who still argue that the planet is not getting hotter, or that humans are not to blame. Many have used the apparent cooling in Antarctica to attack global climate models and point out perceived weaknesses in the scientific consensus that emissions from automobiles and factories are beginning to change global climate.
A January 22 New York Times piece by Kenneth Chang presented the report along with quotes from scientists who thought it by and large likely accurate. One scientist was quoted saying, "But the idea of a long-term cooling is pretty clearly debunked." No one urging caution about Stieg's results was quoted.
CNN.com's report began:
Antarctica is warming in line with the rest of the world, according to a new study on climate change in Antarctica.
Rather than being the last bastion to resist global warming, U.S. research has found that for the past 50 years much of the continent of Antarctica has been getting warmer.
For years common belief among scientists studying climate change was that a large part of Antarctica, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, has been getting colder while the rest of the world has warmed.
However the new research from the University of Washington has found that warming in West Antarctica exceeded one-tenth of a degree Celsius per decade for the past 50 years, which more than offsets the cooling in East Antarctica...
The CNN.com piece ended with quotes from Stieg.
The AP's Seth Borenstein's January 21 wire report began "Antarctica, the only place that had oddly seemed immune from climate change, is warming after all, according to a new study," and included a quote from global warming activist scientist and study co-author Michael Mann, saying the study refuted the views of climate "contrarians." Borenstein did, however, include two quotes from other scientists who raised questions about the study.
The Los Angeles Times' Thomas H. Maugh II began with an editorial:
Scientists have long believed that Antarctica has been bucking the global warming trend, but that is not the case, new research shows.
East Antarctica, as assorted studies have shown, has been cooling recently, but the remainder of the continent is warming at a rate that offsets the cooling, according to satellite and ground data.
Global-warming skeptics have pointed to the presumed cooling of the continent as evidence that researchers' computer projections of climate change are in error, but the new findings reported Thursday appear to refute their criticisms...
Maugh's readers weren't told that any scientists had doubts.
The San Francisco Chronicle went still further into alarmism. Science editor David Perlman told his readers flatly that "the issue [of Antarctic warming] has apparently been resolved." The piece was headlined: "All of Antarctica Appears to Be Warming."
The Guardian titled its piece, "Scientists Solve Enigma of Antarctic 'Cooling,'" summarized it by claiming "Research 'kills off' climate skeptic argument by showing average temperature across the continent has risen over the last 50 years." The Guardian included no alternative points of view.
Co-authors of Stieg's paper included David Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Scott Rutherford of Roger Williams University, Michael Mann of Penn State, Josefino Comiso of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Drew Shindell of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Followers of the global warming issue will easily recognize Michael Mann as the proponent of the since-disgraced "hockey stick" global warming graph and an activist global warming activist and the Goddard Institute as run by one of the world's most infamous global warming alarmists, James Hansen. Stieg himself is a contributor to the ardently pro-alarmist and environmentalist-supported PR blog RealClimate. Despite this, none of the mainstream press stories I reviewed mentioned the activism activities of authors.
On the other side of the question, here are samples from Andrew Booker's op-ed column in the UK Telegraph critical of Stieg:
...So it predictably made headlines across the world last week when a new study, from a team led by Professor Eric Steig, claimed to prove that the Antarctic has been heating up after all. As on similar occasions in the past, all the usual supporters of the cause were called in to whoop up its historic importance. The paper was published in Nature and heavily promoted by the BBC. This, crowed journalists such as Newsweek's Sharon Begley, would really be one in the eye for the "deniers" and "contrarians."
and
One of the first to express astonishment [about the Stieg paper] was Dr Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer in global warming, who wryly observed "it is hard to make data where none exists." A disbelieving Ross Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for NASA, sent Professor Steig a caustic email ending: "with statistics you can make numbers go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage."
As Noel Sheppard reports on NewsBusters.org, 54% of American voters say the media makes global warming appear worse than it really is. Who can be surprised?
Tom Borelli, PhD, director of the National Center's Free Enterprise Project, appeared on the Fox News Channel's "Glenn Beck" program today at 5:00 pm eastern to discuss the appointment of General Electric CEO Jeffery Immelt to a new presidential advisory panel.
President Barack Obama today announced members of his new Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Immelt is one of the members. Tom has been a leading critic of Immelt's corporate advocacy for environmental causes at the peril of consumers, stockholders and employees.
In 2007, Tom named Immelt one of the top five worst corporate CEOs, noting:
...Immelt's global warming strategy is causing a series of unintended consequences. For example, the incandescent light bulb - a GE product and invention of its founder Thomas Edison - will be phased out by federal law.
Over the past year, GE lobbyists had to fight hard to defeat outright bans of incandescent bulbs and buy time to restructure its lighting business that currently relies more on traditional bulbs.
GE's coal business is also feeling the heat from concerns over global warming. While it has invested heavily in Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC), a technology that captures carbon dioxide from coal-fired electricity plants, environmentalists have another plan - just ban the use of coal.
This year, environmental activists have been successful in blocking the construction of a number of coal-fired power plants including 8 of 11 plants in Texas. The termination of the Texas power plants resulted in the cancellation of orders for GE's steam turbines worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
This post was written by National Center for Public Policy Research Executive Director David Almasi. To send comments to the author, write him at info@nationalcenter.org. Please state if a letter is not for publication or if you prefer that it be published anonymously.
At least $8.6 billion of President Obama’s proposed $1.2 trillion stimulus plan is meant to fund dubious special interest policy initiatives of environmental activists and should immediately be jettisoned, says Deneen Borelli, full-time Fellow with the Project 21 national black leadership network.
"It's outrageous that taxpayer money is slated to be used to fund the agenda of environmental special interest groups. These special interest groups are using global warming alarmism to fund dubious projects while discouraging the use of fossil fuels," says Borelli. "If liberal lawmakers really cared about stimulating the economy, they would remove rules and regulations that block the development of more fossil fuels. This would provide good-paying jobs and lower energy costs for Americans. Instead, they appear only interested in using their combined force of money, power and influence to fleece taxpayers of their money and their freedom."
Among the green earmarks in the bill legislation cited by Borelli:
* A $2 billion expenditure for "near zero emissions powerplant(s)." This money apparently will be used to revive the FutureGen coal-fired power plan in Mattoon, Illinois. Federal funding for FutureGen was cut off by the Department of Energy in 2008 due in part to excessive construction costs. Reviving funding has been a goal of Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), and is included despite past criticism of coal-based power generation by President Obama, Vice President Biden and Energy Secretary Stephen Chu.
* $600 million set aside to purchase new hybrid vehicles for federal employees. While there is no documented need for the replacement of vehicles in the federal motor pool, hybrid vehicles have been criticized for performance, cost, safety and the environmental risks created through the production and disposal of their batteries.
* In a December 6, 2008 address, then-President-elect Obama called for a "massive effort" for “replacing old heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs" in federal buildings. The stimulus bill would earmark $6 billion to address this by, among other actions, changing the use of conventional incandescent light bulbs to riskier compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), which pose a risk of mercury poisoning if broken.
Borelli added: "Lawmakers are cramming a feel-good energy and environmental agenda into this so-called stimulus bill. Investing in FutureGen, hybrid vehicles and light bulbs will only stimulate the special interest groups that are inflating the 'green bubble' that could be the next thing to threaten our nation's economic stability."
Project 21, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research, has been a leading voice of the African-American community since 1992. For more information, contact David Almasi at (202) 543-4110 x11 or project21@nationalcenter.org, or visit Project 21's website at www.project21.org/P21Index.html
Regulation Expected to Push Gas Stations Out of Business
From Alfred Lee at the Pasadena Star-News, information that new environmental regulations in California will push some gas stations out of out of business:
Dozens, and potentially hundreds, of gas stations around California are choosing to shut down rather than comply with a state mandate that would require owners to purchase new equipment to reduce vapor emissions at the pump.
The requirement, known as Phase II in the state's Enhanced Vapor Recovery Program, is set to go into effect in April. It requires gas station owners to individually purchase tens of thousands of dollars of equipment designed to prevent harmful vapors from escaping into the air when gasoline is pumped.
But smaller retailers say that the requirement puts an unfair burden on businesses that don't sell enough gasoline to offset the extra cost - and that don't contribute much to the problem in the first place.
Among them is George Fasching, who after 31 years of selling gasoline at Fasching's Car Wash in Arcadia, stopped in December.
"I came to the decision that I was too small a volume operator to continue on with the expenses imposed by the bureaucracy of the state," Fasching said.
April's requirements would have cost him $35,000, he said. Fasching used to sell the gasoline as a convenience for his car wash customers, and blames the new regulations for forcing him to stop.
"It will have some effect on my business, but at least I have the relief that I don't have to deal with these people anymore," he said.
As of the end of December 2008, the South Coast Air Quality Management District had heard back from 3,109 of its 4,500 sites about EVR Phase II.
Seventy-six - or 2.4 percent - indicated they will be shutting down on April 1, 2009 rather than upgrade their sites...
As a followup to this press release, Tom Borelli will be a guest on the G. Gordon Liddy national radio broadcast on Friday, January 16, at 10:30 AM Eastern. _____
So Was Barbarossa, Buddy, But It Doesn't Mean We Approve of It
"'The fact that we got this coalition to coalesce around a set of choices I think is impressive,'" said Jeffrey R. Immelt, chief executive of General Electric." -Coalition Agrees on Emissions Cuts, Steven Mufson, Washington Post, January 15, 2009
More on our take on rich executives lobbying Congress to raise energy prices on poorer people so they can get richer still here. ____
At Energy and Commerce Hearing, House Conservatives Call CEOs to Account
Looks like conservatives on the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee are calling turncoat corporate CEOs to account on the Hill today:
From Stephen Power's account on the Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital blog, as posted there by Keith Johnson:
The Waxman era begins: The first congressional hearing of 2009 on climate change got off to an acrimonious start Thursday, as House Republicans blasted a group of corporate CEOs and environmental groups for staging a press conference instead of appearing before the House Ènergy and Commerce Committee to answer lawmakers’ questions about their ideas for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The Republicans also vowed to hold members of the US Climate Action Partnership accountable for their own use of fossil fuels, by demanding they explain to the committee whether they traveled to Washington by corporate aircraft and how much fuel they used.
“Be prepared for a battle,” Illinois Republican John Shimkus said at the start of the hearing by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Mr. Shimkus vowed to “hold accountable” any Democrats from coal-abundant and petroleum-producing states who vote in favor of legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions and set up an emissions trading system in which companies would have to buy permits allowing them to pollute.
Mr. Shimkus and other Republicans called such legislation, which is favored by President-elect Barack Obama, “a shell game designed to hide” the true costs of regulation from consumers...
Good, good, good.
Using Congress for profiteering is reprehensible; doing it in the name of conservation while flying in on corporate jets to lobby for disproportionately-higher energy costs on lower-income and minority populations makes it doubly so.
I'm not at the hearing, but who wants to bet they have it heated nice and toasty on this bitterly cold global warmy January day?
The only creature comfort the conspirators will be missing is a collection of puppies for the CEOs and the liberal Congressmen to kick on their way out of the hearing room (or so I assume).
We issued a press release on this expensive nonsense earlier this morning:
Energy Bubble, Anyone?
Henry Waxman Gives Public a Look at the Corporate-Congressional Alliance that Threatens to Raise Energy Prices in Pursuit of Private Profit
Thursday's first hearing of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee since Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) ousted Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) as chairman is drawing criticism from the National Center for Public Policy Research, which says the hearing illustrates how powerful corporate interests are working with influential special interests and with the liberal majority in Congress to use government to enhance private profits at great cost to economic growth and liberty.
The hearing will, according to the committee's announcement, "present the perspectives of members of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership ('USCAP'), a coalition of over 30 businesses and nongovernmental organizations that has called for Congress to pass legislation to address the climate change threat."
"Today's hearing on the U.S. Climate Action Partnership exposes the dangers posed by the new political economy," said Tom Borelli PhD, director of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research. "The alignment of corporations, special interest groups and liberal members of Congress aiming for this legislative goal is frightening. The housing bubble was born from an alliance of similar interest groups and now we are about to repeat the same mistake with energy policy."
Corporate members of USCAP are trying to profit from a government-mandated "cap and trade" anti-global warming policy by selling so called carbon credits from reductions in greenhouse gases. Under cap-and-trade, emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, would be limited by the federal government. Companies that are over their emission allotment will be forced to purchase credits from another company that is below its allowance.
Under a cap-and-trade policy, companies would be forced to raise energy prices to reduce their emissions. This would unleash a series of adverse economic consequences and hardships for Americans, as the National Center's Vice President David Ridenour noted in a recent article in Investor's Business Daily:
* A study by the National Association of Manufacturers projected that emissions caps, similar to those rejected earlier this year by the U.S. Senate calling for a 63% cut in emissions by 2050, would reduce U.S. gross domestic product by up to $269 billion and cost 850,000 jobs by 2014.
* According to a study conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the restrictions could raise gasoline prices by 29%, electricity prices by 55% and natural gas prices by 15% by 2015.
* A 2007 report by the Congressional Budget Office, examining the costs of cutting carbon emissions just 15%, noted that customers "would face persistently higher prices for products such as electricity and gasoline. Those price increases would be regressive in that poorer households would bear a larger burden relative to their income than wealthier households would."
"The alignment of corporate and government agendas for the so called "social good" is eerily similar of the warnings in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged which described the unraveling of capitalism" said Deneen Borelli, a full-time Fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research-sponsored African-American leadership network Project 21.
"Pursuing legislation that will raise energy prices in the middle of a recession is economic suicide. It exposes the inability of these CEOs to connect the dots between economic growth and their future earnings," added Tom Borelli. "Let's not forget USCAP corporate membership reads like a who's who list of corporate losers; AIG and Lehman Brothers were founding members and General Electric stock is trading at multiyear lows. Ford, Chrysler and GM are also members -- need I say more?" said Tom Borelli.
"Unfortunately for shareholders, the USCAP CEOs, like their banking industry colleagues, have executed poor risk management regarding the impact of cap-and-trade on their businesses. While banking CEOs thought real estate prices could only go up, USCAP CEOs somehow think there is no downside risk to high energy prices and handing over more power to government bureaucrats. They also think the environmental special interest groups are their friends. That's incredibly naïve," Tom Borelli said.
"We know for a fact that some USCAP CEOs have not analyzed the impact of cap-and-trade on their business. In response to my question about the company's participation in USCAP at the Caterpillar shareholder meeting in 2007, CEO James Owens admitted he did not conduct a cost benefit analysis of cap-and-trade on his business. Shareholders should be outraged over such incompetence," said Deneen Borelli.
"ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva has also not done his homework," said Tom Borelli. "ConocoPhillips has made a significant investment in Canadian oil sands, which release about three times the amount of carbon dioxide than traditional oil. Since cap-and-trade will increase the cost of carbon emissions, Mulva is lobbying to increase the cost of his investment. In addition, his USCAP partner Natural Resources Defense Council is taking legal action to block the processing of the oil sands at a ConocoPhillips refinery."
"Finally, if General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt is so concerned about the state of the planet," Tom Borelli Continued, "why was he selling electricity infrastructure equipment to Iran? Nuclear Iran poses a much greater threat than carbon emissions."
America doesn't need cap and trade and it doesn't need a carbon tax. Any look at the sorry state at the USCAP portion of America's business community, however, makes clear that of the two, cap and trade is worse, because it pits the profit interests of big business directly against the pocketbook interests of the little guy. ____
Statement on USFWS Plans to Introduce More Mexican Gray Wolves in the Southwest
Senior Fellow R.J. Smith has issued a statement on USFWS plans to introduce still more Mexican Gray Wolves in the Southwest:
For a quarter of a century the controversial program to repopulate the Southwest with Mexican Gray Wolves has created a constant political struggle in New Mexico and Arizona. There were very good reasons why the early settlers across the West and the local, state and federal governments cooperated in eliminating the wolves. The large numbers of wolves made cattle and sheep ranching nearly impossible with their constant depredations on the livestock and they also threatened family dogs and even children.
However, as radical Greens have gained influence with liberal politicians and the media, they have been able to gain support for their efforts to force family farmers, ranchers and landowners off the land and return it to dangerous predators. It is part and parcel of their ongoing program of "rural cleansing": to remove people from the land and return it to near wilderness. It is part of a massive program called the Wildlands Project, which even enjoyed support within the Bush administration's political appointees in the Department of Interior.
The USFWS has said that the federal efforts to reintroduce the wolves require the release of still more wolves in order to improve the chances for success. By success they must mean the total elimination of people and livestock in the Southwest. Apparently they have noticed that there are still some ranchers managing to survive who have not lost all their livestock. The chief Mexican Wolf official with the Southwest field office of the USFWS said that the current recovery plan's target wolf population is not high enough.
There have been continuous conflicts in the relatively limited areas where the wolves have already been released over the last decade. Constant wolf attacks on livestock and farm dogs, wolves circling farmhouses at night and wolves gathering near rural school bus stops. There have already been calls for building wolf-proof bus stop shelters in order to protect children from possible attacks. It is widely know that federal officials seldom respond quickly enough following reports of livestock predation to document the event and attempt to capture the specific wolves involved. Although the feds have had to recapture some wolves which have repeatedly been involved in predation, their often slow response has led to examples of ranchers and farmers acting to protect their livestock and their families.
Yet the feds not only want to release still more wolves but they want to release them across a far wider area of the Southwest.
One wonders what oath of office the politicians took who acted to place the well being of wolves before that of American families and children.
Rumor has it that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is re-introducing his massive federal land control bill.
The National Center for Public Policy Research polled African-Americans on the legislation. 52% oppose the legislation while only 37% support it.
As our vice president, David Ridenour, noted when the poll was released:
This is a key test of whether liberal politicians listen to African-Americans who cast 95% of their votes for Barack Obama and accounted for nearly one-quarter of all of President-elect Obama's votes. Black Americans don't want more land locked up if it means restricting energy development and home construction, driving up the price of both. And that's precisely what this bill would do.
The Omnibus Public Lands Management Act, an amalgamation of more than 100 bills that would place new restrictions on energy exploration, home construction, and business activity, has been scheduled by Harry Reid (D-NV) for a vote during this week's special lame duck session of the Senate.
The bill would restrict use of millions of additional acres of land, both public and private, through the creation of new National Heritage Areas (a program creating de facto federal zoning), new wilderness area designations, and management practices that would clear the way for special protections for so-called "view scapes," "sound scapes," and even "smell scapes."
The National Center also helped Americans for Tax Reform gather signatures for a coalition letter to the U.S. Senate on this issue that ATR spearheaded, a PDF of which can be found here.
Addendum, January 12, 2009: The bill was brought to the Senate floor Sunday, January 11, and adopted 66-12. ____
Carol Browner, the latest Clinton administration retread to be tapped by Barack Obama, will serve in the newly created and still undefined role of White House ‘energy czar.’ If her statements earlier this year are any indication, she also will serve as court jester...
Husband David has an op-ed in today's Washington Times as well as other papers on what a cap on greenhouse gas emissions would due to our economy.
An excerpt:
When our economic bus is teetering at the edge of a cliff, it's a bad time to throw on some extra weight.
Yet government-mandated restrictions on carbon emissions would do precisely that, adding enormous additional weight to an economy already reeling. This additional weight shouldn't just be thrown from the bus -- it should be thrown under it.
Most econometric studies agree that restricting greenhouse-gas emissions would slow our already sluggish economy.
A study by the National Association of Manufacturers projected that emissions caps similar to those rejected earlier this year by the U.S. Senate calling for a 63-percent cut in emissions by 2050, would reduce U.S. gross domestic product by up to $269 billion and cost 850,000 jobs by 2014.
The Heritage Foundation estimated such restrictions would result in cumulative GDP losses of up to $4.8 trillion and employment losses of more than 500,000 a year by 2030.
Other studies suggest smaller economic costs: Duke University's Nicholas Institute estimates a GDP loss of $245 billion by 2030 while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates a GDP drop of $238 billion to $983 billion.
Sharp emissions restrictions would also push the costs of energy and other consumer products higher. According to a study conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the restrictions could raise gasoline prices 29 percent, electricity prices 55 percent and natural-gas prices 15 percent by 2015.
The people most vulnerable to such price increases are the poor. A 2007 report by the Congressional Budget Office examining the costs of cutting carbon emissions just 15 percent noted that customers "would face persistently higher prices for products such as electricity and gasoline. Those price increases would be regressive in that poorer households would bear a larger burden relative to their income than wealthier households would." Indeed, the lowest quintile income group would pay nearly double what the highest quintile income group would, as a proportion of income, pay in increased energy costs.
And it appears that all this economic pain would be an utterly meaningless gesture. Patrick Michaels, former president of the American Association of State Climatologists, who is now with the Cato Institute, says reducing U.S. emissions 63 percent would prevent a mere 0.013 degrees Celsius in warming. With emissions from China, India and other developing nations growing at breakneck speed, even this modest benefit would be completely erased.
Some argue that we should undergo this pain anyway to set an example for others to follow. The European Union tried that and now, apparently, they're throwing in their collective recycled-material towel... Read it all here.
What Greenhouse Gas Restrictions Could Do to Our Economy
Writing in Investor's Business Daily today, David Ridenour says, "When our economic bus is teetering at the edge of a cliff, it's a bad time to throw on some extra weight."
He's talking about government-mandated restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions and what they could do to our economy.
The Root Features Project 21 Commentary on Green Policies Hurting Blacks' Bottom Line
By David Almasi:
As cooler weather approaches, there are indications that it is going to be both a cold and expensive winter. Scientifically-monitored sunspot activity and the wise Farmer's Almanac both predict it will be cooler than normal, and the federal government is predicting the cost of heating a home will be a lot higher.
Already earning less than the average American household, black and brown households will take the biggest hit unless something is done - now and over the long-term - to bring down energy prices.
Project 21 Deneen Borelli has a new commentary that was published today on The Root, a black-focused web site jointly operated by The Washington Post and Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard University.
Deneen points out how policies promoted by radical environmentalists and their political allies on Capitol Hill are keeping us from tapping into America's rich natural resources and freeing our nation from foreign energy dependence:
Failing schools, crime and single-parent households are just a few of the challenges facing urban communities. Now, thanks to radical environmentalists and their supporters, a bunch I like to call "Club Green," they must face soaring energy as well...
Despite the hype about wind power and boasts about other renewable energy sources, 85 percent of our nation's energy comes from fossil fuels. Energy from renewable sources such as wind and solar only currently provide about 7 percent of our power and cannot replace fossil fuels anytime soon.
In its September 2008 report, the federal Energy Information Agency predicted a 25 percent rise in heating oil prices and a 17 percent rise in natural gas prices this winter as well as a 9.5 percent projected increase in electricity costs in 2009. Adding to that, gasoline still hovers near $4 a gallon, and the public demands more domestic energy production. A recent Rasmussen poll of likely voters found that 67 percent supported new offshore fossil fuel exploration.
Our nation is blessed with an abundant supply of natural resources. The problem is that Congress, at the demand of Club Green, blocks access to these resources at the peril of families.
This post was written by National Center for Public Policy Research Executive Director David Almasi. To send comments to the author, write him at info@nationalcenter.org. Please state if a letter is not for publication or if you prefer that it be published anonymously.
Project 21 members and staff have been published in the Washington Times' op-ed page several times recently. Fans of the group may wish to click on one or more of the following:
"Speed-Limit Myths" - Project 21 chairman Mychal Massie takes on Senator John Warner of Virginia's trial balloon favoring a federal mandate to lower speed limits. After explaining who/what really would benefit from such a policy (hint: not the environment, but it involves something green), Massie suggests that "it might be better if Mr. Warner just drove off into the sunset. If only he could go a little faster."
"History is the Final Judge" - Project 21 member Ak'Bar A. Shabazz asks, "if we disregard the calls for freedom and democracy in places such as Tibet, where are we placing ourselves as it relates to world history?," and quotes Martin Luther King, Jr., saying "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
"Property Rights" - Project 21 research associate Reece Epstein examines the government's use of eminent domain power in a predominately black city to take choice land from small businesses in order to sell it to large ones. He says, "Self-professed champions of the poor don't help when they oppose eminent domain reform. Doing so simply allows government to take from one and give to another - at the expense of communities - just to rake in tax dollars."
"Let Them Eat Cake" - Project 21 member Kevin L. Martin calls on Congress to allow more oil drilling, saying "There may be a day when we all have electric cars, but the one I have right now doesn't have a plug, solar panel or hydrogen converter. It takes gasoline. While I don't object to the possibility of alternative energy sources in the future, I know that most Americans own cars that need gas and live in homes that are powered at least in part by coal. When the elites stifle access to plentiful power, the financial burden is a lot smaller for them. They can afford to pay more for a hybrid car and rave about getting better gas mileage. They can also feel better about their indulgences when they buy imaginary 'carbon credits' that give them the moral authority to use more energy than they want to allow the masses. Like Marie Antoinette, they think the rest of America can 'eat cake' like they can. Sadly, we can't."
"The Civil Rights Shakedown: Myth or Reality?" - Project 21 fellow Deneen Borelli takes a look at shakedown allegations against Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and describes her own effort to urge a corporate board not to be part of such a process. Deneen wrote, in part, "Frustrated by what appears to me to be a long history of Mr. Jackson and Mr. Sharpton using semi-subtle campaigns to pressure corporations to donate, I spoke up at the JPMorgan shareholder meeting. After Mr. Jackson spoke, I took his place at the microphone and asked Mr. Dimon and his board: 'Will there ever be a day where you will stand up and say 'No' to Mr. Jackson and to his demands and messages of victimization and divisiveness? This is the United States of America, and this is not the 1960s. People should be hired based on their talents and they should be retained based on their results. There should not be color-coded hiring in the United States.' Shareholders clapped. But, unlike Mr. Jackson's, my question went unanswered."
"Gaining Access with Identification" - Project 21 research associate Reece Epstein turns the Voter ID debate into a civil rights issue -- but maybe not in the way you think: "The bottom line is that someone without proper identification is out of step. And those who want to keep them there are out of line."
"Black America is Still Not Free" - Project 21 research associate Reece Epstein reviews the new book "Sweet Release: The Last Step to Black Freedom" by psychologist Dr. James Davidson, Jr.: "...although he criticizes liberals, Davidson is quick to note he is no conservative. He writes: 'My behaviors and ideas [are] anything but conservative. Trying to improve one's social and economic lot by rejecting traditional societal and black community standards for achievement seemed antithetical to [being] conservative.' The apolitical goal of Sweet Release is to create advancers: 'What you seek is simply not in the 'hood. It never has been, and it never will be... We must now move beyond our own remaining chains, beyond the mental barriers that keep so many of us constrained in our thoughts and deeds.'"
"Governance drives this crisis" - Project 21 associate and Initiative for Public Policy Analysis executive director Thompson Ayodele asks, "Hunger is an everyday problem in Africa. What can be done about it?," and answers, in part: "For one thing, a better governmental infrastructure and incentives can stimulate production if done right. Anything that would dampen competition, and thus lower the incentive to produce, should be avoided. When these programs are instituted, they must be administered with professionalism and transparency."
"Too few Watts: 'Segregated News' is Not the Answer" - Project 21 chairman Mychal Massie isn't too thrilled about former GOP Congressman J.C. Watts' plans to create a black news television channel: "...the question begging an answer is what exactly constitutes 'black news.' There are things that happen to black people in black communities that don't really have an impact on the rest of America, but that doesn't mean they should be provincial to black America. News happening in America is American news, and it should be everyone's concern."
"Jesse Jackson Outrage Strategy: No Dough, No Go?" - Project 21 staff director David Almasi and research associate Justin Danhof wonder why Jesse Jackson never challenged XM Satellite Radio for alleged racial insensitivity for a gold tooth ad similar to one run by Toyota which Jackson did protest. They ask: "Remember when Jesse Jackson challenged XM Satellite Radio for its racist advertising? Probably not, since it never happened. Why he didn't is the question." Could it be because Toyota has more money? _____
Ron Bailey of Reason magazine takes a look at Congress' flawed Clean Water Restoration Act, quoting from this National Center paper by Peyton Knight. ____
Animal-Loving Trauma Surgeon Defends Homicide Attempt on Family of Medical Researcher
A medical researcher's house is firebombed with the parents and two young children inside, and a spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front responds, saying the researcher's "children are old enough to recognize the consequences" of their dad's work with mice.
The ALF spokesman is -- get this -- a trauma surgeon. More on him at the ActivistCash.com website.
Media Flocks to Gore Speech on Energy; Mostly Ignore His Use of Gas-Guzzlers to Get There
Americans for Prosperity video shot outside Gore's speech
Apparently complacent about criticism from the Tennessee Center for Policy Research that his family's energy use at his Nashville home is more than 19 times greater than the average American household's, Al Gore has committed conspicious energy consumption once again.
In Washington D.C. Thursday to deliver yet another speech warning Americans about global warming caused, Gore believes, by excessive use of fossil fuels, Gore handed yet more evidence to critics who believe he's a hypocrite.
He did so by traveling to his speech in what almost certainly was an unnecessary entourage of three luxury gas-guzzling vehicles -- two Lincoln Town Cars and a Surburban SUV -- one of which was kept idling outside for twenty minutes, apparently to keep the interior cool for the driver, Mrs. Gore and the Gores' adult daughter.
We know this because the free-market group Americans for Prosperity took a video camera to the speech to film not only the Gore family's vehicle choices, but to interview Gore acolytes who declined sponsors' advice to walk, ride a bike or take public transportation to the speech. (You can see the group's very funny four-minute video online here -- my favorite part is the woman who tries to claim a taxi is public transportation.)
Gore's speech received a significant amount of media attention. I surveyed articles from major news sources (except for the Huffington Post, I excluded opinion columns) to see how many journalists covered Gore's decision to take three luxury gas-guzzlers to a speech decrying the use of fossil fuels.
Here's what I found in the first eleven news stories about this listed on Google News:
Dina Cappiello, Associated Press, "Gore: Carbon-free electricity in 10 years doable" - no mention of gas-guzzlers, but nice quote from Gore: "The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels..."
Steven Mufson, Washington Post, "Gore Urges Fast Energy Makeover" - ended the article by mentioning it and added a cute anecdote: "As people filed out of the hall, three black cars waited for Gore and his entourage. A young woman walked up to the first one, a Lincoln Town Car, and stuck a handwritten note on the windshield: 'I wish I were a Prius.'"
Zachary Coile, San Francisco Chronicle, "Gore challenges America to switch to renewable electrical energy by 2018" - no mention of luxury cars, but a nice quote from Gore about their use: "We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change."
J.S. McDougall, Huffington Post, "Gore's Goal: What You and I Can Do" - no mention of Gore's energy use, but this comment by the author: "...we Americans will have to think small -- not globally, not nationally, not even statewide. This begins with your town. Your house. Your car. You. And me." (Not Gore?)
David Stout, International Herald Tribune, "Gore asks U.S. to abandon fossil fuels" - no mention of Gore's three luxury vehicles, but Stout noted that Gore was "no doubt aware that his remarks would be met with skepticism in some quarters." (I wonder why?)
CNN, "Energy crisis threatens U.S. survival, Gore says" - no mention of cars, but did mention the Gores' high energy use levels at home: "Gore's return to the political arena has drawn increased scrutiny, particularly of his energy use. In 2007, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research chastised Gore for 'extravagant energy use' at his Nashville, Tennessee, mansion. Gore subsequently has installed solar panels, a geothermal heating and cooling system, compact fluorescent light bulbs and other energy-saving technologies in his home." CNN gets credit for mentioning the Tennessee Center for Policy Research's research about Gore last year, but CNN reported the Gores' installation of alternative energy sources without noting that the Gores' home energy use went up an additional ten percent this past year despite these installations.
Of eleven news articles, one mentioned the gas-guzzlers Gore used to get the to event and one mentioned that Gore has been criticized for "extravagant energy use" at home.
Final tally (I'm counting CNN): two mentioned Gore's personal behavior; nine did not.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters, where comments are enabled. ____
Cap and Trade Carbon Policies Could Increase Emissions, Says Justin Danhof
Cap and trade policies ostensibly designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could have the opposite effect, says the National Center for Public Policy Research's Justin Danhof in an op-ed published today by the Christian Science Monitor.
That's because of an established principle of behavioral law and economics explaining that when a stigmatized behavior is turned into a commodity that can be bought and sold, that behavior tends to lose the stigma associated with it.
Writing in the Monitor, Justin describes a social science experiment in which parents were fined if they arrived late to pick up their children from child care. After the fine was imposed, the number of parents arriving late increased, because guilt associated with arriving late had been replaced with the opportunity to buy the right to arrive late, guilt-free. "Parents," says Justin, "were no longer 'arriving late,' but rather, purchasing extra child-care hours."
Justin continues: "A similar situation could occur under a cap-and-trade regime. Under cap-and-trade rules, the government places an artificial cap on the amount of carbon each regulated facility may emit. Facilities producing more carbon than they are allowed are required to purchase additional credits to make up the difference. The opportunity to purchase these credits creates a market where none previously existed. As in the example of the fined parents, the purchase of the right to emit greenhouse gases would likely reduce any stigma associated with doing so. Emission levels, consequently, could rise."
Justin says there are real-world examples of this principle at play in the global warming arena: "Al Gore says the risk of catastrophic global warming is so great that Americans should act immediately to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet his home uses 20 times more energy than the average American home, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. That's OK, the former vice president assures us, because he purchases offsets to ensure that he lives a carbon-neutral lifestyle... If Mr. Gore could not purchase offsets, would he feel more pressure to reduce his energy use? The likely answer is 'yes.'"
The article goes on to cite works by Santa Fe Institute researcher Samuel Boles and columnist Charles Krauthammer, and to review the results of Europe's cap and trade program before concluding: "The social stigma of carbon emissions grows stronger each day. As this stigma grows, companies are increasing their investments into research and technologies to reduce and store carbon. If Congress removes the stigma associated with these emissions by assigning a price to them, it may not like the results."
A note on the fight to protect property rights from National Center for Public Policy Research Senior Fellow R.J. Smith:
To all --
Once again freshman Congressman Paul Broun from Georgia's 10th is on the House floor fighting for property rights.
Congress has been sending lots of bad Green Federal land grab bills to the floor under suspension of the rules, allowing no amendments, and very limited debate, and trying to sneak them by on a voice vote. This has given cover to a surprising number of GOP members, including supposed conservatives, who have been attempting to sneak some Green earmarked pork to their districts with no recorded vote.
Good ol' Paul Broun is down there making certain there are recorded roll call votes taken. The strategy: Stop the bills if you can. Make people think twice with a recorded vote. Hold the RINOs' feet to the fire.
If you haven't visited Paul Broun's website and seen his Congressional Property Rights Action Caucus and the weekly e-letter that his staffer Stephen Kraly sends out, do so. And get on the mailing list for the newsletter. And for those of you who remember Aloysius Hogan and all the great work he did with Senator Jim Inhofe: Aloysius is chief-of-staff for Rep. Broun. You've got some friends in an increasingly hostile Congress.
-- RJ
R.J. Smith is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research. To contact him directly, write him at rsmith@nationalcenter.org.
I believe the Washington Post knows perfectly well that the word "censor" does not belong in the lead of today's Juliet Eilperin story, but the editors left it in (or inserted it?) anyway.
The story, "Cheney Aides Altered EPA Testimony, Agency Official Says Ex-Administrator Says Official From Vice President's Office Edited Out Six Pages," begins:
Members of Vice President Cheney's staff censored congressional testimony by a top federal official on the health threats posed by global warming, a former Environmental Protection Agency official said today.
Bush and Cheney have been in office nearly seven and a half years now. That's time enough for the Post's staff and editors to get used to the fact that they were elected to run the executive branch, and thus they can alter any executive branch document, presentation or policy they darn well please.
That's not censorship; it's editing, policy-setting, or both.
Business as usual, when you run the government.
To be fair, near the end of the story, Eilperin's piece included this quote from the White House:
White House spokesman Tony Fratto noted that White House officials in past administrations have vetted congressional testimony from agency officials.
"There's absolutely nothing unusual here in terms of the interagency review process, whether it's testimony, rules or anything else," Fratto said in an interview. "The process exists so that other offices and departments have the opportunity to comment and offer their views. There's nothing unusual about that, there's nothing nefarious about that, and there's nothing different here from previous administrations."
Exactly right. In other words, the whole thing is a non-story.
Yet the Post ran it anyway.
Cross-posted on Newsbusters, which has comments enabled. ____
In Making Hurricane Predictions, NOAA Aims for Broadside of a Barn
With the news today of the formation of the first Atlantic hurricane of the 2008 season, David Ridenour comments on NOAA's 2008 Atlantic hurricane forecast:
NOAA may have finally figured out a way to get its Atlantic hurricane forecast right. It's predicting that the 2008 season, which began June 1, will be either normal or above normal.
Covering two out of three possible outcomes ought to improve NOAA's odds quite a bit.
After bungling its Atlantic hurricane forecasts badly both last year and in 2006, NOAA is no doubt anxious to avoid being embarrassed for the third year in a row. Last year, NOAA forecast seven-to-nine hurricanes (17%-50% above normal), but there were just six hurricanes, the number NOAA considers normal. In 2006, the agency also forecast seven-to-nine hurricanes and came up two short of its low-range estimate.
The difference in the way NOAA is making its prediction this year appears especially stark when you compare NOAA's 2007 and 2008 graphs. In its 2007 hurricane-prediction graph, NOAA represented normal, above normal and below normal by different colors.
(click image to see full-size)
The 2008 hurricane-prediction graph has just two colors -- green for both near-normal and above-normal and light blue for below normal.
The Climate Prediction Center outlook calls for considerable activity with a 65 percent probability of an above normal season and a 25 percent probability of a near normal season. This means there is a 90 percent chance of a near or above normal season.
Funny, NOAA personnel didn't do it that way last year:
Experts at the NOAA Climate Prediction Center are projecting a 75 percent chance that the Atlantic Hurricane Season will be above normal this year—showing the ongoing active hurricane era remains strong.
At the time they were forecasting a 20% chance of near normal storm activity, which would mean a 95% chance of normal or above-normal activity. Guess the 5% swing really made a difference.
If one doubts that NOAA forecasters might be hedging their bets, take a look at the forecast range of Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE), a measure of total storm activity that takes into account both storm intensity and duration. NOAA's range keeps growing. This year, NOAA projected the ACE will be between 100% and 210% of the median. With a median value of 87.5, that translates to a range of 96.25. The range was 74.38 in 2007, 65.62 in 2006, 61.25 in 2005, 52.5 in 2004, 61.25 in 2003 and 35 in 2002.
The forecasts failed even as NOAA was increasing the margin for error.
Perhaps there's a legitimate reason why the ACE forecast range keeps growing, but it sure looks similar to someone shooting at a target, missing, then moving closer to target to make it a bigger target. You miss enough times and get close enough that eventually you can't miss.
NOAA won't need to clear a very high bar to be right with this year's hurricane season. It need only name 11 storms -- which ought to be a cinch with the newly-updated satellite equipment at its disposal. Eleven is an average number of named storms that NOAA says occur each year, but the number of named storms has risen not only due to better detection due to advances in technology, but due to changes in the type of storms that are named. Subtropical storms, for example, weren't named until 2002.
Here's hoping Mother Nature has a sense of humor.
David Ridenour is vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. To contact David directly, write him at dridenour@nationalcenter.org.
To burst the oil bubble, just use a drill, says David Ridenour, in an op-ed piece at least two dozen newspapers (another example here and here) have now run on their commentary pages.
A version of the piece (various papers have edited it differently) follows:
To burst the oil bubble, use a drill.
If Congress stands up to special interests and develops domestic energy sources, oil prices will tumble.
The U.S. has ample oil reserves.
For over a decade, environmentalists have prevented drilling for oil and natural gas in the "1002 Area" of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), an area in the refuge's Northern Coastal Plain set aside by President Carter and Congress for possible oil development in 1980.
At 1.5 million acres, the 1002 Area is less than 8% of the refuge. An Energy Information Agency estimates the amount of recoverable oil there at 10.4 billion barrels.
President Bill Clinton vetoed a bill authorizing drilling in ANWR under environmentalist pressure in 1995. Had he not done so, nearly 1.4 billion barrels of oil would likely be flowing from ANWR this year. That's equal to about one-quarter of our current imports.
Subsequent efforts to open as little as 2,000 acres to oil and gas exploration have failed repeatedly, but Senator Pete Domenici is trying again this year.
If you think oil prices are inflated, just get a load of environmentalists' cl
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