A few questions for President Obama
How exactly does the President plan to create his new Green Jobs Economy?
Guest post by Paul Driessen
America needs decisive leaders who understand what government can (and cannot) do to stop the Gulf gusher, clean up the mess, and get business, jobs and prosperity back on track. Instead, President Obama sounds like an anti-business Community Organizer in Chief – pointing fingers, making baseless claims about ending our “addiction to oil,” and leaving no crisis unexploited to promote job-killing cap-tax-and-trade and renewable energy agendas. His June 15 “vision” raised more questions than it answered.
1) The President said he can no longer support new drilling unless industry can prove it will be “absolutely safe.” This avoidable environmental disaster happened because BP, its contractors and MMS regulators did not follow procedures or respond properly to tests and warning signs, indicating critical trouble was brewing downhole. But if “absolute safety” is to decide activities and technologies, America will come to a standstill in the absence of impossible-to-obtain proof that nothing will ever go wrong, no one will ever screw up, and no technology will ever malfunction.
Oil tankers sometimes run aground, unleashing their black cargo on our shores. Will oil imports now be banned, as well? Over 42,000 Americans died in car accidents last year. Will highways and city streets be closed to vehicles? Airports, trains and subways? Wind turbines kill 3,000 eagles and other raptors every year, plus 100,000 to 300,000 other birds and bats. Will they be shut down until that carnage ends?
2) President Obama demanded that BP “set aside “whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed” by the spill. With thousands of environmental activists, regulators, congressmen and trial lawyers on Team Obama, one can only imagine what creative damages and costs might be concocted, to convert the initial $20-billion BP fund into a bottomless money pit, and what “standards” might guide bird death valuations, for example.
ExxonMobil paid $600,000 when 85 birds died in uncovered waste facilities. PacifiCorp paid was fined $1.4 million after 230 eagles were killed by its power lines over a two-year period. Will those fines set the standard for Gulf oil spill bird deaths? Or will the standard be the zero, zip, nada fines assessed to date on wind turbine operators for their ongoing slaughter? Will BP be required to compensate oil field workers who lose their jobs because Team Obama imposed an arbitrary drilling moratorium, instead of ensuring improved oversight of drilling, blowout prevention and well completion activities?
3) The President said China is creating “clean energy” jobs “that should be right here in America,” while we send “nearly $1 billion of our wealth every day to foreign countries for their oil.” We will “embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny,” he declared, because “the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.”
America is not running out of oil. It is running out of places the government allows us to drill. China is creating renewable energy jobs, because it mines the lanthanides, lithium and other minerals that are essential for wind turbines, solar panels and hybrid cars, while we lock up our prospects; burns coal to generate cheap electricity to run its factories, while the White House, Congress and EPA try to drive US coal-based power to extinction; and pays its factory workers a fraction of what American workers receive.
Companies have been drilling in deep waters, because most onshore and shallow water areas are off limits. Will we now open the ANWR, Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, Rockies and near-shore OCS to drilling – where access and development are easier, and accidents (that we hope, and industry must ensure, never happen again) can be fixed and cleaned up far more easily than in mile-deep waters?
Will President Obama lift his OCS moratorium (which even his independent safety experts opposed), before it further devastates the battered Gulf economy, rigs head overseas, and thousands of experienced workers permanently leave the industry for other lines of work?
To advance the President’s “national mission” and generate 20% or more of our electricity with wind and solar, will our legislators, regulators and litigators continue to ignore the environmental review, endangered species, migratory bird and other laws that govern fossil fuel and nuclear power – so that we can rapidly blanket millions of acres of onshore and offshore America with wind turbines and solar panels, to replace coal-fired power plants, regardless of the environmental costs?
Rather than dozens of “ugly” offshore oil and gas platforms, often dozens of miles from our coasts – will America now enjoy seeing thousands of “beautiful” offshore wind turbines, towering above our beaches and creating obstacle courses for submarines, merchant ships laden with bunker fuel, and more tankers filled with crude oil and far more toxic refined product?
Will the President and Congress now open some of the hundreds of millions of acres they have made off limits to exploration and mining for the minerals needed to manufacture “green” technologies here in America? Or will we henceforth be dependent on foreign countries and dictators for both our “dirty” oil and the raw materials and finished components needed to build a new “clean energy” economy?
4) Under a cap-tax-and-trade regime, the price of hydrocarbon energy will “necessarily skyrocket,” to “encourage” companies and families to use less fossil fuel energy, and “persuade” them to switch to wind and solar. How will that affect turbine and panel manufacturing costs and subsidies, and the downstream costs of renewable energy and everything Americans make, grow, drive, ship, eat, drink and do?
How will US wind and solar factories compete with Chinese and Indian facilities, if the American plants are compelled to pay two, three, five times as much for electricity, under cap-tax-and-trade and renewable energy mandates? How will they compete if they must also pay subsidies, union wages and gold-plated health and pension plans, if government grants are also tied to compulsory unionization, and if non-union shops and right-to-work states are excluded from the bidding and subsidy process?
How will regulators and “clean energy” companies deal with the nasty pollutants generated in the process of manufacturing hundreds of thousands of wind turbines and millions of acres of solar panels? How will they handle highly toxic silicon tetrachloride, the powerful greenhouse gas nitrogen trifluoride and other chemicals used or generated in making solar panels, fiberglass and other components?
Even “little” 1.5 megawatt wind turbines require 700 tons of concrete, steel, fiberglass, copper and rare earth (lanthanide) minerals. Add in the transmission lines and backup gas-fired generators, and we’re talking some serious land use, raw material, pollution, bird kill and economic issues. How do our legislators, regulators, litigators and environmental activists plan to address these issues?
Will solar and wind companies operate under free market principles, to compete and possibly fail against other energy firms? Or will they be kept in business via huge subsidies under government systems that extract countless billions from families and less favored companies, borrow it from our children, and redistribute that wealth to “clean energy” companies? How long will this Grecian Formula be sustainable?
Spain lost 2.2 traditional jobs for every wind power job its massive subsidies created. President Obama has said we can create 5 million green jobs. How does he plan to compensate 11 million workers who will lose their traditional jobs under the Spanish Scenario? With more stimulus money and red ink?
Every seven million gallons of corn-based ethanol requires billions in subsidies, cropland equivalent to Indiana, millions of gallons of water and millions of tons of fertilizer, to make fuel that costs more but gets a third less mileage than gasoline. Can someone explain how this is eco-friendly and sustainable?
When this house of cards inevitably collapses, as it has in Spain, will its congressional and administration creators be held responsible and accountable, under the same standards they are applying to BP?
Just asking. (Not that I expect President Obama, Senator Kerry or Speaker Pelosi to have any answers – or even deign to respond to any American citizen who might ask such impertinent questions.)
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death.
A few questions for President Obama
How exactly does the President plan to create his new Green Jobs Economy?
Paul Driessen
America needs decisive leaders who understand what government can (and cannot) do to stop the Gulf gusher, clean up the mess, and get business, jobs and prosperity back on track. Instead, President Obama sounds like an anti-business Community Organizer in Chief – pointing fingers, making baseless claims about ending our “addiction to oil,” and leaving no crisis unexploited to promote job-killing cap-tax-and-trade and renewable energy agendas. His June 15 “vision” raised more questions than it answered.
1) The President said he can no longer support new drilling unless industry can prove it will be “absolutely safe.” This avoidable environmental disaster happened because BP, its contractors and MMS regulators did not follow procedures or respond properly to tests and warning signs, indicating critical trouble was brewing downhole. But if “absolute safety” is to decide activities and technologies, America will come to a standstill in the absence of impossible-to-obtain proof that nothing will ever go wrong, no one will ever screw up, and no technology will ever malfunction.
Oil tankers sometimes run aground, unleashing their black cargo on our shores. Will oil imports now be banned, as well? Over 42,000 Americans died in car accidents last year. Will highways and city streets be closed to vehicles? Airports, trains and subways? Wind turbines kill 3,000 eagles and other raptors every year, plus 100,000 to 300,000 other birds and bats. Will they be shut down until that carnage ends?
2) President Obama demanded that BP “set aside “whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed” by the spill. With thousands of environmental activists, regulators, congressmen and trial lawyers on Team Obama, one can only imagine what creative damages and costs might be concocted, to convert the initial $20-billion BP fund into a bottomless money pit, and what “standards” might guide bird death valuations, for example.
ExxonMobil paid $600,000 when 85 birds died in uncovered waste facilities. PacifiCorp paid was fined $1.4 million after 230 eagles were killed by its power lines over a two-year period. Will those fines set the standard for Gulf oil spill bird deaths? Or will the standard be the zero, zip, nada fines assessed to date on wind turbine operators for their ongoing slaughter? Will BP be required to compensate oil field workers who lose their jobs because Team Obama imposed an arbitrary drilling moratorium, instead of ensuring improved oversight of drilling, blowout prevention and well completion activities?
3) The President said China is creating “clean energy” jobs “that should be right here in America,” while we send “nearly $1 billion of our wealth every day to foreign countries for their oil.” We will “embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny,” he declared, because “the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.”
America is not running out of oil. It is running out of places the government allows us to drill. China is creating renewable energy jobs, because it mines the lanthanides, lithium and other minerals that are essential for wind turbines, solar panels and hybrid cars, while we lock up our prospects; burns coal to generate cheap electricity to run its factories, while the White House, Congress and EPA try to drive US coal-based power to extinction; and pays its factory workers a fraction of what American workers receive.
Companies have been drilling in deep waters, because most onshore and shallow water areas are off limits. Will we now open the ANWR, Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, Rockies and near-shore OCS to drilling – where access and development are easier, and accidents (that we hope, and industry must ensure, never happen again) can be fixed and cleaned up far more easily than in mile-deep waters?
Will President Obama lift his OCS moratorium (which even his independent safety experts opposed), before it further devastates the battered Gulf economy, rigs head overseas, and thousands of experienced workers permanently leave the industry for other lines of work?
To advance the President’s “national mission” and generate 20% or more of our electricity with wind and solar, will our legislators, regulators and litigators continue to ignore the environmental review, endangered species, migratory bird and other laws that govern fossil fuel and nuclear power – so that we can rapidly blanket millions of acres of onshore and offshore America with wind turbines and solar panels, to replace coal-fired power plants, regardless of the environmental costs?
Rather than dozens of “ugly” offshore oil and gas platforms, often dozens of miles from our coasts – will America now enjoy seeing thousands of “beautiful” offshore wind turbines, towering above our beaches and creating obstacle courses for submarines, merchant ships laden with bunker fuel, and more tankers filled with crude oil and far more toxic refined product?
Will the President and Congress now open some of the hundreds of millions of acres they have made off limits to exploration and mining for the minerals needed to manufacture “green” technologies here in America? Or will we henceforth be dependent on foreign countries and dictators for both our “dirty” oil and the raw materials and finished components needed to build a new “clean energy” economy?
4) Under a cap-tax-and-trade regime, the price of hydrocarbon energy will “necessarily skyrocket,” to “encourage” companies and families to use less fossil fuel energy, and “persuade” them to switch to wind and solar. How will that affect turbine and panel manufacturing costs and subsidies, and the downstream costs of renewable energy and everything Americans make, grow, drive, ship, eat, drink and do?
How will US wind and solar factories compete with Chinese and Indian facilities, if the American plants are compelled to pay two, three, five times as much for electricity, under cap-tax-and-trade and renewable energy mandates? How will they compete if they must also pay subsidies, union wages and gold-plated health and pension plans, if government grants are also tied to compulsory unionization, and if non-union shops and right-to-work states are excluded from the bidding and subsidy process?
How will regulators and “clean energy” companies deal with the nasty pollutants generated in the process of manufacturing hundreds of thousands of wind turbines and millions of acres of solar panels? How will they handle highly toxic silicon tetrachloride, the powerful greenhouse gas nitrogen trifluoride and other chemicals used or generated in making solar panels, fiberglass and other components?
Even “little” 1.5 megawatt wind turbines require 700 tons of concrete, steel, fiberglass, copper and rare earth (lanthanide) minerals. Add in the transmission lines and backup gas-fired generators, and we’re talking some serious land use, raw material, pollution, bird kill and economic issues. How do our legislators, regulators, litigators and environmental activists plan to address these issues?
Will solar and wind companies operate under free market principles, to compete and possibly fail against other energy firms? Or will they be kept in business via huge subsidies under government systems that extract countless billions from families and less favored companies, borrow it from our children, and redistribute that wealth to “clean energy” companies? How long will this Grecian Formula be sustainable?
Spain lost 2.2 traditional jobs for every wind power job its massive subsidies created. President Obama has said we can create 5 million green jobs. How does he plan to compensate 11 million workers who will lose their traditional jobs under the Spanish Scenario? With more stimulus money and red ink?
Every seven million gallons of corn-based ethanol requires billions in subsidies, cropland equivalent to Indiana, millions of gallons of water and millions of tons of fertilizer, to make fuel that costs more but gets a third less mileage than gasoline. Can someone explain how this is eco-friendly and sustainable?
When this house of cards inevitably collapses, as it has in Spain, will its congressional and administration creators be held responsible and accountable, under the same standards they are applying to BP?
Just asking. (Not that I expect President Obama, Senator Kerry or Speaker Pelosi to have any answers – or even deign to respond to any American citizen who might ask such impertinent questions.)
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death.
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Actually, Brad, no rigs are being stopped since Judge Feldman threw out the order as “arbitrary and capricious”. And today he just ruled that the order will NOT be stayed during appeals; meaning that Salazar’s order has been turned over as of NOW.
Oh yes, this administration is appealing – but the 5th circuit may just sit on that appeal for several months, you know how easy it is to slow things to a crawl in the Federal Courts. (Btw, this has been a favorite trick of enviro activists up until now, it’s kind of funny to watch the tactic thrown back into their faces)
Oh, I know Salazar and Obama say they will issue a new order – but since the first order ignored their own panel of experts and was not based on any actual study, they’re probably going to have to come up with a whole NEW panel of “experts” and have them do a whole new study before they can do anything like this. Oh, and they better hope that they pick people willing to slant the study in the way they want, and that’s not as easy as you may think.
Anything less than this and any new order will be just as “arbitrary and capricious” as the last one was, and will be thrown out immediately. Remember, trying too hard to overturn a Federal Judge’s rulings may just earn someone an “Obstruction of Justice” charge, to say nothing of Contempt of Court.
Obama and Salazar are about to find out just how much power a Federal Judge has in our system. Hint: A helluva lot.
At his core, Obama believes capitalists are evil. In a crunch he always returns to whom he really is.
A President is powerless with out a mountain or two of money and a bunch of stupid laws that says he/she can or can’t do this or that. Who gives him/her the money and makes the stupid “can” or “can’t do” laws? The funny wierdos we send to the House and Senate, that’s who (and I’ll bet you thought they were all worthless and didn’t do anything:-). Now, the root of all evil in the federal government is NOT little old FEMA, the FAA, DOD, DOJ, DOI, DOT, DOS, DHS or any of a million other offices. The pesty little twit we send to the House and the two twirps we send to the Senate are the BIG, B I G, B I G problem.
PS: Think about it. It’s worse than a toothache.
President Obama has been educated and trained to despise Capitalism and embrace Socialism. His goal is the destruction of American industry and growing a permanent Democratic-voting culture beholden upon an increasingly bloated Federal government for everything. His economic model is Greece. The path to this end includes Universal Health Care; economic stimulus for government workers, union workers, teachers, and Goldman Sachs; Cap and Trade; amnesty for 12 million illegal aliens; making Puerto Rico the 51st State; throwing billions of dollars at unsustainable alternative energies, and bringing our reliable fossil energy exploration and production to a standstill. With his Plan there will be no wealth to spread around. For almost a century Communism tried in vain to extinguish American Capitalism from the outside. Now they can sit back and watch as their specially placed Kenyan Candidate in the Oval Office accomplishes the same plan from the inside.
Carl M says:
June 23, 2010 at 8:54 pm
Carl, the simple truth remains that it takes more energy to make ethanol than you get back from ethanol.
ECOSOCIALISM is really Communitarianism, communism for the masses and capitalism for the few. Obama is Communitarian.
Eco-socialsim is nothing more than a collectivist plan for the incremental and ultimately forced, involuntary redistribution of the collective wealth of millions of individual “commoners”, by means of the devious use of the pretext of which ever dire circumstances will effectively necessitate the forceable redistribution of the entire commons itself. Hence, Obama uses disaster capitalism in the form of the oil spill to immediately lecture the nation about the next stage of austerity, cap ‘n trade, nothing more than a pyramid scheme. Obama argues for energy independence, meaning the end of oil, when most alternatives are not sustainable, which begs the question of just how politically convenient any such disaster can become.
“The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.” – Margaret Thatcher
Unlike Obama, who borrows money from the not yet fully tapped taxpayer’s grandchildren.
“The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer’s money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family- which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions- began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to “help.”
– Thomas Sowell
“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it”
– Thomas Sowell
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
– Winston Churchill
“Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville
“Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master”
– Henry Louis Mencken
Eco-socialism, green socialism or socialist ecology is an ideology merging aspects of Marxism, socialism, green politics, ecology and alter-globalization.
Eco-socialists generally believe that the expansion of the capitalist system is the cause of social exclusion, poverty, war and environmental degradation through globalization and imperialism, under the supervision of repressive states and transnational structures.
Eco-socialists advocate the dismantling of capitalism and the state, focusing on collective ownership of the means of production by freely associated producers and restoration of the commons.
In the latest version of the Green Movement, there is to be found much evidence of “biological reductionism” identical to the Green movement under Nazism, an ideology many “organicist thinkers” still find appealing, including Herbert Gruhl, a founder of the German Green Party.
While ‘ecofascism’ is confined to a narrow band of far right intellectuals and disaffected white power skinheads who involved themselves alongside far left groups in the anti-globalization movement, in its more sinister manifestation it may be “imposed as a revolution from above to install an authoritarian regime in order to preserve the main workings of the system” in times of crisis.
Carl M
No time to go into it, but you have constructed a cellulosic hominid, sometimes known as a straw man, to argue against.
.
Everybody appreciated that you had enough time to post nonsense about biofuels .
“Prices of cellulosic sources (sic !) going quickly down” , wasn’t it ?
Now that you have been exposed as what you are , namely a propagandist who didn’t do his homework and doesn’t know what he’s talking about , you run .
Sure , you just “got no time” …. 🙂
Please feel free to “go into it” at your leisure however I suppose that you understood now that anything you add to the BS you already posted will only dig yourself in a bigger hole .
I resume the truth again for interested readers here :
Biofuels are a very marginal source of liquid fuels at prices that are competitive with classical sources (coal , gaz and oil) only in exceptional cases . Cellulosic ethanol and algaes are even worse than classical bioethanol production ways .
The best competing bioethanol is produced with Brazilian sugarcane .
Its competitivity is especially good because the bagasse is used to generate electricity and electricity prices in Brazil are high .
Thanks Lucy Skywalker – I share your sentiments exactly. And after engaging in the climate debate (Chill, 2009), I am attempting to tackle these questions in two projects – ‘Transition’ and ‘Resilience’ – the former to look at the next decade as a period of transition caused by ‘peak oil’, and the second to look at what it takes to make communities ‘resilient’ to inevitable changes in the climate (man-made or otherwise).
On oil – I have some good contacts in the industry – one of whom keeps an open mind on ‘abiotic’ origins. I personally doubt the rate of abiotic production, if it is at all known, matches the depletion rate. The total reserves? This depends entirely upon the price. Above $70 per barrel the oil-shale becomes accessible and that doubles the reserves – assuming one is willing to cope with the pollution and landscape impact – without the shale, known reserves come to about 1000 billion barrels and are being depleted at the rate of 30 billion barrels per year – a billion barrels is thus 12 days worth of consumption. Hence about 30 years to exhaustion. With the shale and other less accessible sources, this timescale could double – theoretically. But as the price rises above $70 as it is likely to do, demand drops and thus extends the timescale. Right now, the economies of China, India, Russia and Indonesia are driving the demand, whilst the OECD countries have contracted a little.
I personally cannot see this level of demand continuing at this sort of price – the economies of the world will find it too difficult to adjust.
As for renewables – whenever and wherever you do the sums, they can’t get to more than 20% of demand because of other constraints (e.g. land, protected areas) and that figure relies a lot on biofuels which would destabilise the food markets. Nuclear cannot be expanded fast enough (I am no fan of doing so anyway – the technology is too risky) and only provides base-load electricity. Renewables only begin to make sense within decentralised systems under maximum demand management at about half current usage – with the rest of demand made up of oil (for transport fuels), coal (baseload), and gas (best not used for combustion but conserved for higher-end uses – but this is not likely when it is still cheap). Housing is key – with maximum use of passive solar, solar PV, heat pumps and insulation, plus reorganisation of transport systems toward public nor private (sorry America, but you have gone down the wrong road and it is going to be costly to retrace your steps!).
I write about this a little in ‘Chill’ – there is more on my website at Ethos-uk.com, where I have been involved in a lot of thinking in the UK about how to integrate renewables into the landscape, community and biodiversity.
Others with all this anti-socialist rhetoric:
I have to get used to this on WUWT – it used to really turn me off blogging – not because it is political when I am looking for nuggets of science, but because it is so damned misinformed! Most European countries are social democracies – where the socialists learned from the mistakes made furter East and got to and ameliorated the American Dream of unnalloyed capitalism. A social democracy operates with compassion as well as capitalism.
That’s not to say the modern-day Greens give me no concern – they do, and I helped found the movement! There are distinct tendencies – but they are not fascist as such, nor communistic – these old terms do not help describe a dark tendency I have struggled hard to name – it involves the legions of bureaucrats, accountants, lawyers, policy specialists and lobbyists that have embraced the ‘green’ solution that gives them plenty of assured work and influence – a far cry from the beginnings. They seek targets and percentages to measure their success – and seldom concern themselves with the consequential impact of their policies on community, landscape and biodiversity (let alone the taxpayer!). The green movement has supported mindless targets for biofuels, only to realise, once the monster was unleashed, how it consumed rainforests and orang utans. Or how the turbine madness would destroy great ethereal beauty such as the Hebridies or Greek Islands (with their tourist-dependent communities and also their eagles). They did not look behind Al Gore’s smile to see his Goldman Sachs buddies and the margins the brokers would make on every carbon trade. They don’t bat an eye at the thought of an unaccountable UN banking agency receiving trillions of dollars/euros/pounds to spend helping the rest of the world destroy these kind of legacies in the name of international renewable equity – despite the lessons they should have learned from an EU bureaucracy (with apparent safeguards, regulations and a parliament to watch over it) systematically destroy agricultural community and biodiversity throughout Western Europe.
There is a lot of work needed here to watch carfefully and take action against these tendencies – but it is not helped by meaningless name-calling and political posturing. We need to be a lot smarter to outwit the guys who are on the make – who have the ear of the Obamas and the Camerons, and who use apocalpytic scare stories, authoritarian science and environmentalist guilt as a fig-leaf.
BEWARE COMMUNITARIANISM OR “THE THIRD WAY”:
It is crucial not to confuse socialist democracies such as Sweden etc., with the ideology of Communitarianism.
Communitarianism opposes all liberal notions.
The vast majority of Americans understand almost nothing about Communitarianism. Yet out of ignorance Americans have nevertheless voted the ideology of Communitarianism into power, embodied by their ruler, and they still continue to confuse Communitarianism with democratic socialism or communism.
Green ideology embodies the worst of both systems whilst fed by elite capitalism. Green alarmism uses fear to deflect from its true motives. Yet it keeps its hand out to receive tax reallocated benefits of quasi capitalist selective favouritism, distributed under a system of Communitarianism which sees no problem rewarding non sustainable green corporate hypocrisy for using non sustainable polluting techniques indistinguishable in any way from any current form of energy production.
Green eco-socialism shares far more in common with Communitarianism than it does with any nostalgic yesteryear version of European social democracy. The key difference is that the choices provided by a real democracy have evaporated and democracy has meanwhile become a mere facade behind the scenes of which corporatism and government are in bed together for personal mutual gain, to be funded by the taxpayer. Some call this public-private partnership. Does anyone recall being asked to become such a partner?
Communitarianism …… the so-called “third way.” That’s a fancy name for that elusive system which maintains the facade of the free market while letting politicians wield as much power as they wish.
RICHMAN, SHELDON
Because of ambitions to change human beings, communitarianism is a form of elitism. Its advocates have the feeling that they have been chosen to advise, to moralize, to know better than the ‘normal’ people what is right or wrong, what the people should do, what will be good for them. They want us not only to be free, but to be good, just, moral as well. Of course, in their definition of what is good, just and moral.
KLAUS, VACLAV, Society and the Crisis of Liberalism, Policy, Summer 1998-99
The Pilgrims began the practice of a principle held up by Karl Marx two centuries later as the ideal of the Communist Party: From each according to ability, to each according to need – and by force! There was a good reason why these communalistic or communistic practices were discontinued. It was because the members of the Pilgrim colony were starving and dying.
READ, LEONARD E., The Essence of Americanism, 1961 Address
[S]ocialism has a double-barreled definition, one of which is the state ownership and/or control of the results of production. Our incomes are the results of production. That portion of our incomes is socialized which the state turns to its use rather than our own.
Government control and ownership of the means and/or results of production is authoritarianism, be it called state interventionism, socialism, or communism. It rests on the premise that certain persons possess the intelligence to understand and guide all human action. It is advocated by those who sense no lack of omniscience in themselves, by the naive followers of such egotists, by the seekers of power over others, by those who foresee an advantage to themselves in these political manipulations, and by those “do-gooders” who fails to distinguish between police grants-in-aid and Judeo-Christian principles of charity. All in all, they are a considerable number, but still a minority in terms of the tens of millions whose lives they would regulate.
READ, LEONARD, Anything That’s Peaceful
Wow, I’m impressed that there is someone out there that knows about the “third way”.
WUWT continuously has the most intelligent contributors.
Do you find yourself rankling against growing green ARROGANCE? Against the PRETENCE of energy PIETY? Against BP green washing and rebranding it’s label by changing their official name to “BEYOND PETROLEUM” way back in 2001?
Stand back and see the big picture: View not only the the current administration, Congress, and the Senate through this lens, but expand that view to include almost every latter day green organization. Huge numbers of this group are now conspicuously silent about the Gulf event precisely because they are subsidized by British Petroleum, or rather, “Beyond Pretentious”. BP also, incidentally, manufactures Corexit dispersant and sells it to itself as well. And despite the show of weakness of the EPA’s token forbidding of the use of Corexit, BP aerial sprayed over one million gallons. This lethal agent is now raining down on several Gulf states killing livestock, birds, trees, farms, crops and wildlife alike, with the human death toll yet to come. Corexit was stockpiled by BP because Corexit is illegal almost everywhere else but in the US.
So who is “running” this government, then? BP? Or is it a collaboration?
“Communitarianism is a collectivist philosophy that explicitly rejects individualism. It does not merely relegate individualism to a subordinate position, but is openly hostile to it. It is an ideology of ‘civic society’ which is nothing less than one version of Post-Marxist collectivism which wants privileges for certain wealthy and influential organized groups, and in consequence, a renewed feudalising of society.”- Vaclav Klaus.
“Communitarianism is the belief that a perfect society relies not of the ambition of personal individualism, but rather consists of the responsibilities of cohesive communal structures. This is inherently a dualistic approach to a nationalistic society…Emphasis is placed not on the inherent rights a government owes to an individual, but rather the inherent responsibilities an individual owes to their community. This is in stark contrast to Western thoughts on individualism…”
“If the question is how can we run a sustainable and just consumer-capitalist society, the point is that there isn’t any answer. We cannot achieve a sustainable and just society unless we face up to huge and radical transition to what some identify as The Simpler Way, that is to a society based on non-affluent but adequate living standards, high levels of self-sufficiency, in small scale localised economies with little trade and no growth, to basically co-operative and participatory communities, to an economy that’s not driven by market forces and profit, and most difficult of all, a society that’s not motivated by competition, individualism, and acquisitiveness. Many have argued that this general vision is the only way out of the mess we’re in.”
– What is our biggest problem? by Ted Trainer.
Extract from Ockham’s Razor, ABC Radio National, 27 Nov 2005.
(The Simpler Way is another new term for the communitarian’s U.N. Local Agenda 21 Programme and the “mistaken for communists” international communitarian Vision 2020.)
“I am speaking of a new engagement in the lives of others, a new activism, hands-on and involved, that gets the job done. We must bring in the generations, harnessing the unused talent of the elderly and the unfocused energy of the young…. I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good.”
-The Inagural Address of President George Bush 1989. Yale Avalon Law Project.
“Bush’s inaugural address,” said George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni, a communitarian thinker, “was a communitarian text, full of words like ‘civility,’ ‘responsibility’ and ‘community.’ That’s no accident. Bush’s advisers consulted on the speech with Putnam.”
“HERD IMMUNITY”
“Officials recognize that these vaccines will harm a small percentage of (genetically susceptible) individuals, but it is for the common good. The communitarian code posits that it is morally acceptable, if necessary, to sacrifice a few for the good of the many. Or as one observer more bluntly puts it, “Individual sheep can be sheared and slaughtered if it is for the welfare of their flock.” – Mercola.com a natural health website & critic of medical Communitarian logic
Communitarian Quotes
“We establish for the moment a new world order. 11 September 2001 everything changed.”
– Amitai Etzioni on July 26, 2003 in an interview with Afghan Mania in Germany.
“The world needs a new global architecture, additional layers of governance, to deal with issues that neither nations nor traditional forms of intergovernmental organizations can cope with.”
– Amitai Etzioni at September 7th, 2004 conference at the Hague titled, “Europe, A Beautiful Idea”
“Communitarianism (Idea and Movement in politics) – With the demise of true socialism as a viable intellectual force, communitarianism is now the most active philosophical opposition to libertarianism. Communitarianism is usually presented in a vague terms, but it is probably best understood as a mild form of collectivism or “democratic socialism”. Communitarianism has had some influence in the realm of practical politics, as witness the fact that Hillary Clinton is reputed to admire many communitarian thinker.”
– From the The Ism Book
WWS – You are a good example of a little bit of knowledge being dangerous. Read my articles on wind. They deal with your objections.
Al Cooper – you too. Commercial ethanol production at present has an EROEI of from near zero to near 8, depending on quite a range of variables, but including energy needed to grow harvest and transport the crops.
Tim Clarke – you too. Domestic production of 2M bbl/d or 730 M bbl/y ?? The USA uses about 21 M bbl/d “all liquids” of which they produce a little over 60%. Oil production alone is about 11 M bbl/d.
And all you guys who “know” what Obama thinks or believes – where did you get your insight? Divine revelation? It is clear from everything he says that he believes in capitalism, but not in unfettered capitalism, – a wise reservation. I’m always amazed that people who have the technical talent that at least a couple of you clearly have can be so mentally screwed up when it comes to politics. I guess a little past borderline autism would explain it. And then some of you don’t even seem to have technical talent!
Murray Duffin says:
“And all you guys who ‘know’ what Obama thinks or believes – where did you get your insight? Divine revelation? It is clear from everything he says that he believes in capitalism, but not in unfettered capitalism, – a wise reservation.”
~
“Capitalism” is a Karl Marx-coined word, which Obama and his followers use as camouflage. What other folks mean by capitalism is actually the free market — something Obama is doing his best to subvert, by rewarding his special interests, and by depriving the middle class of its discretionary buying power, and by ratcheting up the national debt to astronomical levels never before seen, far higher than even in the midst of WWII.
Don’t listen to Obama’s words — he is a pathological liar. Watch his actions, and you will see someone who is trying to ‘fundamentally transform’ the U.S. into the world’s biggest nanny state, where government bureaucrats delve into every aspect of people’s personal lives, where for base political reasons he refuses the offers of oil skimmer ships from other countries to clean up oil from the gulf, where Obama ousts the elected CEO and Directors of a major car company and puts in his own personal CEO and Directors, where harmless and beneficial CO2 is mendaciously re-classified as a “pollutant,” and where the federal government is in league with the Mexican government behind closed doors, conspiring against American citizens to keep our borders wide open to the drug cartels, and our immigration laws completely unenforced.
Mr Duffin, when you call the rest of us “screwed up,” that is pure psychological projection on your part.
Perhaps it would be helpful to explain to Mr. Dutton what the meaning of the words Das Kapital from the Marxist manifesto stands for.
Mr Dutton, you do realize that Obama was the chief of staff of the Illionois Socialist party right?
He is not just any kind of socialist he is a progressive socialist. His entire Harvard education was paid for by his socialist mentor. It is very easy to gain access what Obama believes in and is working on doing to this country.
Charles Opalek
You do realize that there is very little difference between socialism and communism?
It’s like saying I like the GMC Sierra and you saying you like the Chevy Silverado.
It’s the same thing with different decals, different shaped headlights and different interior. It’s made the same place, rolls off the same assembly line and all made and controlled by GMC.
Smokey – there is no such thing as a free market in the sense you are using the word. Whenever markets get too free they also get greedy and irresponsible and result in big problems. Just study a little history. You are probably generalizing a subset of Adam Smith’s “laissez faire” theories of economics, but I’ll bet you have never studied Adam Smith’s writings, including the reservations he expressed. Smith was not an apologist for the capitalist class. He warned that a group of capitalists rarely gather together without colluding against the public. He favored anti-monopoly laws and considered that free competition was contingent on its contribution to economic growth. I have never yet met a “free market” advocate that understood the economic theory behind the term, nor an Adam smith acolyte who had studied his works either as written or in the context of his times. Just to give you a quick flavor, here is a brief excerpt from one informed commentary: “Adam Smith’s championing of laissez-faire was scarcely consistent. In the first place, Smith retreated from the absolutist, natural law position that he had set forth in his ethical work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1757). In this book, free interaction of individuals creates a harmonious natural order which government interference can only cripple and distort. In Wealth of Nations, on the other hand, laissez-faire becomes only a qualified presumption rather than a hard-and-fast rule, and the natural order becomes imperfect and to be followed only ‘in most cases’. Indeed, it is this deterioration of the case for laissez-faire that German scholars were to label Das AdamSmithProblem.
Indeed, the list of exceptions Smith makes to laissez-faire is surprisingly long. His devotion to the militarism of the nation-state, for example, induced him to take the lead in the pernicious modern view of excusing any government intervention that might plausibly be labelled for ‘the national defence’. On that basis, Smith supported the navigation acts, that bulwark of British mercantilism and systemic subsidy for British shipping. One of Smith’s reservations about the division of labour, indeed, is that it leads to a decay of the ‘martial spirit’, and Smith goes on at length about the decay of the martial spirit in modern times, and about the great importance of restoring and sustaining it. ‘(T)he security of every society must always depend, more or less, upon the martial spirit of the great body of the people.’ It was an anxiety to see government foster such a spirit that led Smith into another important deviation from laissez-faire principle: his call for government-run education. It is also important, opined Smith, to have governmental education in order to inculcate obedience to it among the populace – scarcely a libertarian or laissez-faire doctrine. Wrote Smith:
An instructed and intelligent people besides are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one. They feel themselves, each individually, more respectable, and more likely to obtain the respect of their lawful superiors, and they are therefore more disposed to respect those superiors. They are…less apt to be misled into any wanton or unnecessary opposition to the measures of government.
In addition to navigation acts and public education, Adam Smith advocated the following forms of government intervention in the economy:
Regulation of bank paper, including the outlawing of small denomination notes – after allowing fractional-reserve banking.
Public works – including highways, bridges and harbours, on the rationale that private enterprise would not ‘have the incentive’ to maintain them properly(!?)
Government coinage.
The Post Office, on the simple grounds – which will draw a bitter laugh from modern readers – that it is profitable!
Compulsory building of fire walls.
Compulsory registration of mortgages.
Some restrictions on the export of ‘corn’ (wheat).
The outlawing of the practice of paying employees in kind, forcing all payment to be in money.
There is also a particularly lengthy list of taxes advocated by Adam Smith, each of which interferes in the free market. For one thing, Smith paved the way for Henry Georgism and the ‘single tax’ by urging higher taxes on uncultivated land, displaying his animus against the landlord. He also favoured moderate taxes on the import of foreign manufactures, and taxes on the export of raw wool – thus gravely weakening his alleged devotion to freedom of international trade.
Adam Smith’s Calvinist abhorrence of luxury is also seen in his proposals to levy heavy taxes on luxurious consumption. Thus he called for heavier highways tolls on luxury carriages than on freight wagons, specifically to tax the ‘indolence and vanity of the rich’. His puritanical hostility to liquor also emerges in his call for a heavy tax on distilleries, in order to crack down on hard liquor and induce people to drink instead the ‘wholesome and invigorating liquor of beer and ale’. His devotion to ale, however, was minimal, for Smith also advocated a tax on the retail sale of all liquor in order to discourage the multiplication of small alehouses.
And finally, Adam Smith advocated the soak-the-rich policy of progressive income taxation.
Perhaps Smith’s most flagrant violation of laissez-faire was his strong advocacy of rigid usury laws, a sharp contrast to the opposition to such laws by Cantillon and Turgot. Smith did not indeed wish to adhere to the medieval prohibition of all credit. Instead, he urged an interest rate ceiling of 5 per cent, slightly above the rate charged to prime borrowers: a ‘price which is commonly paid for the use of money by those who can give the most undoubted security’. His reasoning followed his predilection, as we have already noted, for hostility to free market time-preferences between consumption and saving. Driven by Calvinist hostility to luxurious consumption, Smith tried to skew the economy in favour of more ‘productive labour’ in capital investment and less in consumption. By forcing interest rates below the free market level, Smith hoped to channel credit into the sober hands of prime borrowers, and away from credit into the hands of speculators and of ‘prodigal’ consumers. ”
Quit spouting silly catch phrases and get educated. But then, why am I wasting my time? that paragraph of inventions you have listed above is totally revealing. Murray
1personofdifference,
You’re right about Obama. We really know almost nothing about him. We were sold a pig in a poke. His co-workers have stated that he never edited the Harvard Review or wrote for it as required, and that his grades would have resulted in expulsion — except that pressure was brought to bear, keeping him academically afloat. If his grades had been good we would never hear the end of it, would we? And keep in mind that Harvard doesn’t give letter grades, but has a simple pass/fail grading system.
Barack Obama was forced to relinquish his law license, as was Michelle Obama. Neither one put their law license in suspension, as people do when intending to reactivate it in the future; both of them agreed to permanently give up their law licenses. Try to find out why — but you will have to overcome the roadblocks set up by the law firm retained by the Obamas, which has so far been paid over $800,000 to expunge details of their past. I stand by everything I wrote regarding this chameleon @3:58 pm. He is a pathological liar with a very shady past, and by his actions we can see that he is deliberately hobbling the U.S., bowing down to foreign potentates and apologizing for America to some of the world’s the vilest regimes, walking arm in arm with the likes of the truly despicable Hugo Chavez.
And there is of course no unfettered free market, and there never was. But at this point in time, every step taken in that direction is beneficial for the country, and every step taken toward Obama’s crony capitalism and government takeover of the auto industry, banking, healthcare, etc., is malignant. Mr Duffin needs to open his eyes and look at the fiasco engineered by the EPA, and explain how regulating CO2 as a “pollutant” is beneficial in any way. George Orwell would understand exactly what’s going on with that.
And the EPA is only one department. Look at the Department of Energy, created in 1977 following the second oil embargo. Its stated purpose? To lessen our dependence on foreign oil. Major fail. But like all government programs, it will never go out of business. This year’s DOE budget is raised to $24.2 Billion. It employs over 16,000 drones — and 100,000 contract employees. It is nothing but government welfare at the expense of the general public.
And now Obama wants to have the government run the healthcare system into the ground, own the banking system for all intents and purposes, and own a major car company that will never repay the $Billions
lentgiven to it — not to save the company, but only to save $37/hr union assembly line jobs. And Obama is intent on passing a regressive Cap & Tax bill that will jack up taxes and raise the cost of all goods and services, in the name of demonizing a completely harmless and beneficial trace gas, which will still be freely emitted by China, Russia, Brazil, India, and a hundred smaller countries, as they all laugh at the anti-American conniver that the Americans so foolishly elected as their misguided apology for slavery that ended over a century and a half ago, forgetting that Obama has zero slave blood. C&T is a disaster that will make the DOE and the EPA budgets look like chump change, and it is a certain bet that government run health care will be disastrous for Americans. Rationing of health care is just down the road. It will happen, without any doubt. Congress, of course, is exempt.It’s hard to believe how clueless and naive Obama’s apologists are. ‘Screwed up’ is inadequate to fully explain it; they harbor an intense hatred of America, nothing less. They want the U.S. to give up her greatness, and become a mediocre, has-been country like those in Old Europe, run by an unaccountable, opaque bureaucracy beholden only to other bureaucrats. The proof is in the Administration and Congress; never listen to their words. Watch their actions to see where they’re taking the country.
Re Maurry Duffins long post
You fail to understand that the basis of the United States is freedom. The United States recognition of the right to seek self gain, (capitalism) combined with the fact that we are a “republic” guaranteeing freedom from tyranny of other groups or from the tyranny of the majority, be that majority religious, political, corporate, or a combination thereof, is highly moral. However in empowering the individual there must be a strong co-commitment element of self-responsibility. One cannot expect the protections such a society enables, without both self responsibility and offering some form of service back to that society.
The love of power for the purpose of subjugating others for one’s own end cannot be removed by any system. It just operates less effectively within a system built expressly for protection from such tyranny. The responsibility of the US form of government is to prevent the formation of such tyrannies: Corporate monopolies that unfairly drive out competition, lobby groups looking for special privileges, banking methods that rig the monetary system and allow leverage of assets tantamount to gambling, fractional reserve banking on steroids, government decisions making risk public but profit private, government sponsored enterprises that, under direct supervision of government regulators, do all of the above, (see Barney Frand and Chriss Dodd, heads of the senate finance committe) are not caused by a capitalist / republic, but are a sick perversion of it, caused by the love of power over others, and the lack of wisdom as revealed by satama dharma. It is the failure of the US government to police the above which is dereliction of their primary responsibility, the protection of individual freedom and power, from the tyranny of those with group power.
No form of government can be free from intrinsic ignorance, but the evaluation of all systems should be based on their ability to resist the corruptions power reveal. Since WWII the US has been the most powerful nation on this planet. Despite its flaws, the US has demonstrated a far greater resistance to exerting tyranny over others then any other nation, relative to the power possessed. Remember that if power reveals corruption, the US has passed this test far better then any other nation. Many on the left often repeat the mantra, “live and let live,“ but remain ignorant of the danger of the system they wish to implement which is inherently duplicit to this maxim. The US system is the best “live and let live” system, specifically due to its republic / capitalist system, and within any society but particularly a large non-homogenous society this has many advantages. The “let live” part is easily forgotten in socialism, and both the “let live” and the “live” part are discarded in murderous communism.
TomVonk,
This is probably a dead thread, and probably no one will read this, but I think your belligerent attitude requires a response. I said I didn’t have time to go into it. This was because I had a all-day training session to do at my job, and then leave to spend the weekend with my sisters to say good-bye to my mother who is in the last stages of alheizmer’s. I apologize for the delay, but it certainly wasn’t for fear of addressing your post.
The main point of my post was not related to biofuels, but rather I thought that the original post was mainly political and deserved a more critical scientific response rather than the type of replies we were seeing. I still feel that way. I love seeing the respectful, thoughtful back and forth about science on this site, and I didn’t think we were doing that very well in this case. I just picked his ethanol example because the numbers seemed so wrong, and he seemed so unaware of what DOE and DOA are trying to do.
Now to your post, I said you were setting up straw men for the following specific reasons:
You said cellulosic sources can’t compete with coal and nuclear. No they can’t, but we can’t really run our cars on them, can we?
Then you said to get 1000 sq. km. for microalgae, we would need a sea band 500 km wide and 2000 km long, and close down all shipping to the west coast. Well that would be a good reason not to grow microalgae, but who is talking about doing that? This is a classic straw man technique. (And I think you juxtaposed macroalgae here. I wasn’t talking about that.) You know, you could get the same 1000 sq. km. in a square 20 miles on each side, smaller than almost all of the counties in the US. We manage to farm, harvest, dry, and process the crops from that vast area every year in virtually every county in the midwest. And for those that didn’t run the numbers, that is about a billion gallons of diesel per year, with enough starch left over to make a larger amount of alcohol type fuel.
And 40 grams per sq. meter per year doesn’t seem pie in the sky to me. The Aquatic Species Program didn’t report results that high, but I seem to recall that when they took their testing to the ponds they were optimizing the cultures for harvestability of the algae and not yield. And they ran a lot of the cultures nitrogen deprived to increase the oil concentrations. I think after 20 years of scientific advancement in genetic engineering, separation technology, etc, we can beat what they could do in 1992.
And yes, researchers are improving the yields of the cellulosic sources, refining planting and harvesting methods, and breeding for lower inputs of water and nutrients. That will bring down the costs. It shouldn’t surprise any one. That is what scientists and engineers do all the time.
I said to take a look at what the biofuels developers are doing. They are not stuck on doing things the way that we have always done them. Here are a few examples of what I meant.
Amyris has a microbe that produces a high-value chemical that is used in cosmetics, and can also be hydroformed to a synthetic diesel.
Qteros has developed a microbe that does the hydrolysis of cellulose and fermentation in one step, thus lowering capital and operating costs.
Syntroleum and Tyson Foods are in the process of starting up a 75 MGY plant that will convert low grade waste fats from Tyson’s operations into a synthetic diesel that is far superior to normal biodiesel.
Origin Oil has developed an ultrasound technique to separate oil from the rest of the algae in a simple flotation/settling unit operation
Chemrec has developed a process to produce synthetic diesel from tall oil from pulp mills and are already in production in Europe.
At least three different companies have processes that can convert existing ethanol plants to produce butanol isomers, which is more energy dense and doesn’t have most of the difficult issues that ethanol does.
And the list could go on and on. They are developing routes to specialty chemicals as well as biofuels, using wastes as feedstocks, and producing fuels that are far better than the ethanol and methyl ester biodiesels that we have now. And most of the fermentation type companies are working with partners in Brazil because they want the access to sugar cane sources, and the Brazilians want access to the technology.
The US military doesn’t believe it is all hype. They have already successfully tested several synthetic jet fuels, and will have them certified soon. The oil and chemical giants don’t think it is all hype. Exxon, DuPont, Shell, Total, BP and many others have formed joint ventures with biofuel developers and are investing millions in them. Will everyone succeed? I doubt it, but I think many will. Are biofuels perfect? Not by a long shot, but the other options aren’t either. Will they have to have subsidies? Probably for now, but is that really worse than sending our money overseas? And BTW, the Kerry Lieberman climate/energy bill has about $50 billion set aside that is needed to get nuclear power going again.
If you see this, I can tell that you know a lot about this subject. I could be persuaded that this is pipe dream. I am open to reasonable arguments and facts that I haven’t considered. I don’t think these are THE solution to our energy future, but I think they are part of it.