I’ve held off as long as I can with commenting on the presedential election, as it tends to suck all the oxygen right out of the room, but this issue needs to be aired. There’s more to Obama’s energy plan than bankrupting coal power plants. He also intends to make energy prices “skyrocket”:
This doesn’t sound sustainable to me. Hat tip to Jon Jewitt.
UPDATE: here is video from the San Francisco Chronicle of the actual interview:
Hat tip to Fred for this one.
Mark, of course you are right, behavior modification is what’s in the cards.
There is no real choice, between the two candidates, as far as climate or energy go. The people who run things, are behind the curtain, invisible to most of us, are using the time honored techniques used by dictators the world over and articulated clearly by Edward L. Bernays, the father of PR and political spin, the man who got women to equate smoking with being liberated! The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.
He’s not going for a second term then???????????????
It’s easy to see who Messiah Obama is, what has not been brought out by the mainstream media is that the Messiah has horns. Unfortunately, if you didn’t do your homework and educate yourself on who this man is and what he represents, it’s to late now.
To bad, our country’s future hangs in the balance
“Well, that’ll mean the poor won’t be able to afford it which will mean more wealth will need to be redistributed downward.”
Genius, hoodie. Bet we get the ‘Civilian Guard’ first.
“Obama is obviously very intelligent.”
Oh? Too smart for a plumber?
The coal industry will not be bankrupt they will simply pass the costs onto the consumer.
I have heard this sort of thing for far too long. BOTH pay. When you raise the price on anything, there is less of it sold. That hurts the company as well as the consumer.
Look at what happened to gas. Prices went up. That increased oil company profits temporarily–until lower consumption forced prices to go down below where they were before.
As one wag put Obama’s policy:
All we have to do the solve the energy crisis is to repeal the law.
Of Supply and Demand.
if Acorn and the rest have invented enough voters to replace the disaffected ones in the swing states he has nothing to worry about.
Ann Coulter is right,
It’s a declaration of war on America.
Well, yes, but America tends to win these things.
I’m starting to have serious reservations that this country will still exist 10 years from now. It’s being destroyed from within, and the politicians are the catalyst.
If we survived Ike’s 91% marginal tax rate and his lamebrained “nuclear tripwire” so-called “strategy” (not to mention his contemptible, asinine, destructive “military-industrial complex” speech), and the Carter presidency, we’ll survive this.
As Tarkington once put it: “not unlike a bug fished out of an inkwell: alive, but discouraged.”
As a member of the once “third world”, you americans are becoming new members of the “fourth world” with all that AGW pseudosience.
The USA will never be the last century´s USA again. You are really blind, we just can not believe how you are heading to a bottomless precipice
Well, for the sake of heaven and the lives of you children, DON’T follow us over the cliff!
(You might be wrong, though; don’t count us out. We can be pretty resilient. Look at how we came back after Carter!)
So you can have a socialist, or a national socialist. Not much of a choice, in my opinion. Hat tip to DiLorenzo.
The Constitution protects us from bad leadership better than just about any arrangement in history. We have had some real honkers. Yet here we sit.
Besides, periodic bad leadership is a natural consequence of democracy. It’s the price we pay for it.
It could get very bad. Yet we will have survived worse.
First, many apologies to “Jim B Original”…I had no idea I was posting under someone’s identity…I’ll gladly change if you’d like it back ;*)
“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”
I am by no means an OB supporter, but is it possible he was just throwing a bone to the various law enforcement agencies?
Don’t want us to go off sounding half-cocked ;*)
Jim
Wil the unemployed coal workers still be allowed to “cling to guns and religion,” or will those be taxed as well?
How about people who’s jobs depend on available supply of electricity?
And the sucky thing is, that McCain Lieberman would have done the same thing.
Anyone wonder why I’m writing in Paris Hilton this year?
OK, I suppose I’ll be a gadfly here and play Devil’s advocate.
First off, while the President can affect policy a fair bit, it’s our friends in the Capitol that will ultimately shape it the most. Whether or not a particular President wants certain policies in the domestic arena, they are not necessarily going to happen unless a Congress is sympathetic. As the Americans on this blog who follow THOMAS.gov or any other legislation tracker should know, proposed bills and bills that actually pass the rigmarole of Congress rarely resemble one another.
For those of you who are worried that Obama has the power to actually do anything to the coal power plants, consider this: Just off the cuff, I’d guess that at least 25 states (with 2 senators each) get a large portion of their energy from coal. History tells us (as do regression analyses, if you’re interested) that those senators are highly unlikely to vote in favor of the strictest policies. If only 41 senators vote against a bill, it will not pass. That means that you will see the bill either: get Christmas tree’d to death; or radically altered to fit those senators’ constituencies’ needs.
Does this mean we will not get something close to what Obama wants? It’s hard to say, and it largely depends on the logrolling and wheedling the bills supporters do. But we can rest assured that the GOP will remain a gadfly in any of his policy making by simply asking for concessions, seeking to alter bills, etc.
Even with majorities in the House and Senate, party unity in the US is, and always has been, weak due to the structure of US government. Federalism saves us from broad sweeping changes so often seen in parliamentary systems like the UK or Japan. Remember the permanent Republican majority that we were promised in 2000? Yeah, didn’t happen. Why? America doesn’t work that way because it wasn’t structurally designed to do so.
I read this site mostly for the science content, and do find what you guys do with the weather stations admirable. But as for the political commentary, I can only say this: Calm down, everyone. Presidents do not exercise half the domestic policy making power we all seem to think they do. If you really want to be nervous about Obama as president, worry about his future as a foreign policy maker, where the Presidency has historically been most important. If you really are worried about domestic policy issues, I suggest to EVERYONE that they get involved with their local representative, read THOMAS.gov and see how their reps are voting, and pay more attention to what Congress does in general. That’s where the real domestic political action is at, and that’s what we seem to all forget every 4 years.
If they understood the science the entirety of the AGW energy policy can be reduced to a single equation. The more BTUs per C atom the better. Thus we have the Hydrogen economy and windmills as best and coal as the worst.
Simple answers are often wrong.
Well, that’ll mean the poor won’t be able to afford it which will mean more wealth will need to be redistributed downward.
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That’s one thing that gets me about the liberals.
One one hand they declare that energy needs to be more expensive so that people will use less of it.
Then they turn around and declare that it isn’t fair that energy has been priced beyond the reach of the average families, so they create yet another welfare program to provide subsidized energy for everyone.
The net result is that the people are more dependant on govt then they were before govt took their money to pay for something that govt made expensive in the first place.
evanjones,
One quick economics note: Taxes on inelastic goods tend to get passed on to the consumer, and the resulting deadweight loss is borne almost entirely by the consumer. It’s elastic goods where taxes are most likely to affect both the consumer and producer.
This is why a gas tax holiday, for example, makes so little sense. Producers and sellers of gasoline know that gas demand is inelastic to price, and will simply keep the price at pre-tax holiday levels and reap the economic profit.
The big problem, therefore, with heavily taxing and raising the price of energy, is that it affects those on the bottom of the economic totem pole the most. Simple linear marginal taxation hurts those at the bottom because there is a basic amount of energy that one must use just to maintain a basic modern standard of living. One interesting solution to this is to tax logarithmically as consumption increases. That way, the poorest are not hit the hardest by a tax increase, as their consumption will be at the point where taxation increases the slowest.
I keep hearing: “The voters will boot them out in 2010 if they misbehave”.
Well, these guys aren’t stupid – they learned from their mistakes in 1994.
Expect the following once the Obamanistas land in Washington:
1. Rigorous takeover of the national climate data centers.
2. Fairness doctrine
3. Control & censorship of the internet
4. Persecution of sceptics until they submit.
5. Cap & trade
6. Tax increases
7. World Court jurisdiction
8. Strict gun control
9. Pack the Supreme Court with Marxists
10. Submission to the international law and the UN
Getting the picture?
They are not interested in serving the people. They are bent on forcing the people to live how they think is right.
Should give Americans yet more reason to continue clinging to at least their guns. I can’t believe I’d be writing such dire predictions of the country I was born in and a citizen of. What is wrong with Americans today? They are getting duped by con men on every front!
Unfortunately, Barack Obama has declared war against the US Constitution. He sees the Constitution as an obstacle to his “total makeover” of the US government–so the Constitution has to go!
Obama is right about that–the Constitution is meant to be an obstacle to government tyranny. Unfortunately, if Obama can pack the courts using his Democratic Party majorities in the Congress, the Constitution will magically start to say whatever Obama wants it to say. Voila! No more checks and balances.
Jeff (09:09:39) :
Strangley enough, the guy who’s ’strongest’ on the economy is acctualy the one who is the highest risk.
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Are you stating that Obama is strong on the economy? On what grounds?
Would it be his plans to raise taxes on families making more than $150,000 a year. (Considering that this number has fallen from $250,000 to $150,000 in less than a month, how much further will it come down before he takes office? Considering Obama voted for a bill that raised taxes on everyone making more than $42000, maybe that will be the floor)
He wants to increase taxes on all businesses by increasing the capital gains taxes.
He wants to force everyone to join a union. (a bill to eliminate secret ballots in unionization drives was introduced this year, and Obama has endorsed it.)
He has endorsed a bill that will end ALL state restrictions on abortions and provide federal funding for them. (Even parental notification for minors will be eliminated) (He even promised NARAL that passing this bill will be the first priority for him once sworn in.)
Obama has no credibility on any issue economic. McCain isn’t great, but at least he tried to reform Freddy and Fannie back in 2000. A move that was blocked in part by Obama.
When the pro-Obama guy was going into his little “pay no attention to the man behind the screen” spiel he was talking clean coal.
So I clicked the link under the article to find out what exactly this ‘clean coal’ stuff is of which they speak. According to that it doesn’t actually exist. It’s an oxymoron. Why does the media never let us in on little key facts like that?
Obama is obviously very intelligent. Even if he knows about the doubts surrounding AGW theory, would he hint about them in a campaign?
We’ll see what he does once elected. The slightest hint of waffling and delaying would mean that he won’t be as radical as many people on this blog fear.
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He believes he is at least.
A month or so ago, Obama told legislators that if they don’t pass Kyoto, he’s going to order the EPA to start regulating CO2 emissions.
He’s a true believer. Or at least he believes that he can use this issue to make the world more “fair”.
“If we survived……we’ll survive this.”
As I said, these guys have learned from their previous mistakes.
They are not going to repeat them. This time they are going to make sure
the dissent gets suppressed and that they control the information.
You think the military is gonna intervene? The generals are going to be replaced soon.
Another thing on the Obama backed union bill. Whenever there is an impasse in the negotiations, it authorizes the govt to impose a contract on both parties. In practical matters, this means that whenever there is a Democrat in the White House, the govt will force the company to accept whatever demands the union makes.