Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, National Security | Tags: Affordable Energy, Crony Capitalism, Offshore-Wind Market?
The Obama administration Department of the Interior has long busied themselves with preparations for the country’s first-ever federal offshore-wind lease sales, and the administration plans to start with a plot off the Atlantic coast that they hope will prove what a potential offshore-wind market will look like. Will there be any interest? Depends on how much subsidy Interior is promising.
“Trust us,” the wind industry intoned, “the enormous public investment is just seed-funding. It will be well worth it if costs fall in the cause of saving Mother Gaia.”
Energy insiders never bought it. The Victorians replaced windmills with steam driven machinery because they weren’t cost-efficient enough. But it’s easy to understand why Joe Average and populist politicos bought it. After all, aren’t most of us suckers for fictional romantic notions of wafting windmills able to harness the wind and create ‘free energy?’
Except that’s not how it worked out in the real world:
(Peter C.Glover)
Sally Jewell, the new Secretary of the Interior, and former head of consumer co-op REI, said “If there is good interest in this one, then I think you will have this happening on a consistent basis.” She said Interior considered many factors, including which areas would yield the highest potential for wind power while avoiding bird migration patterns and shipping lanes. Timing for developing a commercial offshore wind industry, she added, is up to the private sector. “The market will dictate, but we certainly don’t want to get in the way.”
Numerous articles document how European climate policies have been disastrous for affordable energy, economic growth, entire industries, people’s jobs and welfare, wildlife habitats and human lives.
The Obama administration is still trying to save the earth from global warming, though even the IPCC is admitting that there hasn’t been any warming in 15 years, even while CO2 continues to increase (and green the world). The president has shown no signs of approving the Keystone XL. The administration ignores the fact that wind farms are killing thousands of eagles, bats and other birds, and in spite of the fact that eagles are a federally protected species and it is a crime to kill one. Most European countries are recognizing that their huge investment in wind energy has been a flop, and are trying to reconsider. In the meantime, they are buying wood to fuel their power stations — that they get from American forests. Go figure.
The Sierra Club has long since changed from an environmental club that wanted to protect the Sierra mountains, into a radical environmental group. They have just decided to go whole “Deep Ecology,” and oppose any form of energy other than wind and solar. Even hydro is a problem for them because they’d prefer to tear down dams. This is all quite precious and sensitive, but would leave Americans freezing to death in a cooling climate. We can adapt to slight rises in heat, but cold kills. Wind and solar just don’t produce enough energy to even begin to power our country. It simply does not and cannot work.
Top Swedish climate scientist Dr. Lennart Bengstrom wrote: Warming is not noticeable —the warming we have had in the last 100 years is so small, if we didn’t have climate scientists to measure it, we would not have noticed. Sea level has risen fairly evenly for 100 years by 2 -3 mm per year. The pitch has not accelerated.
So there you have it. This president will continue to push more money into wind and solar, probably directed to his cronies, and continue to leave fossil fuels out of his “all of the above” energy plan, though he is happy to take credit for the rise in our natural gas and oil production on private lands that he had nothing whatsoever to do with.
Filed under: Africa, Art, Energy, Freedom | Tags: Built to Run, Seventy-Five MPH!, The Fastest Creature
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Health Care, Law, Politics, Taxes | Tags: Costs Up Dramatically, Ill-informed Public, ObamaCare Trainwreck
“It is entirely possible that we have a public so spectacularly ill-informed, we are no longer capable of governing themselves.” That was Jim Geraghty, writing Friday at National Review. “An April tracking poll from the Kaiser family Foundation showed that “Four in ten Americans (42%) are unaware that the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) is the law of the land. 12 percent believe it has been repealed by Congress, 7 percent believe it has been overturned by the Supreme Court, and 23 percent say they don’t know enough to say what the status of the law is.”
If the public doesn’t know whether or not ObamaCare is the law, it’s a little dubious if they have any understanding of “what is in it” in Nancy Pel0si’s famous phrase. With that level of vagueness, it’s not clear how much faith we can put in polls. The polls do, however, show that the law is significantly less popular than when it first passed.
“Overall, the public remains as divided as ever when it comes to their overall evaluations of the health law. This month, 35 percent report a favorable view, 40 percent an unfavorable view, and a full 24 percent report they have no opinion on the law, continuing a recent trend of particularly high shares not offering an opinion. Partisans remain quite divided, with a majority of Democrats in favor (57 percent) and most Republicans opposed (67 percent).”
Over half of Americans say they approve of efforts to change or stop the law “so it has less impact on taxpayers, employers, and health-care providers. Only one in three believe the law’s opponents should stop trying to block the law, down from 40% at the beginning of the year.
It was a shock to Democrats when Max Baucus who was one of those who wrote the Affordable Care Act not only announced his retirement, but said that ObamaCare was a “train wreck”, but train wreck it is.
Businesses are cutting hours and benefits in advance of the ObamaCare mandates. Research from UC Berkeley found that some 2.3 million workers risk seeing their hours cut back because of ObamaCare. They didn’t expect this. Democrats have longed for government health care for so long that they assumed that everyone would be for it.
A couple of years ago a reporter asked HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius whether ObamaCare’s employer mandate would hurt job growth. ” think that this will actually be a great incentive” to increase jobs, was her response.
They thought it would reduce the cost of health care. They thought it would make people healthier, they believed it would reduce the number of emergency room visits, saving money. It is necessary to enroll all the healthy young people to subsidize the care of older people. There are all kinds of new taxes and surcharges that will drive health costs even higher. The IRS needs to hire something like 15,000 new people to keep track of your medical status. ObamaCare is setting the nation on a permanently higher track of spending for health care — starting next year.
In California, ObamaCare will increase the cost of individual health insurance premiums by 64% – 146%. And you will enroll or pay the fine. And when you get past that, there may not be any doctors who will see you anyway. Trainwreck.
American Elephants 