Solutions That Can't Work for a Problem That Does Not Exist

Climate alarmism’s 10,000 commandments

EPA fiats threaten American lives, livelihoods, living standards and life spans

Paul Driessen

The United States will “do more,” before it’s “too late” to prevent “dangerous” global warming, President Obama told Berliners last week. If Congress won’t act, he will, by regulating carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, increasing subsidies and reduce environmental overview for wind and solar projects on federal lands, and issuing other rules that will adversely affect economic growth and job creation.

Indeed, his Environmental Protection Agency is already devising new rules that will sharply curtail carbon dioxide emissions, by regulating thousands of facilities that use hydrocarbon energy – and thus ultimately almost everything Americans make, grow, ship, eat and do.

However, the manmade global warming “disasters” exist only in computer models and assertions by scientists who are addicted to billions in government Climate Armageddon grants. Moreover, the “preventative measures” are far worse than the disasters EPA claims to be preventing.

Even the most diehard alarmists have finally recognized that average global temperatures have hardly budged since 1997, even as atmospheric levels of plant-fertilizing CO₂ climbed steadily. For many areas, the past winter was among the coldest in decades; the USA and Britain just recorded one their coldest springs on record; and satellite data show that Earth has actually cooled slightly since 2002.

The frequency and severity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts are no different from observed trends and cycles over the last century. 2012 set records for the fewest strong tornadoes since 1954 and the number of years with no category 3 or higher hurricane making US landfall. (The vicious tornadoes of recent weeks underscore how quickly the weather can swing back to normal patterns.) Arctic sea ice is within a few percentage points of “normal” levels for the past fifty years, and the rate of sea level rise is not accelerating.

These facts completely contradict computer model predictions and alarmist claims. Moreover, as Climategate and numerous studies have shown, the “science” behind EPA’s ruling that carbon dioxide “endangers” human health and welfare is conjectural, manufactured, manipulated and even fraudulent.

EPA is supposed to protect our environment, health and welfare. Instead, it “safeguards” us from exaggerated or illusory risks – by issuing mountains of costly, intrusive regulations that endanger our health, wellbeing and wildlife far more than any reasonably foreseeable effects from climate change.

This accumulation of anti-hydrocarbon restrictions and penalties is putting EPA in control of nearly every aspect of our lives. Fuel, compliance and business costs will soar. Companies will be forced to outsource work to other countries, reduce work forces, shift people to part-time status, or close their doors.

Poor and minority families will be unable to heat and cool their homes properly, pay their rent or mortgage, buy clothing and medicine, take vacations, pay their bills, give to charity, and save for college and retirement.

With twelve million Americans already out of work, and another eight million working multiple lower-paying, part-time jobs, EPA’s global warming and 1,920 other rules over the past four years translate into unprecedented sleep deprivation, lower economic and educational status, and soaring anxiety and stress. That will mean greater risk of strokes and heart attacks; higher incidences of depression, alcohol, drug, spousal and child abuse; more suicides; and declining overall life expectancy.

EPA’s new 54.5 mpg fuel efficiency standards will force more people into smaller, lighter, less safe cars – causing thousands of needless additional serious injuries and deaths every year – in the name of preventing illusory climate and oil and gas depletion crises.

Federal regulators use the same phony climate change and energy depletion arguments to justify letting wind turbine operators slaughter millions of birds and bats every year – including bald and golden eagles, hawks, condors and whooping cranes. They continue to promote and subsidize $50-per-gallon biofuels, to replace oil and natural gas that the world still has in abundance – thanks to new exploration, drilling and production technologies. This focus on biofuels also means more rainforests and other wildlife habitats are being cut down in the name of “renewable” energy.

EPA and President Obama never consider any of this, in calculating the supposed “benefits” of their onerous regulations. They refuse to recognize that their hysterical claims of climate cataclysms are increasingly indefensible. They ignore the damage that their heavy-handed rules impose on our health, welfare and environmental quality.

EPA finds, punishes and even targets anyone who violates any of its ten thousand commandments, even inadvertently. The agency’s climate change actions, however, are not inadvertent. They are deliberate, and their effects are harmful and far reaching. They will affect every American and 100% of our economy.

And yet, these increasingly powerful bureaucrats – who seek and acquire ever more control over our lives – remain faceless, nameless, unelected and unaccountable. They operate largely behind closed doors, issuing regulations and arranging sweetheart “sue and settle” legal actions with radical environmentalist groups, to advance ideological agendas, without regard for their impacts on our lives, livelihoods, living standards, health, welfare and environment.

They know that, for them, there is rarely any real transparency, accountability or consequences – even for gross stupidity, major screw-ups, flagrant abuses or deliberate harm.

We need to save our environment from environmentalists and EPA – and safeguard our liberties, living standards and lives against the arrogance of too-powerful politicians and bureaucrats. How we achieve this, while protecting our lives and environment from real risks, is one of the greatest challenges we face.

________________

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

© Paul Driessen * June 20, 2013

Published in the Washington Times, Monday, June 24, 2013

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/24/climate-alarmisms-10000-commandments/

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Production Tax Credit 'FIT' for Retirement

Big subsidies for wind projects are 'FIT' for retirement
By Mary Kay Barton
The Coalition for Sensible Siting welcomes this article from our friend and voice for citizens for New York State on industrial wind.

Larry Beahan of the Sierra Club Niagra Group, declared in his 8/7/12 Buffalo News 'Another Voice' piece that FIT - a feed-in-tariff (aka: another TAX) should be mandated to guarantee rates for "green" energy for the next 20 years. 
Apparently Mr. Beahan is unaware that industrial wind energy already has been feeding at the government trough of taxpayer-funded corporate welfare for over 20 years now - in the form of the Production Tax Credit, and 1603 Direct Cash Grant Program.
The reality is, subsidies for industrial wind cost FAR more than any other source, as spelled out in the 8/1/12 Master Resource article, "New York State's Money-Road to Nowhere":
“On a per kWh basis, wind receives 80 times the public subsidies received by fossil fuels, but produces no reliable electricity capacity and very few American jobs. In fact, for every green job that wind supposedly creates, it destroys two to four regular jobs – in large part due to “skyrocketing” electricity rates.”

So what do we get for those exorbitant costs? Industrial wind provides virtually NO Capacity Value / Firm Capacity (specified amounts of power on demand), and therefore, can NOT provide modern power – period. Despite having over 140,000 Industrial Wind Turbines installed worldwide, CO2 emissions have NOT been significantly reduced – ANYWHERE!

We may as well mandate that we get 25% of our naval fleet from sailboats, 25% of our air transport from gliders, or 25% of our gas & diesel vehicle transport from horse and buggies.

Another reality -- Germany is now building 17 new coal, and 29 new gas-fired power plants to replace their emissions-free nuclear plants.
Environmentalist Jon Boone has done an excellent job of defining the problems with the Sierra Club's blind support of industrial wind in his report, "The Sierra Club: How support for Industrial Wind technology subverts its history, betrays its mission, and erodes commitment to the scientific method".

Paul Driessen's Washington Times article today (8/7/12), "Wind Energy Tax Credits Fund Bird Murder," points to the hypocrisy of any supposed bird enthusiast supporting industrial wind.

Obviously, the admittedly "necessarily skyrocketing" electricity prices associated with this Administration's "green" agenda, will further drive business out of NYS (and the U.S.), and hurt our poor the most.

You would think that folks would understand that that our $16 TRILLION Dollar indebted nation can no longer afford to throw good money after bad pursuing the wishful thinking of "green" enthusiasts. Our resources would be much better spent on Energy Efficiency, and research on technologies of the future - not antiquated corporate money-grubbing schemes like ENRON-initiated wind power.

I think we can all agree -- The time for science-based energy policies is now!

Mary Kay Barton

Mary Kay Barton, a retired health educator and small business owner in New York State, is a tireless advocate for scientifically sound, affordable, and reliable electricity for all Americans. She has served over the past decade in local Water Quality organizations and enjoys gardening and birding in her National Wildlife Federation “Backyard Wildlife Habitat.”

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“Greenbacks” energy boondoggles versus real energy

Government tax and subsidy schemes waste billions. We need real energy and jobs.

Paul Driessen

Having had it with $4-per-gallon gasoline and the Obama Administration’s squandering billions of taxpayer dollars on phony “green” energy schemes, angry voters have told their senators “Enough!”

Their calls provided sufficient spinal implants in enough senators to defeat three proposals to extend the wind energy “production tax credit” (PTC). The credit gives wind project developers taxpayer greenbacks whenever they generate high-priced electricity, even if there is no market for the power at the time it’s generated. Worse, the PTC is paid on top of other subsidies, fast-tracking of wind projects through environmental review processes, and exemptions from endangered species, migratory bird and other laws.

Confronted by the gale of public outrage, Senate Democrats tried a new tack.

They offered an amendment that would eliminate various tax deductions for five major oil companies, turn the supposed new revenue stream into more subsidies for wind turbine, solar panel and electric car makers – and use any leftover crumbs to “pay down” the skyrocketing budget deficit they helped engineer.

The ploy needed 60 votes – but got only 51, despite President Obama’s vocal support. “Members of Congress,” the president said, “can stand with big oil companies, or with the American people.”

Not exactly. The American people are no longer buying the partisan rhetoric. They increasingly understand that new taxes and restrictions on oil companies are not in their best interest. In fact, a recent Harris Interactive poll found that over 80% of US voters support increased domestic oil and gas production to create and preserve jobs, lower pump prices and increase government revenues.

They realize that only 12% of what they pay for gasoline goes to oil companies for refining, marketing and distribution. Another 12% is state and federal taxes. Fully 76% is determined by world crude oil prices – and thus by global supply and demand, and confidence or fear about world events.

They know that eliminating tax deductions for expenses incurred in producing and refining oil is the same as imposing new taxes. Those taxes would result in curtailed drilling and production, reduced royalty revenues, worker layoffs, still higher gasoline prices, and increased costs for everything we grow, make, transport and do with petroleum. Blue collar, poor and minority families would be hurt worst.

Every US business claims deductions for new equipment, facility depreciation, utilities, payroll, research and other expenses. This ensures that businesses, like individuals, recover their costs and get taxed only on their net incomes. Five oil companies should not be punished as the sole exception to this rule.

Legitimate expense deductions are very different from subsidies. Subsidies involve government taxing individuals and profitable companies, and transferring their money to politically favored companies and products that could not survive without perpetual support.

The system is even more insidious when subsidized entities return substantial portions of their taxpayer largesse as campaign contributions to President Obama and other politicians who arrange the wealth transfers. It’s still worse when hard-earned taxpayer money is used to reduce risks for wealthy investors who buy into boondoggles arranged by bureaucrats who are much better at choosing losers than winners.

As voters are learning, the Solyndra, Evergreen, Fisker, A123 and dozens of other “green energy future” scandals and insolvencies are only a small part of the subsidy cesspool.

Subsidies, punitive taxation schemes and “alternative,” non-hydrocarbon energy are often justified by claims that we face imminent manmade catastrophic global warming. In reality, virtually no empirical evidence supports hypotheses, assertions or computer model projections about melting polar icecaps, average global temperatures, storm frequency and intensity, sea levels and other natural phenomena.

Wind, solar and biofuel energy are also justified by claims that we are running out of oil and gas. In fact, America is blessed with vast proven petroleum reserves and even greater undeveloped prospects that government has made off limits. The natural gas and hydraulic fracturing revolution is merely a hint of the energy, jobs and revenues Americans could produce, if certain politicians would end their obstinacy.

“Renewable” energy is further justified by claims that petroleum “keeps us trapped in the past.” In truth, we need to worry about the present, especially our unemployment and debt crises. Oil and gas provide 60% of America’s energy. By contrast, despite untold billions in subsidies, wind and solar combined still provide barely 0.60% – and are unlikely to do much better for decades to come.

The $2-billion Shepherds Flat wind project in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge area involved $500 million in outright subsidies, plus a subsidized loan guarantee of $1.1 billion for General Electric, plus production tax credits. At the whim of the winds, its 338 gigantic turbines will generate electricity for California, in wild swings between zero and their combined rated capacity of 845 MW – chopping up eagles, falcons, herons, bats and other protected species as they spin.

In 2010, GE generated over $5 billion in US profits – but paid no US income taxes, and no fines for the thousands of protected birds and bats that its Cuisinart wind turbines slaughtered.

By contrast, White House villain ExxonMobil (one of the companies targeted by the failed tax bill) earned $30.5 billion in profits that year, on revenues of $383 billion, paid $1.6 billion in US income taxes, and made combined lease bonus, rent, royalty, tax and other federal payments of almost $10 billion. When a few birds are killed on oil company property, companies pay substantial fines.

President Obama promised that he would “fundamentally transform” America and ensure that electricity prices “will necessarily skyrocket.” His Energy Secretary has said Americans should pay $8-10 per gallon for gasoline. His Environmental Protection Agency and Interior and Agriculture Departments have systematically foreclosed access to our nation’s oil, gas, coal and uranium resources.

Meanwhile, Mr. Chu’s Department of Energy recently awarded $10 million of taxpayer money to Philips Lighting for making an “affordable” light bulb – that costs $50 per bulb!

And it is working overtime to promote, subsidize and install thousands of onshore and offshore wind turbines that generate too much ultra expensive electricity when it’s not needed and too little when it’s most needed, require too much land and too many raw materials, kill too many birds, cost too much money, and require perpetual subsidies and exemptions from environmental laws that apply to all traditional forms of energy.

This “green” energy “future” is unsustainable.

Oil companies do make a lot of money, because they produce, refine and sell enormous quantities of fuel and other petroleum products. But they pay billions in taxes and royalties – and produce real energy.

Wind, solar, algae and switchgrass companies take billions in Other People’s Money. They pay virtually no taxes, and provide virtually no usable energy, except in the minds and press releases of their promoters.

Expecting that higher taxes on oil companies will produce more oil at lower prices is like saying we will get cheaper bread, and more of it, by eliminating tax deductions for bakeries’ electricity and equipment.

American voters and consumers understand this. It’s time our elected officials and unelected bureaucrats did likewise.

___________

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

 

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