A first step?
Published Sat, Jun 27 2009 11:19 AM
The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to drive up the cost of energy on Friday. There’s really no other way that this should be said, unless you believe in or are invested in the propaganda regarding anthropogenic climate change.
The legislation, which passed despite deep divisions among Democrats, could lead to profound changes in many sectors of the economy, including electric power generation, agriculture, manufacturing and construction.
The bill passed 219 to 212. It still has to go through the Senate, but there too there’s a majority of Democrats and we know that the President would happily sign anything that cripples the economy.
President Obama hailed the House passage of the bill as “a bold and necessary step.” He said in a statement that he looked forward to Senate action that would send a bill to his desk “so that we can say, at long last, that this was the moment when we decided to confront America’s energy challenge and reclaim America’s future.”
That’s not what this bill will do. Instead it will take an already struggling economy and cripple it. Rather than confronting the energy challenge, it will exacerbate it. Rather than reclaiming America’s future, it will smother it under a blanket of bureaucratic regulation.
Considerably more than half of the energy that we use in this country comes from the burning of carbon based fuels. We all saw what precipitated our current economic “crisis” last summer. As the price of petroleum (a carbon based fuel used by the “working” class to get to and from work, as well as by the transportation industry to move groceries from the farm to store shelves) rose to record levels we watched as first there was a slowdown in the economy and then a virtual collapse of other sectors of our government’s “carefully managed” plans for our “free market” economy (it’s much closer to a “state run” economy when you look at it).
Taxing the use of carbon based fuels through cap-and-trade policies will bring back those prices. We’ll shut down entire industries in our zeal to avert a .25° rise in “average” global temperature…
The final bill has a goal of reducing greenhouse gases in the United States to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent by midcentury.
Good luck with that. 17 percent of 2005 levels isn’t likely to bring that much of a change, especially when you consider that returning to pre-1990 levels won’t bring much measurable change either.
We know about alternative energy sources, but they make up a miniscule portion of our energy economy, and they’re not cheap. Nor are they exactly “environmentally friendly.” Take solar power for example. If we’re talking about the use of semiconductors to directly convert solar energy into electricity, they’re not very efficient, they require a large amount of surface area exposed to the sun, don’t work well on cloudy or rainy days, and their production involves the use of massive amounts of toxic chemicals. If we’re talking about using solar energy to heat water, it requires a large surface area again, and much of the captured “warming” is re-radiated back into the environment.
What about wind power? Well, I suppose the return to 16th century technologies might not be such a bad thing. The Dutch managed to reclaim a lot of land from the sea using windmills. And who can forget The Man from La Mancha? And if sails were good enough for the navies of the world all those centuries, surely we can use them to propel our cars to and from work – unless we live in an area that doesn’t happen to be favored by high winds. Oh wait… we can’t use wind power either. It requires vast tracts of land in order to work. And those huge propellers are so unsightly – just ask Ted Kennedy.
How about nuclear energy? Oh wait… that’s just so incredibly dangerous – just ask Jane Fonda. Why, we can’t even find a place to dispose of the waste products that people will agree on.
Biofuels? Not very efficient in the end. Ethanol for example, produces less energy per gallon than gasoline. Racing engines make more power on ethanol than on gasoline, but that’s because they consume nearly four times as much ethanol as a similarly sized gasoline engine would gasoline.
Biofuels aren’t exactly environmentally friendly either. After all, it takes a lot of energy to grow the plant material in the first place. And consider how much land must be dedicated to the production of that plant material. Oh, I suppose we could convert our farms to growing feedstock for biofuels, but then what would we eat? Check out this quote from the Washington Post…
“Anybody that knows anything about the marketing of corn knows that when you raise the price of corn you are going to create problems in all of the markets that use corn,” said Ronald W. Cotterill, director of the Food Marketing Policy Center at the University of Connecticut.
How about waste oil from cooking? Sorry Charlie, there’s just not enough of it.
Now don’t get me wrong. I think that it’s a good idea to pursue alternative energy sources. It’s not even an exclusively “Democratic” idea either. Remember, it was George W. Bush (you know the “selected, not elected” President) that called for a fourfold increase in alternative energy supplies. And he took a lot of heat for that from the “objective, non-partisan” media…
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Ever since President Bush proposed a four-fold increase in “alternative fuels” during this year's State of the Union address, the media has been abuzz with doomsday reports…
“Fossil” fuels won’t be around forever – not if they’re truly “fossil” fuels. Finding environmentally friendly energy sources is a good thing. After all, we all live in the environment. We’ve yet to create a closed system that separates us from it for a significant period of time, despite the best work of space researchers.
But, our economy is already suffering from a “prolonged recession.” Leave it to our Congress to pass legislation that “could lead to sweeping changes in the economy,” all in the name of “climate change.”
Protect your wallets folks, the government’s coming after them again. This legislation is indeed a first step. A first step back to the stone age – when life was nasty, brutish, and short.
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ablur responded with:
 | Looks like you and I were thinking similar thoughts this morning. |
David responded with:
 | "...unless you believe in or are invested in the propaganda regarding anthropogenic climate change"
ANd even if one does "believe in" (which some do as a religious, not scientific, matter) anthropogenic climate change, China, India and others will continue to grow their economies on coal and other massively polluting energy technologies, while crippling the U.S. economy may--MAY--reduce CO2 "pollution" by enough to reduce global temps by 1 degree by the year 2100, IF (and it's a BIG IF) CO2 actually has the kinds of effects Anthropogenic Global Warnists cannot eveb reproduce in falsifiable experiments.
One degree, IF the AGW religionists are correct in ALL respects.
Heck, we've had more global cooling than that in the couple of few years due to solar output fluctuations alone. |
T F Stern responded with:
 | Add to these reasons the fact that this bill has over a thousand pages and hasn't been read or properly debated so as to explain the impact on everyone; then you begin to see what kind of Flim-flam is being foisted on everyone. |