Democratic Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman declared yesterday that a new EPA study shows their new global warming
legislation won’t cost Americans much after all. But so far most Americans don’t show an inclination to pay anything for such legislation.
“There’ll be some people who will want to demagogue that politically, but that’s less than $1 a day,” The Politico quoted Lieberman saying at a press conference yesterday. “Is the American household willing to pay less than $1 so we don’t have to buy oil from foreign countries, so we can create millions of new jobs, so we can clean up our environment? I think the answer is going to be yes.”
Our surveying suggests…
however, that the answer is no. Democratic Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman declared yesterday that a new EPA study shows their new global warming legislation won’t cost Americans much after all. But so far most Americans don’t show an inclination to pay anything for such legislation.
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Only a dollar a day and we’ll have magic Green Energy. Except that a lot of that new tech. takes Rare Earth elements.
Guess who supplies most of it?
Hint: It’s not us.
I wonder if it will get as bad as Spain’s experience:
Sunny Spain suspends solar subsidy scam
“Spain pays more in subsidies for renewables than the total cost of energy production for the country”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/17/spain_sustainability_scam/
“Is the American household willing to pay less than $1 so we don’t have to buy oil from foreign countries, so we can create millions of new jobs, so we can clean up our environment? I think the answer is going to be yes.”
November just can’t get here fast enough….
“so we don’t have to buy oil from foreign countries, so we can create millions of new jobs, so we can clean up our environment?”
None of these things will happen with this bill. It will just raise taxes and costs on everyone. American politicians are idiots.
Wouldn’t it be nice if American politicians were talking about stopping the oil leak? I guess none of them have house on the Gulf Coast. So no matter to them.
A year ago we were assured that this would cost no more than the price of a postage stamp per day – or was that somethng else ? I get so confused .
Alan Carlin wasn’t consulted or asked to review this report. Was it even written by economists? Just substituting natural gas for coal will cost more than that and that does not include the cost of building the infrastructure.
My family needs every dollar………..so yes, I do mind more of my property being confiscated and wasted by these thugs.
Hum, I thought NASA just stated that massive solar flares will kill us all in 2013 anyway.
LOL
Americans might gladly pay a dollar a day for a cleaner environment (whatever that means at the moment), but they’re already in debt by hundreds of dollars a day and certainly don’t want to add a penny more.
“…but that’s less than $1 a day…”
It reminds me of the TV ads that were looking for donations to help impoverished African children from around 20 years ago.
“For less than a Dollar a day you can (insert AGW Earth saving scheme here.) That’s less than the price of a cup of Coffee”
Of course they left the price of a cup of Coffee out because passable Coffee isn’t that cheap anymore. They could get with the times and ask for $1.75 a day though.
I’ll be willing to pay more once we first recover the billions of dollars wasted on useless climate “research”…
Didn’t the climate scientists already get their stimulus climate ca$h??
Oops – and somewhat off topic (oil spill)
Sorry, my first post said month – brain fart…should have said day- but the meaning still stands…sorry again!
This is the off-topic part (to some extent)
Its interesting how many politicos want to wade into the oil-spill question – as if they were oil engineers. Most are lawyers – oh boy, here we go – folks who studied jurisprudence wanting to be engineers – engineering wannabes – how pathetic!
From what I read – and this isn’t final you understand – looks like another case of engineering arrogance. “WE KNOW MORE THAN YOU DO – NEANER NEANER!”
Lots of examples here:
Titanic, Challenger, Discovery, just to get started – you structural types can name more.
Important point is that when you think you know more than the kid from college, or your good friend in the opposite cubicle, then you are ripe to make a mistake by being arrogant.
It wasn’t lack of supervision that brought this on, but the “I’m right, you’re wrong.” syndrome. “I know what I’m doing because I’ve been right (insert number here) times in the past.”
Murphy exists, for engineers especially – anytime you think you are smarter than your peers, you’re in trouble. You stop listening and then set yourself up for failure.
Golly, just happened again!
Duh!
Mike
David Suzuki and his foundation are breeding green politicians who are getting elected in municipal governments, pushing for targets, drafting green policies through the backdoor.
Suzuki himself had his program “the nature of things” on Arctic Ice CBC last year advised by Dr. David Barber, of Rotten ice fame…
Scientists, activists and journalists are working hand in hand to deceive and sell the ideology.
AEGeneral says: “November just can’t get here fast enough….”
Sen. Boxer is voting as if there isn’t going to be an election in November. I’m wondering if she knows something that the rest of us don’t.
Sorry to bring it down to this level, but, it is this simple.
Trust your instincts.
Incredible – just as the evidence piles up that AGW is a scam, the evidence is piling up on a daily basis that these clowns have just barely finished inhaling breath from lying to the American public that comprehensive health care reform would actually ‘save’ money, and they are now extolling the low cost features of taxing the carbon cycle?
Who are the bigger fools? Them for thinking we believe them, or us for letting them get away with it?
A dollar a day? Thats 365 dollars a year (hard to believe, but that’s me). I do recall a figure from the UN from a few years ago that stated that in order to combat AGW the costs per person per year would be around 300 dollars.
I also recall that at that time the average year income was about 5500 dollars, a large part of the world has to live on less than 2 dollars a day, so that explains the low average.
300 dollars of 5500 dollars is about 5.5% of that income, and now you can calculate your own, so if you are doing 30.000 dollars a year than you would pay around 1650 dollars or 4.5 dollars a day. The average yearly income of an American household is around 50.000 (2007) wich amounts to around 7.5 dollars a day.
So less than an dollar a day, 0.73% of the income of an average American household? If that where true than you might believe in AGW as well.
I like Joe Lieberman in many respects, but this is just magical thinking. Pass a law, and previously non-viable and inefficient means of energy production will suddenly become viable and efficient in a few years? It’s a total crock. If they want to create jobs they should undertake a massive expansion of nuclear power generation and open up terrestrial and shallow-ocean areas for more oil exploration and production (along with massive expansion of natural gas production). That would lead us to energy independence, or something much closer to it than where we are now. These guys are not serious people- they’re just parroting what Greenpeace has fed them without understanding it at all.
If it’s so cheap let Kerry’s wife pay for all of us.
Others have done the math a little differently, but it comes out as unbelievable however you do it. [Disclaimer: I have not read the 74-page study. Just going by this. ]
$80 – $150 per household per year is the figure given. Round it off to $100 per household per year. Times ~100 million households, comes to $10 billion per year. As others have pointed out, this is not commensurate with various other figures which have been mentioned, by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude. But perhaps the new figure is right, and the old ones were off.
Let’s compare it to other expenditures. The 2010 census — getting all Americans to answer 6 questions — cost somewhere upwards of $10 billion (hard to see exactly what the decennial census cost vs. other surveys), so about the same amount.
The Department of Energy was created in 1977 with the goal of eliminating America’s dependence of foreign oil. Its annual budget is in the high $20 billions. Now not all of that is going to ensure “we don’t have to buy oil from foreign countries”, but well over half is, and has been for over 30 years. When DoE was created in 1977, the U.S. imported about 40% of its oil; now we import about 65%. In other words, over 30 years, the DoE has made negative progress towards “energy independence,” while spending an amount comparable to the claimed cost of the Kerry-Lieberman bill. Draw your own conclusions.
As for “creating millions of new jobs”, well, I suppose it’s possible. After all, Spain created many new jobs with their “green energy” plan. It all depends on whether you count the number of old jobs which would be lost (which will be larger than new jobs created, based on Spain’s experience), and the jobs which would have been created with the capital which the bill will use up. It’s one of the many ways in which we are misled with half-truths.
So here I am struggling to make ends meet; my wife lost her job and I have congestive heart failure that keeps me from working full time and requires medicines that are expensive, and they expect me to be glad that their plans will only cost me $1 more a day, $30 more per month, $365 more per year? Do they have a clue???? No wonder they are a bunch of tree-huggers: they think money grows on trees.
What they are counting is wealth expended. That is the least of it.
What they are NOT counting is the HUMONGOUS amount of wealth PREVENTED. That is where the real cost lies.
This administration is great at pumping negative effects (job losses prevented, etc., which I don’t buy for a plugged nickel), but pretty lousy at that sort of logic when it is actually valid and works against it.
HaroldW is on the right track, here.
Even if the $1/day figure were really true, which is completely laughable, it neglects the fact of the multiplier effect that increasing energy costs have on the whole economy. That extra cost will not only apply to each of us, but to every truck, train, airplane, farm tractor, business, except for those who have bought enough politicians to get themselves exempted.
Think back to what happened to the cost of things during the big spike in oil prices in ’08, which was one of the initiators of this whole mess. Of course, when this next spike in energy costs occurs, the Fed will likely be in the midst of inflating the currency to try to stay ahead of our unsustainable debt, so we won’t just be looking at $5-$6/gal gas, but $6/gal milk, $6 loaves of bread, $6/lb hamburger, etc. And thanks to Obamacare your medical insurance and medications will be inflating even faster than their already onerous rate. Add in the multitude of fees and tariffs squirreled away in those multi-thousand pages bills they’ve become so fond of passing at midnight of a Saturday night, the blossoming state and local tax burden and you better figure on doubling or tripling your current income over the next five years just to keep pace with your current state of economic well being.
Al Gored says:
June 17, 2010 at 3:30 pm
A comment copied from James Delingpole’s blog, re British wind power:
“In the last 24 hours they have generated a staggering 458 MWh. That means that each £2 million + windmill has generated about £8 of electricity. Makes you proud to be British doesn’t it.
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
Thanks for the link! Please keep posting about MWh – MegaWatt-HOURS.
MWh is what counts – MW without time is meaningless. Were the lights on a minute or an hour? 1 solar MW in darkness or 1 turbine MW in stillness produces 0 MWh – nothing, nada.
Yet renewable energy advocates usually speak in terms of just MW. Why this MW delusion is not countered with real actual MWhmeasurements of similar systems is a total mystery to me. Cost should be stated per MWh – not per MW.
Electricity is an endangered species. Invest in candles.