Sunday we all got a chuckle (or a scare depending on your world view) from the Superbowl Green Police commercial. Some thought it was fine satire, others thought it hit a little too close to reality.
After watching this report about Cathy Zoi in the Obama administration, perhaps the “too close to reality” worry has merit. In this report from John Stossel, she visualizes and vocalizes the need for “swat teams” in neighborhoods to enforce energy efficiency retrofits for homes and businesses.
Zoi, formerly of the “Alliance for Climate Protection”, formerly Al Gore’s point person for his “Repower America” nationwide campaign, now heads up Obama’s DOE energy efficiency/renewables division.
Cathy Zoi, center, Al Gore, at right. Photo via Flickr
Treehugger has a report on her move from GORE to DOE.
So why is John Stossel reporting about her? It seems some cronyism might be afoot related to company that’s been getting some government handouts as part of the “stimulus”. Watch John Stossel’s eye opening report below.
I should add that I’m all for energy efficiency, which I demonstrate with deeds, but I’m against “swat teams” forcing retrofits on homeowners. People are smart enough to make a change if it will save energy and thus money.
I didn’t see an announcement to say that the USA had turned into a totalitarian dictatorship. That’s the most incredible thing I’ve seen.
Coincidentally (I’m in the UK by the way) a month or two back I received a letter from my local council to say that they had set up a visit for me from a surveyor. Now I have kidney cancer and don’t do social visits, but would enjoy kicking the rear end of just about anyone in reality, and an interfering nosey bureaucrat would do just fine.
Apparently it was part of the English Housing Survey. I’d like a visit from a nurse, but maybe a surveyor is the next best thing.
After a little investigation I discovered this
http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/pdf/1371753.pdf
which says they’ll be measuring my house’s energy effciency, something the council didn’t mention in their letter to me.
I’m not quite at death’s door, but any council sponsored surveyor preaching to me on the long term benefits of cavity insulation would find himself quite a bit closer himself, as any benefit would have to factor in my own longevity.
I really wonder what the outcome would have been if I had allowed this person into my house,
I had better prepare for the SWAT team. That must be the next step.
Good wishes to you, Graham.
I can’t imagine the indignity of “kilowatt police” on top of what you already endure
@Brian G Valentine (14:57:15) :
Thank you for your response.
I believe in the presumption of innocence and I take the position that the appearance of a conflict of interest is something to be avoided.
On a related topic, I do not believe cronyism, special favors, pay-for-play, etc., are acceptable simply because these things have gone on since day one. Improper is improper regardless of which political party is in power.
The comment, so easily thrown away, about SWAT teams going into every neighbourhood and retro-fitting houses with her husband’s company’s windows made me shudder.
This is Governmental corruption out in the open. Why has this woman not yet been arrested, or at least removed from office for this blatant illegality?
Looking at the system right at the top, political appointees in the Federal government were not exactly “uninvolved” with [the particular] President’s election to office, and where it stops, I have no idea.
I’m not spotless.
Gavin S has been whacked in the skeptical web pages for “blogging his workday away on Real Climate” instead of doing his job.
Do I write my skeptical stuff on web logs during work hours? Yes I do, yes I do, and yes I do
H.R.2857 – GIVE Act
To reauthorize and reform the national service laws.
Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act
This bill and others similar to it require “mandatory volunteer” service from children and young adults.
SEC. 152. ESTABLISHMENT OF NATIONAL CIVILIAN COMMUNITY CORPS PROGRAM
SEC. 1506. TRAINING.
including a focus on energy conservation, environmental stewardship or conservation, infrastructure improvement, urban and rural development, or disaster preparedness needs
Who would the green police be? According to the GIVE Act, it would be your own school age children and all young adults. Mandatory volunteers.
Count me as one of those who was very upset with Audi’s Green Car commercial. Was it just a means of promoting their diesel engine car or was it a glimpse of the future with environmental extremists in control of the government? The commercial portrays peolple being arrested and roughed up by the police for “crimes” such as:
Asking for a plastic bag instead of paper.
Being in possesion of incandescent light bulbs.
Putting a used battery in the garbage.
Sitting in a hot tub set at 105 degrees.
Is this a glimpse of the policy direction of the future? Congress has already banned incandescent light bulbs. Now another Obama Czar speaks of swat teams to enforce energy efficiency retrofits for homes and businesses.
These people are serious psychopaths and they control the government!
The term SWAT team is commonly used in the Federal government in a positive sense. It has nothing to do with police. You send in a specialized or multidisciplinary team to fix something. I think you are being just a little paranoid.
AGW is, to my mind, absolute the most harmful and despicable fabrication to have come about in my lifetime, when I first looked at AGW for the DOE 25 years ago I thought it had been discredited every decade since 1900 and no one would ever do anything except laugh about it ever again, I feel turned upside down thinking about how far this falsehood has spread and the consequences of the spread of this belief, seem too much for me to bear
In Software Engineering, a ‘SWAT Team’ (‘S’pecial ‘W’eapons ‘A’and ‘T’raining) is an organizational structure model. The purpose of a S.W.A.T. project is to get as much done as quickly as possible, typically on a small, difficult task. …
That is how the term is used in the Federal Government. We are the government and we are here to help!!
Definition of Swat team from Wikipedia:
“A S.W.A.T. (Special Weapons And Tactics)[1][2] team is an elite Special Operations tactical unit in American and some international law enforcement departments. They are trained to perform high-risk operations that fall outside of the abilities of regular officers. Their duties include performing hostage rescues and counter-terrorism operations, serving high risk arrest and search warrants, subduing barricaded suspects, and engaging heavily-armed criminals. A SWAT team is often equipped with specialized firearms including assault rifles, submachine guns, shotguns, carbines, riot control agents, stun grenades, and high-powered rifles for snipers. They have specialized equipment including heavy body armor, entry tools, armored vehicles, advanced night vision optics, and motion detectors for covertly determining the positions of hostages or hostage takers inside of an enclosed structure.”
I think the bottom line here is for each one of us to start “Living Green”. We must find ways to make our homes and businesses energy efficiency.
Most people turn to window tints in order to reduce their energy consumption. FREE information on different kinds of window tints and it’s benefits are available at http://www.TintBuyer.com. Window tints will enable us to minimize the use of our air-conditioners and heater which is way economical and eco-friendly. Let’s go GREEN!
Correction: the mandatory service language has been removed from HR 2857 but can still be found in HR 1444. (It took me a whole Saturday last year to find that.)
You can still see that the groundwork for the ESTABLISHMENT OF NATIONAL CIVILIAN COMMUNITY CORPS PROGRAM with “a focus on energy conservation, environmental stewardship or conservation” is being laid right now.
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h1444/show
Graham UK: I believe the English Housing Survey is a ruse to hide the new survey for reappraising (ie raising) Council Tax bands, thought up by the odious John Prescott. It means anyone who has spent their own taxed income to improve their property will find themselves in a higher tax band.
In the UK people are already taken to court and fined for eg putting something in the wrong bin. I told you recently of a friend (and academic as UEA as it happens!) whose living room/kitchen in Cambridge which is not large at all contains three rubbish bins, which due to lack of space have to sit int he room, One is for organic waste – only collected once a fortnight!
All this is as per EU dictates btw – everythig must be separated, re-cycled etc. Except that the bottom has fallen out of the recycled materials market esp for paper, and it’s stored in old hangars etc all over the country as vast expense. Some councils barge it down the Thames etc and then send it all off to China or Indonesia to dispose of – really good for the carbon foot[print, that!
Meanwhile we jettison enough cardboard p.a. in the UK to fire a couple of electrity stations – but we are not permitted to burn it due to EU rules on ‘hazardous waste’. One guy spent all his savings on a factory to convert waste cardboard to fuel bricks, and was doing pretty well at it – but EU rules forced him to close it, with no compensation of course. (Thanks to C Booker for detail on all this kind of stuff – he’s been cataloguing it for many years)
I collected up all my old ‘energy saving’ lightbulbs last summer and took them to the dump, handing them in separately and noting the mercury as hazardous waste. I watched as the guy promptly went and threw them in the giant skip with all the other landfill stuff.
“Let’s go GREEN!”
Let’s not.
“but seeing as how new EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has inflated the Agency’s budget by almost 50%, there would seem to be little reason for USEPA to outsource its authority. Yet, that’s exactly what has been going on, and I thought that someone should bring the situation to your attention.”
50% !!! That’s insane,,,
http://bigjournalism.com/rtrzupek/2010/02/09/outsourcing-the-usepa-an-open-letter-to-congress/#more-20810
I’m already “green”.
I eat food that has incorporated carbon mainly from plant sources and my metabolic processes exhale some of it out as CO2; what waste is left is generally good for manufacturing fertilizer. That fertilizer is used by plants again. I’ve noticed this process keeps going year in and year out, over and over again.
I use electricity that is produced in part by hydroelectric plants, by coal-fired electric plants, and by wind turbines. One of these enhances the air with additional CO2 so next year’s crop is likely to be more abundant than last year’s. The others simply convert kinetic energy in one place to kinetic and thermal energy in another.
I drive a vehicle that burns diesel; it contributes to the CO2 levels that benefit plants also, including trees that are growing at tremendous rates now. These will eventually be cut down, sawed into lumber and made into houses and fine furniture (with the occasional bonfire for fun), helping to solve housing problems for me and millions of others.
I recycle my plastics so they’re made back into plastic; I recycle my metals so they’re made into metal products, and my glass, too, which finds it’s way into feedstock for new glass products. My paper goes into the newspaper bin and that’s recycled, too.
When I die, I’ll probably be cremated, and eventually become part of the carbon cycle that will support other life forms the world over.
You don’t get much greener than that. (Isn’t carbon a wonderful thing?)
It isn’t Haliburton, so it doesn’t count. Silly Rabbit! Cronyism is for kids!
Stossel is a self-proclaimed libertarian so no doubt he’s got some bias in this piece, but who can honestly say that something doesn’t smell when the head of a federal weatherization program is married to the VP of a company whose business is making energy efficient windows and that benefited uniquely from a federal stimulus bill? Imagine if a Boeing VP were married to a DoD procurement boss. What could go wrong?
For the critics who obviously haven’t been paying enough attention to know that this video is not a slap-dash hack job, I’ll let John Stossel explain himself through his blog entries on crony capitalism. I look forward to apologies that it was actually a well-researched and considered hack job.
David: there are several definitions of SWAT teams on Wikipedia. You are cherry picking.
Don, I seriously doubt the SWAT team they’d deploy would be there to assist you with your software engineering. Do you?
Maybe serious Materials will now suffer a downturn. Obama endorsements seem to be a kiss of death these days. Just look what happened to Martha Coakley in Mass.
I’m convinced that the only way out of the mess is split the country.
Give the West Coast to the ecos, call it People’s Republic of Greenville or something, let every envio mental move there, they can have Al Gore as Chairman of the Communist Party and Sue Solomon as Minister of Science, then they can systematically demolish everything that runs on fossil fuel, the only prohibition is to re-enter America and attempt to regulate.
Greenville would quickly become a colossal foreign aid case, I would gladly pay my taxes for this if it would ensure they remained there
I wonder how many members of the “swat teams” will be Acorn union people. Just remember what BO said, we will no longer be able to set our thermostats to 72F. Mine is set at night for 58. Brrrrr
This also goes the warmers’ statements that corporations are the ones backing the “deniers.” Yeah, right.
Swat teams. It’s already started in Australia. A council of Government ministers decided that Australian homes should be fitted with “smart” electrical meters. This is COMPULSORY. The cost will be carried by the citixen. If you opt out of getting a smart meter, you get your power supplu cut off.
The economic scenarios before the roll-out produced a hopelessly wide range of outcomes for the smart meter program, many in the red, with one of 3 main rationales being “to reduce greenhouse gases”.
I suspect that the real story is that some Australian States are due to go overboard with solar and wind power. When the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow, they will need warning and a lead time to alter backup fossil fuel power, which is likely to be an expensive gas turbine type. So they are forcing the consumer to pay the cost of meters with radio telemetry so they can avoid making large economic losses through misallocation of backup.
The meter police will have the ability to enter premises at any time under the guise of detecting tampering.
The workers’ flag is deepest red ……