Yesterday, president Obama announced emission standards which he said would raise the cost of automobiles by $1300.
While the new fuel and emission standards for cars and trucks will save billions of barrels of oil, they are expected to cost consumers an extra 1,300 US dollars per vehicle by the time the plan is complete in 2016. Mr Obama said the fuel cost savings would offset the higher price of vehicles in three years.
His remarkable comment caught my attention, because one of the primary purposes of Obama’s “cap and trade” plan is to massively raise the cost of fuel. There aren’t going to be any fuel cost savings. In fact, Mr. Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle last year that he actually intends to bankrupt coal fired power plants using cap and trade:
You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.
Two automobile companies are already going bankrupt, so I think we should take Mr. Obama’s words seriously.
I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains tax, not any of your taxes.
WASHINGTON – Democrat Barack Obama said Sunday that if elected he will push to increase the amount of income that is taxed to provide monthly Social Security benefits.
Audacity indeed. The assumption seems to be that no one remembers what was said last week.
I must have missed it but I cant see where in that quote Obama says he plans to bankrupt coal fired power plants?
About 1.2 million people die in automobile accidents every year. That is 137 people every hour. Each day, the death toll from automobiles is nearly as high as the total number of Americans killed in Iraq since 2002.
Clearly, the only sensible way to deal with this is to ban automobiles entirely. That would also save countless polar bears and penguins.
Moderator – Better wake up on the 10:14:37 commenter.
“Roads (15:39:18) :
GM and Chrysler concentrated on the home market, which was less regulated and less sensitive to fuel consumption under low oil price conditions but proved uncompetitive and almost unsaleable in the high oil price world.
Utter balderdash! (That’s English for crap)
Haven’t you heard of Vauxhall-Opel, Daewoo, SyangYong or Mercedes?
The first 3 are GM, Chrysler either owns or is heavily into bed with Mercedes.
I’m sure there are more but that’s enough for now.
DaveE.
jon,
there is a mammoth difference between conservation and greater efficiency (which I’m all for), on the one hand, and driving inexpensive, dependable energy suppliers out of business so expensive, undependable energy suppliers will find it easier to survive.
one is smart (if implemented humanely), the other is madness.
btw, keithhennessey.com has a comparison of Bush’s vs. Obama’s increased CAFE standards for fuel efficiency. the Bush plan results in a projected net loss of about 30,000 auto industry jobs. the Obama plan that replaces it has a minute increase in fuel efficiency over the Bush plan, with a projected job loss of 150,000. these job loss figures are based on the $ amount added to the price tag. Obama’s standard kills 5 times as many jobs for a negligible increase in efficiency.
in the middle of a recession.
Sukiho,
Listen to the real words. Seems straightforward to me.
Mike
Oliver Ramsay (09:42:50) said:
Let’s say there’s a hundred years worth of oil at the present rate of consumption.
It’s absurd to look at this as an ethical problem. It’s a practical problem.
AGREED that it’s a practical problem. It happens to be THE practical problem I have worked-on (well, like everybody else, one tiny corner) for the last 30 years.
THE central fact that EVERY “green” individual forgets is that THERE HAS BEEN ONLY a ~100 year supply for, oh, the LAST 100 YEARS. It has been remarkably consistent. Wonder WHY?
Question: if it is your job to find and produce oil & gas, WHAT is the discounted value [aka Net Present Value or NPV] of the oil that you’ve found that wil not be produced for say 100 YEARS? [For the Innumerate among us, try to find your copy of Excel, or whatever it’s called on your Power Mac, and READ about NPV calculations in the HELP; pick a discount rate, say 10% for a nice round number, and work it out.]
For some strange reason, folks DO NOT continue pouring money into oil exploration that won’t be produced in their lifetimes. In fact, DAILY somebody world wide “plugs & abandons” an exploration well that turns-out to be uneconomic to produce under foreseen (that means relatively near-term) conditions.
It does require a little faith in the your fellow human beings (the ones with the missing fingers and the Marsh Funnels and the BMF Stilson Wrenches) to believe that we’ll be OK if we “only” have “100 years supply at current consumption”.
But this isn’t rocket science. Or should I say, Climate “science”.
Take a deep breath, look at the record, and try to trust & respect folks who are emphatically NOT as hip as you are, but really, really know what they’re doing.
Alternatively, if you are “green” and terribly worried about our energy supply, band together with 1000 of your closest friends and buy an equity interest in a natural gas company, say Devon. CH4 is the “cleanest” thing going, or in “green” terms, the closet thing to hydrogen that’s economical to produce. Just don’t be disappointed if Devon doesn’t EVER have more than 100 years of proven reserves at current rates of production; I’m sure that their investors would rather have the dividends.
sukiho (10:14:37),
You don’t know how to do a simple search??
I put in the keywords: Obama, bankrupt, coal. Plenty of links came up. Here’s the first one:
GMTA.
So Obama’s CAFE plan has a 10% increase in fuel efficiency (3 mpg) compared to the Bush plan, and a 500% increase in projected industry job loss.
Bush: 32 mpg, 30,000 jobs lost
Obama: 35 mpg, 150,000 jobs lost
They both looked at the same numbers, and made different judgements.
so jon, just based on these numbers, if one President can be described as, in your words, “immoral and ridiculous”, and the other President as clear-eyed yet compassionate, which is Bush and which is Obama?
Zach: “(i.e. coal plants closed and replaced by something else)”
That’s funny Zach. Care to define “something else”?
Zach B (08:04:28) :
You know what bothers me about “scientific” conservatives? They think because they can use a calculator with a cosine function button they know all about human nature.
.
You got a calculator with only a cos function? I want one.
I took a course from Dean Long, Dean of the Thayer School back in the Paleozoic, statics, I think it was. The Dean had an enormous FOUR FUNCTION calculator that ran on C-cells. By this time you could buy a little scientifc solar powered calculator that WASN’T Reverse Polish for very few $$.
We asked the Dean why he still used the clunky 4-function calculator with buttons the size of commerorative postage stamps. He said: “well, I know pi and Sqrt 2 and 3, and the trig functions for 15, 30 and 45 degrees. The rest I can interpolate. If I need to do anything beyond first-order approximation, I have you guys.”
Coincidentally, this was the only class I ever took where the prof spent LARGE swaths of time teaching and reiterating first-order approximation; what my colleagues now call “the smell test”.
On the first day, we were asked how much a mile of welded RR track grew in length for a 10 degree rise in temperature. No calculators, no pencils & paper, what’s your “guess” (that is, first-order approximation)? [who the heck knew the coefficent of thermal expansion for mild steel off the top of their heads? Dean Long did, that is, close enough.]
Every other prof wanted to know if you could get the answer to three significant figures; absent a good first-order understanding of the variables and the data, that sometimes lead to some extremely accurate WRONG answers. {Sound a little like AGW, anyone?]
Dean Long knew that the real question was “yes or no?”
And that brings me back to zach: the real question is STILL “yes or no?”.
No hand wringing, no “human nature”, no quesses or wishes or flying manbearpigs, is Carbon Cap & Trade a good idea? Yes or No?
I know what Dean Long would say.
E.M.Smith, always enjoy your comments. Wish I had your investing advice a couple of years ago.
My 401K was well diversified, but lost money in every category – “Interest Only” (savings account?) included, since the management fees exceeded the interest. The “Bond” category I assumed was Treasury Bonds, but after reading the small print, discovered the word “mortgages”.
My B.O.B. (Bug Out Bag) is ready to go. Don’t plan to leave Texas, just leave the city and head to the hill country till the dust settles.
Now I’m off to read your Blog.
oh, a simple search, well the simplest place to search for it was in the quote that followed the statement, perhaps the author forgot to include it
(16:24:50) :
Reply: Like there’s any way to put the toothpaste back in the tube on this thread ~ charles the sometimes pc moderator
Being Scottish by ancestry, I use a vacuum system.
.
Graeme Rodaughan (18:43:23) :
. . . [1] BO has authored at least 3 self-congratulating books. Ref:
Whereas Adolf Hitler only managed 1.
Hitler was promoting a philosophy. BHO was promoting himself. That someone with no accomplishments could write that many autobiographies by his forties is something of an accomplishment in itself.
[2] I too find the terms “fascism”, “Communism” to be falsely distinct. I prefer to make a distinction on the grounds of the “Dispersion or Concentration of Social Authority”.
My distinction is more along economic philosophy lines. Otherwise it’s just how a particular dictator (Stalin, Mao, Hitler, a zillion banana republic dictators) chooses to run things. Not that I would compare BHO with those self-starters.
[3] Dictatorship is the “default” (not the natural state, just the default state) form of Government
Kings have long been the default, and kingships were usually dictatorships.
Graeme , thanks for the post.
sukiho,
There is a link to the video – in this article – right above the quote. Perhaps you forgot to click on it.
Hah! We are coal industries which generate bioelectricity (neuron-electrical flux) from coal (organic compounds)… Yeah! Definitely, we will be bankrupted by this kind of greenish economic plans.
Those who understand the corrupt science behind AGW should stop giving aid and comfort to the enemy by repeating their dishonest euphemism “cap and trade” and refer to it as it is “cap and tax”.
Anthony,
Delete if this has already been posted elsewhere.
Time has reported how the EPA has cooked the books when calculating the total emissions “stress” test for biofuels. Congress required the EPA to compare Biofuels emissions with gasoline. Interesting, according to time, the EPA had to look at a 30 year period to make Biofuels emissions even comparable to gasoline (even then with the most optomistic assumptions). It’s OK to pollute more now if the emissions are slightly less later. A 100 year period look better.
From Time:
“The starkest example of the problems with the analysis is the time horizon. When the EPA studied a reasonable 30-year time period, even with its generous assumptions, soy biodiesel and corn-ethanol plants powered by coal or natural gas actually produced more emissions than gasoline; corn ethanol only passed the stress test (and just barely) when powered by the cleanest possible power. And that analysis assumed it’s a good trade-off to accept massive emissions today in exchange for reductions over 30 years, when in fact massive emissions today could help trigger devastating ice melts and other feedback loops that could make reductions over 30 years practically irrelevant.”
To read the full article go to
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1897549,00.html
This hoax is comparable to the Global warming propaganda and maybe even worse since calculations can probably more accurately predict the total emissions from Biofuels than predict global temperature.
Think of the taxpayers money being wasted on Biofuels.
Please note that Obama’s elite (statist) “fuel efficiency” demands (he has no way to actually IMPLEMENT them!) will KILL an additional 3500 people.
Per year.
Every year.
For thirty, forty, fifty years – until some one has the guts to repeal them and stop the murder.
The Gulf War so roundly condemned by Obama’s libera;s only killed some 3800 people. Total. Over the past 7 years since 2002.
While freeing another 65 million in two countries. I would argue that Obama is deliberately murdering Americans by demanding smaller, less safe cars – while at the same time he kills the economy and the world’s capitalist societies.
All to produce NO measureable change in greenhouse gasses – and NO change in the world’s temperatures.
Here’s the video of it—not just audio—hard to miss what he means, you see him saying it :
factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com
Thursday, May 21, 2009
USA on the Precipice of Destruction
By Alan Caruba
Watching the debate of the Waxman-Markey “Cap-and-Trade” bill that would impose limits on “greenhouse gas” emissions, allegedly to deter “global warming” one Congressman, reading from the script in front of him, said that there is no further debate on whether “global warming” is real and that “a consensus” of scientists concur. He lied.
Everything about “global warming” is a lie and has been since the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to provide the basis for the destruction of the world’s great, industrialized nations while exempting developing nations such as China and India from its mandates.
On my desk is a Global Warming Petition signed by 31,478 American Scientists. It says “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
“Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmosphere carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
Along with other data I picked up in March while attending The Heartland Institute’s second International Conference on Climate Change is a summary for policymakers titled “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate.” Published by the Institute, it is the work of the Science and Environmental Policy Project. On June 2, the Institute will sponsor another comparable conference in Washington, D.C.
The national media will do its best to either ignore or disparage the science that will be presented by some of the nation’s leading climatologists and meteorologists. They have betrayed Americans for decades with their slavish repetition of environmental lies, their glorification of Earth Day, all things “Green”, and their attacks on so-called deniers and skeptics.
America needs all of its 330 million people to be skeptics. It needs them to shake off the lies about “global warming” and demand by calls, letters, faxes, and emails that Congress steps back from the entirety of this foul piece of legislation and to vote against it.
The United States of America is on the precipice of its own destruction and it will be the work of the Democrat members of Congress, the White House, and the work since the 1970s of all those self-anointed and self-proclaimed “environmentalists” who seek to destroy our economy.
“Cap-and-Trade” is a dagger at the heart of America. It will raise the cost of electricity, gasoline, and all forms of energy vital to the economy of the nation. It will enrich the federal government at the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. It is a form of taxation that will impact everything we purchase.
It is to the credit of the Republican Party that its members in Congress are waging a battle to deter this piece of legislation from becoming law. As one Republican Senator noted last evening, “Carbon dioxide is what we exhale, every one of us.” How difficult is it for anyone to understand that CO2 is not a threat and never was?
The threat is the hidden political agenda, socialist in its attempt to control the entire landmass of the nation, to lock away our vast natural energy resources, and to impose laws that will impoverish the present and future generations of America.
The despots of the world are watching and waiting for our destruction. They will celebrate in their palaces. They need not fire a single missile.
Jim G (09:56:50) :
The frightening thing in my mind, is that this wasn’t kept secret before the elections. Not that McCain was any better.
This is what the people of the good ole USA have chosen.
Be careful what you wish for….
Of course, in 3 years, 7 if he’s re-elected, people will really be wishing for a change.
FORTUNATELY MACCAIN CHANGED HIS MIND AND FIGHTS THE CAP&TRADE BILL
“Don Shaw (20:34:04) : Think of the taxpayers money being wasted on Biofuels.”
It’s not just that Don. I know of two stories, not just things I read about somewhere, but of families I know in the Philippines, who were hurt so badly by the skyrocket price of food last year, partly caused from biofuels, where the daughters in their early 20’s of both families left home and moved to a bigger city to find a job so they could send money home for food and also there was one less mouth to feed in the home that way. This is a real consequence.
——————————————————————
“When millions of people are going hungry, it’s a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels.”
–Palaniappan Chidambaram,
India’s Finance Minister