More than usual, one topic dominated the energy
and environment news this week. It was lights out for progress with Earth Hour proponents taking a
dim view of human progress.
* Uh Oh Al! Gore
Doesn’t do his part for Earth Hour.
* Watts Up With That? Quote
of the Week: “I will be thinking about the 1.8 billion people on Earth who have no access to
electricity, and how insane they must think we are.”
* Carter Wood: “Just
guessing from personal experience, having visited East Germany before and after Communism,
we’d bet that Sofia used to go dark every evening: No light bulbs, energy rationing, rampant
poverty — that’s the way they used to achieve “Earth Hour” savings in
Bulgaria’s planned economy.”
* Newsbusters has a look at
the estimate that many are taking part in Earth Hour — without their choice
* Subprime Carbon:
Environmentalists Warn About the Next Big Bubble
* NYT columnist Thomas
Friedman is calling for a “climate bailout”
* This can’t be good
… Obama Creates Forum on Energy and Climate
* Wind Farm NIMBY’s in
the UK
* Paul Chesser:
Bustin’ a Cap & Trade
This morning the Wall Street Journal editorial
page warns “Team Obama floats a carbon tariff.” Rep. Ed Markey, a key supporter of
cap-and-trade, has said he wants to avoid a trade war. Then again, Mr. Markey has a tough time
learning the right lessons from international relations so our confidence is low.
Wow. From the “you already knew it
intuitively but here’s good evidence” file:
March 27 (Bloomberg) —
Subsidizing renewable energy in the U.S. may destroy two jobs for every one created if Spain’s
experience with windmills and solar farms is any guide.
For every new position that
depends on energy price supports, at least 2.2 jobs in other industries will disappear, according to
a study from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.
U.S. President Barack
Obama’s 2010 budget proposal contains about $20 billion in tax incentives for clean-energy
programs. In Spain, where wind turbines provided 11 percent of power demand last year, generators
earn rates as much as 11 times more for renewable energy compared with burning fossil fuels.
The premiums paid for solar,
biomass, wave and wind power - - which are charged to consumers in their bills — translated
into a $774,000 cost for each Spanish “green job” created since 2000, said Gabriel
Calzada, an economics professor at the university and author of the report.
The Governator wants to to use
California’s desert for renewable energy in the form of solar panels. Sen. Diane Feinstein
says nein! For another perspective, IBD says:
Our own suggestion is, once
again, to classify nuclear power as a renewable resource, which in fact the reprocessing of spent
fuel rods makes it. Then use infrastructure money from the stimulus package to subsidize a
job-creating building program, sort of a domestic Manhattan Project.
That would satisfy the
energy needs and rules of both California and the nation. It would create “green” jobs
and energy. And you wouldn’t have to carpet the Mojave Desert with solar panels.
That seems like a good idea — or at the
very least, something better than being discussed in national policy circles. For those who do not
believe in global warming, no solution seems best. For those who are concerned about potential
global warming but who care about decent policy, there seem to be very few good options out
there.
“A United Nations
document on “climate change” that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave
next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in
wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs
and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes
— all under the supervision of the world body.
“Those and other
results are blandly discussed in a discretely worded United Nations ‘information note’
on potential consequences of the measures that industrialized countries will likely have to take to
implement the Copenhagen Accord, the successor to the Kyoto Treaty, after it is negotiated and
signed by December 2009. The Obama administration has said it supports the treaty process if, in the
words of a U.S. State Department spokesman, it can come up with an “effective framework”
for dealing with global warming.”
This is absolutely pathetic. Apparently the
crime situation in New York has been so well defeated that the public is paying for state officers
to go around and check out whether freezers are leaking, cars are spilling oil, etc. It looks like
the focus on environmentalism is really tackling the big issues of the day:
“Violations of the
bottle bill, as it turns out, are the most common complaint the officers deal with in the city, said
Maj. Timothy Duffy of the environmental police force, who oversees New York City. Over all, he said,
environmental complaints in the city almost tripled in 2007 — to 621 a year from 226 in 2006
— and criminal summonses more than doubled, from 993 to more than 2,000.’