Filed under: Fun n Games, Pop Culture, YouTube | Tags: Chihuahua, Dancing, Ozomatli
‘Cus it makes me happy.
I think, but am not sure, the song is by Ozomatli — who rock. That is all.
Corrections: The video came to me via @Toraradical on Twitter, who has a great blog of his own. And the song is by Juanlu Montoya. Thanks to SooperMexican, blogger AND illustrator, for that.
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Energy, Politics, Statism | Tags: Clean Energy Fantasy, Government Snake Oil, Stop Useless Spending
On Monday, the Obama Administration “announced a number of new initiatives designed to accelerate the modernization of the Nation’s electric infrastructure, bolster electric-grid innovation, and advance a clean energy economy.”
Aimed at building the necessary transmission infrastructure and developing and deploying digital information or “smart grid” technologies, these initiatives will facilitate the integration of renewable sources of electricity into the grid; accommodate a growing number of electric vehicles on America’s roads; help avoid blackouts and restore power quicker when outages occur; and reduce the need for new power plants. (emphasis added)
“A 21st Century grid is essential to America’s ability to lead the world in clean energy and win the future,” said John Holdren, President Obama’s science and technology advisor.
This pushes all of my annoyance buttons. Dr, Holdren managed to get most of the administration buzz words all in one sentence. Why is there something special about “21st Century?” Why is it desirable to “lead the world in clean energy?” And please spare me the “WTF”, it’s absolutely meaningless. A lot of countries have invested a lot of their citizens’ wealth in wind farms and solar arrays, and it hasn’t worked out anywhere. The promoters and rent seekers are driving forward, but the engineers and energy experts say that it’s a dead-end road.
Wind is free, but attempts to capture that energy fail because wind is too intermittent. It is the nature of wind that is the problem, something that innovations in turbines cannot change. Solar energy is too diffuse, and the sun has the nasty habit of sinking beneath the horizon for half the day.
All “these efforts build upon the historic $4.5 billion in grid modernization investments provided in the Recovery Act.” The Department of Agriculture has $250 million in loans for smart-grid technology in rural America. You can’t win the future by wasting more money.
The very detailed illustration above is devoid of information, if you enlarge it, it doesn’t help, there’s nothing there except for a solar panel on the roof. They suggest that consumers can get more information about their energy usage, and you will be able to contact your house for its energy use with your smart phone!
To manage the energy shortage created by the Obama administration by starving the nation unnecessarily of energy, we can call the house and turn down the heat? Or will the federal government decide how much power we may use? The Smart Grid will help us to eliminate greenhouse gases and lead the world in clean energy.
The carbon dioxide that Obama is so worried about makes up about 38/1000 of 1% of the atmosphere. The amount represented by human activity is approximately 15/10,000 of 1% of the atmosphere. The climate has not warmed for the past ten years, and the sun has gone quiet. We may be in for another Maunder Minimum (1645-1715), the most bitterly cold part of the Little Ice Age. It’s too soon to know, but cold is far more lethal than the 1 degree of warming that we have had over the last 100 years.
Ronald Reagan got it right, back in 1981:
We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success — only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive and free. Trust the people.
It is American ingenuity that has learned how to do slant drilling, to drill in deep offshore waters, to release oil from shale formations providing the whole world with ample new supplies of fossil fuels. Government cannot do a better job. Government cannot fix the economy, Government cannot put America back to work. Stop interfering and trust the people.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Liberalism, Statism, Taxes | Tags: Bumps on the Road to Recovery, Enough With the Road analogies, M, Time for Golf, We Need More Patience
“There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery,” President Obama said recently, when he was celebrating the sale of the government’s remaining stake in Chrysler. The Treasury was ecstatic that Fiat had agreed to pay $560 million for the Government’s Chrysler shares. As Obama celebrated saving the auto industry, he didn’t mention that it was saved with 16,000 fewer auto workers.
The inimitable Mark Steyn took that up on Saturday in a column titled “Obama’s Road to Nowhere: This is Main Street, Obamaville; All bumps, no road.” Mark Steyn has the amazing ability to tell you the really bad news and make you laugh while he does it.
“I’m not concerned about a double-dip recession,” Obama said last week. Perhaps it’s because all his economists have departed for the more comfortable surroundings of academe. I think we would all feel better if he was more concerned.
The American economy has amazing strengths. We have flexible markets, a smart workforce, a tradition of labor mobility, and a strong entrepreneurial class that should be driving the recovery and steadily cutting back on the unemployment rate. Ideas are always plentiful among a free people.
So what’s going wrong? Why does the economy seem stuck? Obama is annoyed because business is not stepping up and hiring and expanding. Unfortunately, nobody in the administration has any business experience, nor run a business and discovered what it takes to keep a business solvent. So what’s holding the economy back? What is missing?
Confidence. Trust. Hope. Faith. Expectation. Optimism. Anticipation.
Americans are an optimistic people. Recessions are always the by-product of mistakes. Government mistakes, business mistakes, financial sector mistakes, and fixing them takes time. What causes confidence to return? This president has done more to destroy hope than any president in living memory. He didn’t tell us that the Hope he espoused was ensconced in a vision of a regulatory state in which disinterested experts who were assumed to have the factual knowledge, practical wisdom and unwavering integrity to manage the economy well. He was wrong. Americans cherish their freedom. They don’t need overbearing regulation, and they resent it.
When an economy is in trouble, there is a history of moves that work to restore confidence. The U.S. corporate tax rate is the highest in the world. If you want corporations to have more incentive to hire, why not cut their taxes? When economic times are terrible, why would you raise energy prices dramatically and lay people off? The EPA is ratcheting up standards that will shut coal-fired plants down, and consumers will see their electricity bills jump an estimated 40 to 60%. When you supposedly recognize that there weren’t any shovel-ready jobs, why are you blathering on about investing in infrastructure and “green” jobs. Why do you pretend to reduce unnecessary regulation while your agencies turn out new ones faster than ever?
Unfortunately, almost everything a government does in response to a recession delays and weakens recovery. Politicians naturally try everything they can think of to soften the blow of a recession. Generous unemployment insurance postpones the search for a job. The first-time homebuyer’s credit was meant to help, as were programs to slow the foreclosure process or keep families in homes that they cannot afford. Well intentioned, but it delays the correct price discovery process. We’re two years into the recovery and housing prices nationally are still falling.
The Obama fiscal stimulus failed, and substituted for other fiscal policies that would have helped, like permanent tax-rate reductions — proven strategies from the Bush, Reagan, Kennedy and Coolidge administrations. The president campaigned for higher taxes and continues to argue for higher rates, especially ideologically motivated higher tax rates on the wealthy, on saving, and on small business.
The free trade agreements with Columbia, Panama and South Korea, long negotiated, still languish, unsigned, on the president’s desk. Expectations about inflation have a big influence in the economy. Fearful expectations about what the future will bring can be self-fulfilling. The evidence that Obama’s economic policies are failures is abundant. How strange that the man who ran on a campaign of Hope and Change has brought so much change and so very little hope.
Filed under: Domestic Policy, Education, History, The United States | Tags: High School Seniors Flunk, National History Test, Parents Can Do More!
Only 35 percent of American fourth-graders know the purpose of the Declaration of Independence, according to national history test-scores released on Tuesday. The National Assessment of Educational Progress indicated that there hasn’t been much progress. Kids don’t understand the basic principles of democracy and America’s role in the world.
Only 20% of U.S. fourth-graders and 17% of eighth-graders who took the 2010 history exam were “proficient” or “advanced.” This has not changed since the test was last given in 2006. In high school, it was even worse. More than half of all seniors scored at the lowest achievement level — “below basic.” Only 9% of fourth-graders knew why Abraham Lincoln was important.
The test was given to a representative sample of public and private schools and included 7,000 fourth-graders, 11,800 eighth-graders and 12,400 high-school seniors. The test is scored on a 0-500 point scale, and those scores are broken into “below basic,” “basic,” “proficient” and “advanced.” Fourth and eighth-graders have seen a slight upgrade since the exam was first administered in 1994. High school seniors have not.
African-American and Hispanic students in fourth and eighth grades average scores were a bright spot. Hispanic fourth-graders jumped from 175 in 1994 to 198 last y ear. In eighth grade, black students improved to 250 points in 2010 from 238 in 1994.
Expect more debate about whether history and science are being neglected because of No Child Left Behind’s emphasis on math and reading — and the need to “teach to the test.” So teaching kids to read and do math means that you have to skip history? Don’t be absurd.
Parents must simply not take it for granted that our schools are doing a good job. Be sure they know your family history. It’s easy to add some historical novels to their reading that will make history seem more real and compensate for inadequate history in the classroom. History, after all, is simply stories about what we think happened in the past and why. Historians tell history based on what the evidence tells them really happened. Storytellers try to make it come alive:
— Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes, about Boston in revolt in 1773
— My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier & Christopher Collier,
The Revolution.
— Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink, The frontier in Wisconsin
— Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt, The Civil War divides border state families
— Rifles for Watie by Harold Keith, a 16 year-old fights in the Civil War
— No Promises in the Wind, by Irene Hunt, A story of the Great Depression
— Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham, The story of the author of
The American Practical Navigator.
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Energy, Environment | Tags: Jobs and Unemployment, No Jobs No Hope, Obama Won't Listen
President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness met yesterday in Durham NC at Cree Inc., a company that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting. The Council recommended streamlining the federal permit process for construction and infrastructure projects. They explained that the process can delay projects for months or years, or even cause projects to be abandoned. They suggested that he was probably briefed by his staff on such challenge when he implemented the Recovery Act.
Obama smiled and ad-libbed “Shovel-ready was not as…um…shovel-ready as we expected.” The Council, led by GE’s Jeffrey Immelt, erupted in laughter. Not really funny.
Obama filled the Jobs Council with Fortune 500 CEOs from General Electric, American Express, DuPont, Time Warner, Eastman Kodak and Xerox among others. But:
- GE’s workforce has shrunk by 25,000, almost 16%, between 2001 and 2010. The number of overseas GE jobs climbed during those years.
- AmEx employed fewer workers in 2010 than it did ten years ago.
- Kodak’s workforce was just 18,800 last year. In 2001 it was 75,000.
- Xerox’s workforce shrank by 30% between 2001-2009, before it acquired Affiliated Computer Services and its 74,000 workers in 2010.
- Intel has trimmed its workforce over the past decade.
These are not what one would call growth companies. And the list of suggestions for immediate acts to increase employment in a jobless economy— a sad list after four months of work: More money to retrain workers. More tax dollars to retrofit commercial buildings to boost energy efficiency. More government loans granted by the SBA. They did urge streamlining the permitting process. No wonder these companies aren’t growing.
There are 13.9 million people out of work according to the federal government statistics. This does not include those who are classified as “discouraged” workers or “involuntary part-timers.” The federal statisticians claim there are 8.5 million involuntary part timers. At 54,000 new jobs (May’s record) it would take 22 years to get the 13.9 million jobless back to work.
Business has told Obama over and over that uncertainty is killing them. They don’t know what Obama’s regulators are going to do next. They don’t know what to expect about government mandates, what the changing health care rules will be, what the EPA will decide to regulate next, how much energy will cost, how much inflation they have to face, where they can get a loan and under what rules.
Obama remains uninterested, and has even denied that there is any uncertainty. Apparently what is keeping business from growing and prospering is their lack of being “green” enough. Then he wanders off rhapsodizing about his “clean energy revolution” that is going to jumpstart the economy somewhere, some time in some alternate world. Obama calls the money for jumpstarting the green efforts — “investments”as if money spent now for his green ideas is somehow different from the money spent in 2009 and 2010 on his failed green efforts. The green companies that have received subsidies are struggling to stay afloat, and without government subsidy will soon go belly-up.
- Solyndra— loan guarantee $535 million in 2009. Spring 2010 failed to complete initial public offering. Audit questioned ongoing viability. Laid off 180 workers.
- Beacon Power — $43 million loan guarantee in 2009. Stock price dropped by half while DJIA increased 40%.
- First Wind Holdings — $117 million loan guarantee 2010. Withdrew IPO in October.
- Nevada Geothermal Blue Mountain project — on track so far.
Cree Inc. who makes those $50 lightbulbs is a government approved technology to benefit from the ban on incandescent bulbs. More than $78 million in federal grants. $96 million in federal contracts. Manufacturers of incandescent bulbs have been put out of business by federal decree. Cree’s quarterly report states that the restoration of consumer choice would “result in reduced sales.” Uh Huh!
The claims for wind energy have proved to be overblown. The claims for fuel-efficiency standards for cars have proved to be inefficient. The claims for energy-efficiency for alternative lighting dim hopes for the ability to read and see.
These policies are being driven by rent-seeking special interests over concern that carbon dioxide — the colorless, odorless gas that is one of the building blocks of life — is causing the earth to warm alarmingly, if you call one degree over a century alarming. And anyway, it hasn’t warmed at all for over ten years. Carbon dioxide, that alarming substance, makes up almost 380 parts per million in the atmosphere. That is 38/1000 of 1%. Approximately 95% of the so-called “greenhouse gases” is water vapor.
Whether Obama can scare up some jobs with his green-energy revolution remains to be seen. It hasn’t worked for European countries. The more they have invested in wind and solar, the worse economic shape they’re in. No matter how many jobs our economy can turn up, the EPA will destroy more. But the EPA, they claim, is not allowed to consider things like cost-effectiveness nor jobs; their task is making the air ever more pure.
Filed under: Freedom, History, Military, United Kingdom | Tags: Nazi Occupied Crete, Patrick Leigh Fermor, World War II
James Bond and his ilk were not entirely derived from fantasy. There were examples of the type in real life, and one of those was Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor who died at the age of 96 this last week. As a young man, after being expelled from Kings College, Canterbury for holding hands with a greengrocer’s daughter, he walked through pre-war Hungary and Romania. It was his war record that made him the stuff of legend.
In 1940, when he was twenty-five, he was commissioned into the Brigade of Guards, and then because of his knowledge of Greek, he transferred into SOS, the Special Operations Service. He took part in the British fighting and withdrawal from Greece and Crete, but then set about organizing the resistance in Crete to the German occupation. He turned out to be a natural commando, and could pose as a Cretan as he spoke the language.
His unforgettable exploit was the kidnapping of the Nazi commanding officer in Crete, General Kreipe. Leigh Fermor and Stanley Moss, another young Guards officer, disguised themselves as German corporals, stopped the General’s car, dealt with the driver, stowed the General under the back seat with several members of the resistance on top. They drove through some 20 roadblocks and frog-marched the General across the island to a waiting British submarine.
Stanley Moss wrote up the whole episode in Ill Met by Moonlight after the war based on his own wartime diary. It’s one of the classics of war. Leigh Fermor is the one in the center of the three seated men, and Stanley Moss is just to the right.
Paul Rahe, who was a friend, has a memoir with more pictures and a clip from the movie by the same name at Ricochet. Ill Met By Moonlight is a great read, particularly if you are a history buff. Parachuting into Nazi occupied Crete is the stuff of today’s thrillers, as it was really lived in 1944.
Filed under: Freedom, History, The United States | Tags: An Animated Atlas, Geography and History, The Growth of a Nation
Here’s a great lesson in geography and history. Our students are graduating from school without much knowledge of their own country and no sense of the big picture of how our nation developed.
History ought to be fascinating and fun. I can’t say that any of my teachers made it so. I remember a college professor whose idea of drumming history into young heads was Saturday morning 8 o’clock snap quizzes where you were supposed to list what happened from, say 1874 to 1883. Dates were the important knowledge, but we had no sense of a framework into which to enter the dates. I suspect he turned out no future historians.
I still remember, hazily, a fourth grade textbook called Pilots and Pathfinders about the world’s great explorers and adventure. Just the right thing for 4th grade. Explore this version, and if you like it, you can buy a more elaborate version for your student.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Freedom, Liberalism, Politics | Tags: Sarah Palin's Emails, The Mainstream Media, The Quest for Dirt
There’s a lot going on in the world: we’re at war in Libya; China is about to launch its first aircraft carrier; hearings are beginning in the House on allegations that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms knowingly allowed criminal suspects to purchase weapons and smuggle them into Mexico for Mexican drug cartels; a nuclear expert from RAND has calculated that within two months Iran will have enough weapons-grade uranium to manufacture a nuclear weapon; and the EPA is attempting to destroy the coal industry.
So Friday, when a trove of more than 13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska were released. The mainstream media, including everyone from Mother Jones to Britain’s left-leaning Guardian, claim that they just don’t have enough reporters to go through them all and have asked unknown citizen activists to go through them playing “gotcha,” to find something scandalous. One of the more reprehensible acts by the mainstream media in living memory.
Toby Harnden is the US Editor, based in Washington, for the British Daily Telegraph. He suggests that the email frenzy is backfiring on her media antagonists:
The trove of more than 13,000 emails detailing almost every aspect of Sarah Palin’s governorship of Alaska, released late on Friday, paints a picture of her as an idealistic, conscientious, humorous and humane woman slightly bemused by the world of politics.
One can only assume that the Left-leaning editors who dispatched teams of reporters to remote Juneau, the Alaskan capital, to pore over the emails in the hope of digging up a scandal are now viewing the result as a rather poor return on their considerable investment.
If anything, Mrs Palin seems likely to emerge from the scrutiny of the 24,000 pages, contained in six boxes and weighing 275 pounds, with her reputation considerably enhanced.
Sarah Palin remains a lightning rod for the media. I have a hard time understanding the hatred out there, for hatred there is. She was a highly effective governor in a state where the governor’s office is far more powerful than in many other states.
The hatred seems to be based in the fact that she stands in opposition to the Left’s concept of who can be considered a member of the elite. She came out of “nowhere.” Alaska is some sort of backward, uncivilized, place and not a proper state. She is some kind of country person who shoots animals, and her husband competes in snowmobile races, and she has five (can you imagine!) five children. She was mayor of a little tiny town that no one ever heard of. She graduated from the University of Idaho, you know, where they have all those neo-Nazis. And she couldn’t answer the question about what she reads. She doesn’t even read the New York Times!
These pitiful folk who hope to become certified members of “the Elite,” and worry more about their newest handbag and who was seen at the latest cocktail party, have no understanding of real competence and women who are perfectly capable of handling whatever comes along. Meet some farmer’s wives in the Midwest (“flyover country”) or western ranch women who can milk cows, tend a garden, preserve foods, plow, drive a tractor and serve on the school board or county council. The minimal competence of the glossy barbie dolls who report on the news pales by comparison.
Do read “Sarah Palin’s letter from God” from Andrew Malcolm in the Los Angeles Times, written (not for publication ) just before the birth of her son Trig. The media keep following her around, hoping for — what? She is not, at the present, running for anything. She is on a family tour of America, celebrating America and freedom, our history, and Americans, and the media are squawking because she won’t give them her itinerary.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Energy, Environment | Tags: Marxist Job Plans, Warriors and Quiet Waters, What Global Warming?
— Semper Fly: Here’s a lovely essay about fly fishing with wounded warriors for your Sunday reading. Warriors and Quiet Waters is an organization that employs a band of volunteers to employ the therapeutic and rehabilitative qualities of fly fishing for trout on Montana’s rivers and streams to help heal traumatically wounded U.S. servicemen and women. Worth your time.
— Dr. David Whitehouse asks “Warming, What Warming?” The one question climate scientists avoid, he says, is “how long does the current standstill in global temperatures continue before you question some of your assumptions about global warming?”
— IPCC Wrong Again: Up to now, scientists have asserted that species are currently dying out at a 100 to 1,000 times the so-called ‘background rate’ the average pace of extinctions over the history of life on Earth. Oops! Species loss far less severe than feared.
— The Truth About Greenhouse Gases: The dubious science of the climate crusaders, by William Happer A contemporary moral epidemic; the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types — even children’s crusades — all based on contested science and dubious claims.
— U.S. Goes on an Energy Starvation Diet: The Environmental Protection Agency has two new rules it wants to impose on utilities that use coal. But the rules make sense only if you want less energy, higher prices and fewer jobs.
— Media’s Bias on Display in Hate of Palin. The New York Times and Washington Post have asked their readers’ help in scouring 24,000 emails from Sarah Palin’s governorship released Friday. They hate her — really hate her.
— Job Plan With a Page From Marx: The president has unveiled a plan to cut joblessness with an industrial policy from the 19th century. In this “new ” economy, government will pick winners and losers for industry. It didn’t work then, it won’t work now.
Filed under: Liberalism, News of the Weird, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear | Tags: Does Rehab Work?, Double Standards, Psychology and Rehabilitation
I have studiously avoided any mention of Congressman Anthony Weiner. To say it is thoroughly covered by many other sources is a vast understatement. Most people just want the whole thing to go away; while a vast number of others cannot resist the temptation to make jokes, usually connected to the Congressman’s last name. Once started down that path there are few things one can say without running into unfortunate word combinations.
From the New York Times:
“Congressman Weiner departed this morning to seek professional treatment to focus on becoming a better husband and healthier person,” said the spokeswoman, Risa Heller. “In light of that, he will request a short leave of absence from the House of Representatives so that he can get evaluated and map out a course of treatment to make himself well.
Ah yes, Rehab. When any celebrity’s actions start making front-page news, it’s off to rehab for a cure. Psychology really didn’t make it into prime time until after World War II. In the late 50s and early 60s, we had the rise of the helping professions. There was little in human interaction that could not be improved with a little attention from a psychologist. Thus even Wikipedia lists clinical psychology, educational psychology, forensic psychology, legal psychology, health psychology, industrial psychology, organizational psychology, occupational health psychology, school psychology, sport psychology, exercise psychology, neuropsychology, traffic psychology, and ecological psychology. There must be something there for Mr. Weiner.
I am sure that the helping professions can do helpful things, but I am not convinced that the self-esteem movement was the answer to anything in public schools. In international comparisons, our students have soaring self-esteem, and lousy ability in math and science, and they don’t know much about history or geography either. I guess you could look at that and say that the psychologists have done a dandy job, we just need some mathematicians and scientists to step in and fix things.
Publicly, the evidence we have of rehab fixing up celebrities is pretty thin. Of course we don’t hear about the reformed jerks who have now become nice — we only hear about the drunks who go on another binge, the addicts who are back in court, the messy divorces, and the bastard children.
The 60s generation, the counterculture movement, the sexual revolution, the feminist movement, socially accepted drug use, hippies, Eastern religions, the ‘new left’ , the anti-war movement all provided plenty of need for the helping professions — but did they help? Can a jerk, with the help of rehab, become a non-jerk? And can rehab keep a misbehaving Congressman in office, and away from the camera? And keep him from becoming mayor of New York?
Nancy Pelosi and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz have demanded his resignation. Congressman Weiner has departed for an undisclosed location. Democrats don’t seem to mind much about whatever he has done. They care about his constant presence on the front page, with the (D-NY) after his name.
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Energy | Tags: Bringing America Down, Disastrous Energy Policies, The Anti-American EPA
The dream of the far left is to bring America down. They object to ideas of American exceptionalism, and think we should be more equal to others in the community of nations. According to John Hinderaker of Powerline:
The cornerstone belief of American liberals is that the United States is too rich and too powerful. And, if you want to make America poorer and weaker, the easiest way to do so is by preventing the development of our energy resources. Such a policy hobbles our economy and causes massive transfers of wealth from the U.S. to other countries, many of which are hostile. Liberals think this is all to the good, but pretty much every other American disagrees.
The Obama administration’s energy policies have been a disaster, assuming that American decline is not your objective. We have written many times about the administration’s efforts to suppress development of our oil resources, but coal is equally important. The United States is blessed with extraordinary deposits of coal, but Obama is determined to prevent us from using it to generate cheap and plentiful electricity. Obama wasn’t kidding when he said, as a candidate, that his policies would cause electricity prices to “skyrocket.”
Two new regulations from the EPA on ‘pollution’ will hit the coal industry so hard that hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost, and electricity rates will skyrocket 11 percent to over 23 percent according to a new study based on government data. The EPA says that any hit the industry will suffer is worth the health benefits. Elsewhere, the EPA has made it clear that they do not do cost-benefit analysis, and are prevented by regulation from doing so.
What’s more, officials said that just one of the rules to cut sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions will would yield up to $290 billion in annual health and welfare benefits in 2014. They say that amounts to preventing up to 36,000 premature deaths, 26,000 hospital and emergency room visits, and 240,000 cases of aggravated asthma. “This far outweighs the estimated annual costs,” says an official on background.
This is made-up hooey. The EPA would have to have statistics showing that 36,000 people have currently died from exposure to sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions, and they don’t have any such thing. They make up statistics like this all the time, and Lisa Jackson confidently quotes bogus health statistics in front of Congress. Fifteen States have initiated a legal challenge to the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases pose a danger to public health and welfare.
Nevermind. The EPA will charge right ahead. Utility Giant American Electric Power said yesterday that it will shut down five coal-fired power plants and spend billions of dollars to comply with a series of pending Environmental Protection Agency regulations.
But EPA defended its regulations Thursday, noting that the agency has worked closely with industry to ensure that its regulations are “reasonable, common-sense and achievable.”“These reasonable steps taken under the Clean Air Act will reduce harmful air pollution, including mercury, arsenic and other toxic pollution, and as a result protect our families, particularly children,” EPA said in a statement.
The company, one of the country’s largest electric utilities, estimated that it will cost between $6 billion and $8 billion in capital investments over the next decade to comply with the regulations in their current form. The costs of complying with the regulations will result in an increase in electricity prices of 10 to 35 percent and cost 600 jobs, AEP said.
Louisville Gas & Electric in an “environmental cost recovery” move (watch for this on your power bill) says that ratepayers will see their electric bills increase 19.2 percent by 2016. A LG&E spokesman said:
The EPA is forcing utilities to do this. We don’t have a choice. It’s not a question of are we going to meet them. The question is when and how and how much money. We have to meet these regulations because the EPA is mandating it for us to do it. They’re forcing us to do it.
These thing are all interconnected. If electricity prices go up, jobs will be lost not only in the power industry, but in the regular economy. Business in the private economy hopes to operate with a profit margin, their only reason for being in business. They will pay more for their power, their suppliers will pay more for their power, the cost of the goods they sell will rise, more inflation, more lost jobs.
American households will be hit hard, as will American businesses. Producers will try to cover their higher production costs by raising product prices. Consumer demand will fall, income and employment will drop.
These are unnecessary job-killing, economy-destroying regulations. Obama claims to want an improved economy, more jobs, less unemployment — yet every move by his administration contributes to the decline. They really are trying to bring America Down.
American Elephants 