Christopher Horner reports that Pajamas Media has received a leaked internal document confirming Spain realizes its green failures, just as Obama pushes the American Power Act based on Spain’s program.
Pajamas Media has received a leaked internal assessment produced by Spain’s Zapatero administration. The assessment confirms the key charges previously made by non-governmental Spanish experts in a damning report exposing the catastrophic economic failure of Spain’s “green economy” initiatives.
On eight separate occasions, President Barack Obama has referred to the “green economy” policies enacted by Spain as being the model for what he envisioned for America.
Later came the revelation that Obama administration senior Energy Department official Cathy Zoi — someone with serious publicized conflict of interest issues — demanded an urgent U.S. response to the damaging report from the non-governmental Spanish experts so as to protect the Obama administration’s plans.
Most recently, U.S. senators have introduced the vehicle for replicating Spain’s unfolding economic meltdown here, in the form of the “American Power Act.”
But today’s leaked document reveals that even the socialist Spanish government now acknowledges the ruinous effects of green economic policy.
Full story here:
Well, you could ferment all your crops into alcohol and burn all your trees and peat.
I don’t know what you’d eat or burn the second year.
Repeat after me: GREEN….GO!!!!
You see, after all, who invented this expression was a visionary.
The parable of the broken window is apt here.
Stepping back in perspective, you can look at it in a slightly more humanist way. We’re deciding to *break* our energy system and saying this will generate jobs in rebuilding it better. The money spent doing this could be spent in numerous other ways. For instance, space exploration is currently underfunded in most nations. Regardless of what you consider to be the greatest threat to the earth from man, the fact of the matter is that mans impact on this planet only increases due to increases in human population on it. It is a true and correct perspective to think that the ultimate conservationist/environmentalist wants to leave Earth permanently. There is no greater way to reduce your impact on Earth than by leaving it and making your mess living elsewhere. Beyond this, there is no guarantee that Earth will not be hit by a life-ending asteroid and self-sustaining colonies on other solar bodies only makes sense if you’re talking about it from a survivalist pov.
So now we’re deciding to break our energy system to rebuild it. This is a waste of time by definition. We’re essentially making work for ourselves. It’s like burning down your house so you can rebuild it when what you really need to do is kick your older children out to make houses of their own. We’re going to spend tremendous percentages of GDP to do this. NASA’s budget is an order of magnitude less as a percentage of the federal budget than in the 1960’s. Right now we spend around 0.5% of the federal budget on NASA, that’s about 10-15 billion dollars. Human spaceflight is a large chunk of that, but smaller still. The impact of the energy plan on just the federal budget is in the hundreds of billions.
I’m sure I don’t need to go further to demonstrate just how wrong this perspective appears. Humanity seems to have decided to look solely inwards at itself, and generally that’s when bad things happen.
If you’re running a household, you don’t spend money adding onto the house so your children and their wives/families can live with you. You don’t destroy parts of your house because the number of occupants is overwhelming efforts to keep it clean. The only real solution to this is to give your kids someplace else to live. Humanity’s children need a viable means of leaving the nest, or it will simply get harder and harder to keep the earth clean and pristine.
@Mike says:
May 18, 2010 at 1:45 pm
‘This “leaked document” is just a slide show presentation. It describes some pros and cons of Spain’s energy policies. (E.g., too much emphasis on solar.) It does not confirm claims made in the controversial study critical of Spain’s green economic policies. This has little to do with current debates about U.S. energy/climate policy.’
It was a spanish university in spain who did the study, last year I believe.
And it has everything to do with the current debate in US. One reason is the fact that countries who has shelved tones of cash into everything green (or too much anything government funding) during during financial crisis’, two in this case after after the dot com bull shit, is bound to not do too well budget wise. Hadn’t Spain gotten the hell out of Dodge Iraq City when they did, and still shelled funding into the green drain they’d probably gone bust before Greece. UK are still keeping their nose above the surface only because of the oil, but then again BP might have f.ed that up for UK completely unless the conservatives gets down and dirty begin all that they can be and separate man from state, and from what it looks like now UK from EU, since obviously UK was only a bone to EU as long as UK was on the up and up and, no war to fund years and year and years through two serious downs, and at the same time funding every “green” idiocy known to man, all the while trying to get rid of that nasty sticky oil that takes care of cash business any time of the day every day.
Excerpt from: Vincent on May 18, 2010 at 2:05 pm
Does she then swallow a cat to catch the bird? If we can spend and tax our way out of a debt-induced recession then an old lady can swallow a whole live cat.
Of course the proper sequence is to swallow a small frog to catch the fly, then swallow a snake to catch the frog. The snake can find its own way out easily enough, but swallowing some mineral oil for lubrication will help it get through the tight spots.
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Excerpt from: Henry chance on May 18, 2010 at 2:19 pm
They already have green sheetrock (gypsum wallboard) but that indicates the moisture-resistant type suitable for bathrooms.
However, there may be a “green” market for 100% recycled aluminum products, based on recycling some old rocks that had to be cleared away from a site where a future nature reserve -slash- carbon sink is planned to be located. Now how green is that?
Jeff M says:
May 18, 2010 at 10:40 am
“What is this about? (OT)
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/05/2010-is-warmest-year-on-record/1
They say it is warmest year on record and record low snow extent? Given the cold winter in the northern hemisphere, I’m wondering whats up with this article.”
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70% of the earth is ocean. We were in a El Nino (hot ) phase so sea surface temps were up. Also as Dr. Spencer pointed out this transferred heat to the troposphere so the satellite temp was also up. What is not mentioned is the ocean after dumping heat to the atmosphere has cooled 1C in one month a drop not seen since the cold seventies.
Spencer: Record January warmth is mostly sea
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/05/spencer-record-january-warmth-is-mostly-sea/
Flashback to 2007 – SST [sea surface temp] to plunge again?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/05/flashback-to-2007-sst-to-plunge-again/
The decrease in upper ocean heat content from March to April was 1C – largest since 1979
http://wattsupwiththat.com/?s=1c+ocean
Mike – Had you read the article , you might have noticed that the slide show referenced was reported as being an earlier non-government study , not the leaked document . As mentioned above , that study has been around for a while . The second page of the article provides a translation of parts of the current document . Does that help ?
Question for you UK folks: The UK didn’t jump on the Euro bandwagon, or did they? If not, they can imitate this window company sticking it to its creditors by de-valuing UK currency. That’ll stave off the collapse four or five years…
I saw where one of the possible fixes for Greece was to temporarily kick them out of the EU so they could solve their problems with a devaluation.
Reminds me of the constitutional amendment passed just after the american civil war. I’m too lazy to check the facts but I seem to recall being taught they were one state short of enough votes for passage. So, they “deemed” Delaware out of the union, passed the amendment, and then re-admitted Delaware. Things haven’t changed so much after all.
Even if your source is accurate, $800,000 is “catastrophic economic failure” ? Please. And people that have spent their careers in alternative energy development have economic ties to “Big Wind”? Shocking! Think you’ve really blown the roof off something here…
Al Gore’s Holy Hologram says:
May 18, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Energy efficient windows? LOL
I can’t believe Americans are making a big deal out of double glazing and politicians get involved. We’ve had them in England for decades.
But then again, England’s elite taxed us for having windows a couple hundred years ago…
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We have double and triple glazed windows in the USA. Before that we had “storm windows” that were put on the outside of the permanent windows in the fall and taken off in the spring. Some of the older houses still have “storm windows” instead of being retro fitted with double glazed.
Which business segment/subsidiary was it GE bought from Enron?
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There is a question not adressed on that document I think.
In Spain there are other energies that receive subsidies from goverment.
The cogeneration plants do, as well as national carbon as milio said. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration , cogeneration uses natural gas as fuel, wich Spain has minimum reserves if any.
So in order to get the subsidies from goverment, many cogeneration plants have been built, and now they find that there is almost no chance to compete with windpower, when there is wind, as they get the “fuel” for free and cogeneration has to pay for it. Maybe these jobs at the cogeneration plants are lost, but they will be as a result of a bad investment.
On the other hand, I believe that renewable policy in Spain is not correct, but its because of solar panels which receive a greater subsidie about 10 times the one received from windpower or cogeneration and that makes that the 2% of the electric energy consumed (fotovoltaic panels) receive more than half (57%) of the total subsidies, windpower on the other hand produces 13% of the electric energy consumed and only gets 27%.
Renewable energy can lower the price of the energy, by importing less fossil fuels, wich spain has almost none, and lowering the price of the electric energy pool. Yes, sure some jobs could be lost, but some years before the crisis, many people came to work to Spain from abroad.
Windpower produces occasionally more than half of the electric power consumed, and the problem I see is that if it grows goberment will have to give money to reliable power sources as fuel or cogeneration to stand and don’t generate energy, but to be there just in case there is not enough wind.
Jim asks, “Which business segment/subsidiary was it GE bought from Enron?”
Enron was a major lobbyist for Kyoto, having made its original fortune gaming outstandingly stupid state energy laws. When they died, GE bought their wind division and many of the executives who designed the strategy. Google for confirmation.
1DandyTroll says:
May 18, 2010 at 3:15 pm
That last sentence was a record breaker: MS word count = 124
Sorry, forgot to add your “sentence” (paragraph).
“UK are still keeping their nose above the surface only because of the oil, but then again BP might have f.ed that up for UK completely unless the conservatives gets down and dirty begin all that they can be and separate man from state, and from what it looks like now UK from EU, since obviously UK was only a bone to EU as long as UK was on the up and up and, no war to fund years and year and years through two serious downs, and at the same time funding every “green” idiocy known to man, all the while trying to get rid of that nasty sticky oil that takes care of cash business any time of the day every day.”
What all governments need to do about wind energy subsidies is “break wind”.
‘Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas. That may exhaust my French phrase quota for the year, but it’s worth it. The saying is the title of an essay by 19th century French economist Frederic Bastiat and means “that which is seen, and that which is not seen.”
Bastiat’s essay is most famous for the “parable of the broken window,” in which a young boy shatters a shopkeeper’s window and, after some initial outrage, the villagers conclude that the rascal helped the local economy. Why?
Because if no one broke windows, window makers would be out of business, and if window makers were out of business, they wouldn’t buy any more bread or shoes, hurting the bakers and cobblers. So the six francs the shopkeeper must spend for a new window is really a boon to the community.
The problem with this argument can be gleaned from the title of Bastiat’s essay. By counting the money the shopkeeper spends to replace a perfectly good window (that which is seen), we ignore the money he might have spent on something else (that which is unseen). The shopkeeper might have instead dropped six francs on new shoes, a book or a bonus for his assistant. Those who celebrate the broken window as a generator of growth take “no account of that which is not seen.” ‘
~Jonah Goldberg
http://townhall.com/columnists/JonahGoldberg/2009/08/05/how_much_is_that_clunker_in_the_window
Or try this at home:
“Honey, I just had all of our perfectly good windows replaced with triple layer ion accelerating windows, which also repel lightning because they are specially doped glass, and additionally they harness the amazing runaway co2 greenhouse affect seen on Venus, thus reducing our heat bill in winter.
All I had to do was take out a second, max out the credit cards, and use our vacation money to do it. Isn’t that great?!”
Oh wait, maybe you shouldn’t try that at home.
>>>Yet despite the soft-pedaling, the document reveals exactly why
>>>electricity rates “necessarily skyrocketed” in Spain, as did the public
>>>debt needed to underwrite the disaster.
Not simply an economic disaster, but perhaps a social disaster too. As this report makes clear, the high proportion of windelecs (wind turbines) in Spain has led to grid instability and many ‘brownouts’ as a precursor to full blackouts.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article384768.ece?token=null&offset=12
Rolling blackouts in a 24/7 technological society will inevitably lead to chaos and social unrest, as the majority of products and services fail. Delete electricity, and any modern society will go from the Technological Age to Stone Age in less than a year.
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>>>As we in “nowhere” Oregon get covered with those monstrosities
>>>only to be abandoned later….
Hey, look on the bright side. In a few hundred years you will have a great cluster of tourist attractions – a bit like Stonehenge, but fabricated in mild steel and carbon composites.
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>>>How does Obama manage to lecture anyone on profligate government
>>>spending and for having an excessive deficit without his face turning
>>beet red?
Errm, not really possible, is it?
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>>>The UK didn’t jump on the Euro bandwagon (they can) de-value
>>> UK currency. That’ll stave off the collapse four or five years…
No, the UK did not join the Euro and so can devalue and save the external deficit (although this will make external debt more expensive, and we hold a lot of that).
The main UK problem is the internal (government) deficit, which is huge. They will need to reduce this at some point, and this will cause more unemployment and yet another economic slowdown.
But don’t crow too much – the US is not far behind us in deficits.
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The total futility of using windpower to generate electricity is demonstrated magnificently in “The Wind Farm Scam” (Independent Minds) by John Etherington (Paperback – 1 Sep 2009)
Not everybody agrees with the leaked report:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy09osti/46261.pdf which claims that the U Rey Juan Carlos study uses an unconventional methodology that does not directly measure job loss.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/paltman/media/Rodriguez%20letter.pdf A letter from the Spanish gov’t to a US politician criticizing the report.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/paltman/media/ISTAS%20_ENG.doc a translation of a response from a Spanish gov’t agency criticizing the URJC paper. (Which I got from here:
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/paltman/spain_rejects_calzada_spanish.html
One blog calls the report’s author Calzada an “Exxon-funded libertarian”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Now I don’t understand any of the BS either side says. It does seem to me however a little peculiar that the leaked report, written at a Spanish university, is as US-centric as it seems, so many references to US policy, so many references to Obama? It’s as if it were written for consumption in the U.S., not Spain. Wouldn’t you think they’d be more concerned in directing their attention toward the Spanish and EU governments? I was just wondering.