New study documents harmful effects of “cap-and-trade” and “endangerment” schemes
Guest post by Paul Driessen
Environmental justice demands that the United States address global warming, the gravest threat facing minority Americans, insist the EPA, Congressional Black Caucus and White House. Are they serious?
The alleged threat pales next to unwed teen motherhood, school dropouts, murder and other crime. But even assuming human carbon dioxide emissions will cause average global temperatures to rise a few degrees more than they have already since the Little Ice Age ended, it is absurd to suggest that any such warming would harm minorities more than policies imposed in the name of preventing climate change.
Human activities have not replaced the complex natural forces that drove climate change throughout Earth’s history. But even if manmade greenhouse gases do contribute to planetary warming, slashing US emissions to zero would bring no benefit, because steadily rising emissions from China, India, Brazil and other rapidly growing economies would almost instantly replace whatever gases we cease emitting.
Most important, fossil fuels power the economic engine that ensures justice and opportunity in America today. Policies that make energy less reliable and affordable reduce business revenues and profits, shrink investment and innovation, imperil economic recovery, and hobble job creation, civil rights, and the pursuit of happiness and the American dream.
Whether they take the form of cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, restrictions on drilling and coal mining, or EPA rules under its claim that carbon dioxide “endangers” human health and welfare, anti-energy policies frustrate the natural desire of poor and minority Americans to improve their lives.
As to coping with higher temperatures, restrictive energy policies send electricity prices skyrocketing, making it harder for low-income households to afford air conditioning, and putting lives at risk. They send poor families back to pre-AC misery of bygone eras, like the 1896 heat wave that killed 1,300 people in New York City’s sweltering tenements. In wintertime, they make heating less affordable, again putting lives at risk.
I recently documented the connection between energy policies and civil rights. My “Justice through Affordable Energy for Wisconsin” report focuses on the Dairy State, where I grew up. However, its lessons apply to every state, especially the 26 that get 48-98% of their electricity from coal or have a strong manufacturing base. (The full report can be found at www.CFACT.org)
Energy is the foundation for America’s jobs, living standards, and everything we make, grow, eat, wear, transport and do. Climate change bills, energy taxes and renewable energy mandates deliberately restrict supplies of reliable, affordable hydrocarbon energy – sending shockwaves through the economy.
Fossil fuels generate three-fourths of Wisconsin’s electricity, keeping costs low and enabling its $45-billion-a-year manufacturing sector to compete in a tough global marketplace. Hydrocarbons sustain thousands of jobs in agriculture, tourism and other sectors of the state’s economy. They ensure that hospitals and clinics can offer high-tech diagnostic, surgical and treatment services.
They enable school districts, families, churches, shops and government offices to operate in the black. Soaring fuel and electricity prices would force schools to spend millions more for buses, heating and lighting. That would mean higher taxes – or reduced music, sports, language and special education programs. Poor and minority neighborhoods would be impacted worst.
Small and minority businesses are often young and undercapitalized. Increasing their operating costs, while decreasing the disposable income of their customers, puts them on the verge of bankruptcy.
“A single worker in our Rhinelander fabrication plant can do the work of ten who do not have access to cranes, welding machines, plasma burners and all other machinery that allows us to cut, bend and fabricate steel up to six inches thick, and make all kinds of heavy equipment,” says Oldenburg Group executive vice president Tim Nerenz. But the machinery and facilities are energy-intensive. If energy costs rise, the company would have to cut wages and benefits or lay off workers, as contract prices are fixed and overseas competition is fierce.
Indoor pools and other facilities make tourism a year-round industry, sustaining local economies during frigid Wisconsin winters, making resorts like the Chula Vista Resort in Wisconsin Dells popular jumping-off points for cross country skiing, snowmobiling and dining. Rising energy costs would reduce family vacations, hammer bottom lines, force layoffs, and cause foreclosures throughout these communities.
In every case, it is blue-collar workers, low and moderate income families, minorities and the elderly that are affected most severely.
Nor are these impacts likely to be offset by “green” jobs. As Spain, Germany and other countries have discovered, wind and solar power require constant infusions of money from increasingly strapped taxpayers and energy consumers. When the economy sours, the subsidies disappear, and so do the jobs.
Wind and solar electricity is expensive, intermittent and unreliable – necessitating expensive gas-powered backup generators, and further damaging family and business budgets. Plus, most of the jobs will be in China and India, where low energy and labor costs, and access to rare earths and other raw materials that America refuses to mine, supply wind turbine and solar panel factories that easily under-price US firms.
The entire cap-tax-and-trade, renewable energy and green-jobs edifice is a house of cards, propped up by claims that humans are affecting the Earth’s climate. As EPA and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson repeatedly assert, “Climate change is already happening, and human activity is a contributor.”
However, that is not the issue. The issue is whether our use of fossil fuels is now the dominant factor in global warming and cooling, and whether future manmade climate change will be catastrophic. There is no replicable or credible evidence to support that proposition.
Headline-grabbing disaster scenarios forecast for 50 or 100 years in the future are the product of speculation, assumptions, unreliable computer models, and articles by climate activists falsely presented as peer-reviewed scientific papers in IPCC reports, news stories and political speeches. As my Wisconsin study explains, they are not supported by actual data and observations regarding historic and current global temperatures, ice caps, glaciers, sea levels, rainforests or cyclical weather patterns.
Energy taxes and subsidies, renewable energy mandates, soaring prices for everything we need – and severe impacts on families, businesses, jobs, opportunities, living standards and basic civil rights – might be justified if we did indeed face a manmade climate disaster. But even then we should carefully examine the costs and benefits of any proposed actions.
We should determine whether slashing fossil fuel use will stabilize our planet’s ever-turbulent climate, and whether our limited resources might be better spent on adapting to future changes, natural and manmade, just as our ancestors did.
If global warming science is inaccurate, dishonest, slanted or fraudulent, there is even less justification.
We cannot have justice without opportunity, or opportunity without energy. We cannot have justice by sharing scarcity, poverty and skyrocketing energy prices more equally – especially on the basis of erroneous, speculative or manipulated climate science.
We must therefore be forever vigilant, to ensure that Congress does not slip cap-tax-and-trade proposals through during a post-election lame-duck session – and EPA does not shackle our economy and civil rights progress with its job-killing “endangerment” rules.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.
Henry chance says:
July 31, 2010 at 4:30 pm
The new phrase or crime is environmental justice. Whites have placed polution sources near poor black communities and every thing hurts. Higher crime, more sickness and lower IQ’s.
No, Henry: For the largest part, your assertion is untrue.
People live where life is affordable.
A short summary: Back when most industrial projects were initiated, most people who worked at those industries lived in temporary lodging until they found a residence close enough to their work, something affordable.
As it happens, real estate people built tract housing close to the industrial point, and most —if not all— of the employees bought those houses. But as time went on, those employees made more money and moved away to a more distant community to put some distance between them and the industry’s location.
That left the tract housing empty, and reduced the price of the real estate (houses). That situation made having a house more affordable for the lower income groups. Others, seeing an investment opportunity, bought the tract houses and rented them out.
Ultimately those places became rundown and the rest is history.
Now, I should like to remind you that many of the best and brightest people have arrived from rank poverty. Poverty has a way of presenting you with options. That some resort to crime is all a matter morality.
IQ is essentially the intellectual payload of a person’s abilities, and that varies with both education and application.
Finally, let me point this out: Booker T. Washington was a former black slave. He verily pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and became the quintessential American success story. Imagine: A former slave who lived in rank poverty, had no education save what he did for himself, and went on the form the Tuskegee Institute. From the very bottom to very top, and he did it because he wanted to get there.
If he did it, then there’s really no excuse for other’s not doing it. Every human has drive to varying degrees. Failure is the only option for those not willing to apply themselves.
Of course, being paid to remain a failure is a political stratagem used by politicians as a ploy to remain in office and have influence. So, in many cases the black community is told that they can never succeed in a white man’s world, and incredibly, many believe that message. Think I’m kidding? To put an exclamation point on all of that, there’s this: The Seattle school district wanted to drop the GPA for getting a High School diploma to a GPA of 1.0.
That’s D a average. Think about that: It’s essentially failure made to order.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2010007013_grading06m.html
Blade. Yup
Never let a crisis go to waste. Obama’s mob of legislators have been extra-busy cooking up new ways to “punish” those who risk their investors’ money drilling for oil. In its most sweeping response to the gulf oil spill, the House on Friday approved legislation that would impose new environmental safeguards for offshore drilling, remove a liability cap for spill damages, and slap industry with a new tax to fund conservation projects nationwide.
That’s right; now “Big Oil” has been handed a billion-dollar a year bill for land purchases for national parks, forests and wildlife refuges. Environmentalists are already drawing wish lists of projects (the greenies “conservation” rackets) such as “the catalyst to complete our land acquisition plan” for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, said Woody Smeck, acting deputy regional director of the National Park Service’s Pacific West Region. “We have 22,500 acres still to acquire from willing sellers.” It must be great when you can send the bills for your grand projects for someone else to pay, even when that someone has nothing to do with your schemes. The investors in oil exploration and drilling companies must be so pleased to be extorted of $1 billion every year on projects that have no connection whatsoever with their business.
The law also removes a $75-million liability cap on oil firms for economic damages caused by spills. The bill would repeal a provision of the 2005 energy law that exempted projects, including the Deepwater Horizon drilling, from detailed environmental analysis. It bars companies with poor safety and environmental records from receiving new offshore drilling leases, and it requires offshore drilling rigs to operate under the U.S. flag, requiring tougher safety rules than those in effect for the Deepwater Horizon, which was registered in the Marshall Islands (and had nothing to do with BP, the contractor). The measure prohibits oil companies from bidding on new offshore leases unless they renegotiate royalty-free offshore oil leases that were approved in the 1990’s. It establishes new ethics rules for drilling regulators; increase fines to $10 million, from $100,000, for willful violations of drilling rules; and establish new procedures for use of oil dispersants.
Some areas have reports of pump prices increasing already by about 7 cents a gallon. This is the future.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”
This guy doesn’t drive “a suv” he travels in an armada of them to a personal ” subsidised ” private 747 or huge military helicopter. He uses more fuel getting to New York than his employers could use in a lifetime. Shame on him.
Let’s hope that US voters get it right in November…
And in Britain
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/emission-cuts-threatened-by-economic-recovery-2014118.html
“Emission cuts threatened by economic recovery”
Brilliant post by Paul Driessen. For me this is absolutely the nub of the whole cAGW scam.
As Dr. Roy Spencer puts it in his excellent book “The Great Global Warming Blunder”:-
“While relatively wealthy and environmentally conscious Westerners can deal with the higher food prices that result from diverting some of our food supply into liquid fuels, green energy policies will push many of the world’s poor who are already malnourished into starvation. Many Westerners are able to absorb the extra costs of CO2 regulation that must inevitably be passed on to the consumer, but the war on global warming will increasingly become a war on the poor.”
Even here in the UK (not quite the Third World – just yet. Give the Alarmists a little more time!), the Government’s energy regulator OFGEM predicts that an “average” domestic electricity bill will be £5,000 p.a. by 2020. That is more than 100% of the State Old Age Pension – which the vast majority of the poor rely on for their old age.
And the reason for the skyrocketting energy prices?
You guessed it!
Happiness and justice are greedy pursuits. You must humbly accept your equally rationed place in the socialist machine being brought in through the backdoor. If you complain or continue to live your productive lifestyle, you will be killed by heavier taxes.
“Pat Moffitt says:
July 31, 2010 at 7:39 pm
“The wholesale, utopian, social engineer determined to impose his long-term policies no matter what the immediate discontents, is by his cloth precluded from learning from his mistakes. Nor can he take account of the insight that there will always be unintended consequences, whether good, bad, or mixed.” ANTONY FLEW, The Politics of Procrustes, 1981.”
Darn it! Another book I’ve got to buy.
UK Sceptic says:
August 1, 2010 at 1:02 am
“Let’s hope that US voters get it right in November…”
It’s not that easy. We will see a swing from the dems towards repubs. How much, no one really knows. That being said, all should remember, the CAGW/CC movement thrived quite well under repub leadership. Apparently, total control over energy use is too tempting for all politicians. The fact is, I know of no repub that makes it a cornerstone of his/her campaign to rid ourselves of these global totalitarians. Perhaps there are a few out there. I know Sen Inhofe works diligently for this cause, but we really don’t have anyone making it a campaign issue. So, when the swing happens, there will be no mandate to change directions on this issue. Fortunately, repubs will see it as a repudiation Obama’s agenda of which CAGW/CC is a cornerstone. So they’ll continue to attempt to thwart his agenda, but two years later, where will we be? Hopefully, the world will have seen the fraud for what it is, but I’m not holding my breath.
mod, could you rescue my previous post from the black hole of posts? thanks
Done RT-mod
Too many taxes and over regulation is generating the working poor into starvation.
This allows cheap imports to take over.
Well look at it this way, the EPA in 1972 banned DDT on a pack of lies spread by some idiot Rachael Carson. Real science tried for years to prove anything she said was true, came up empty.
Yet about 1.5 million blacks in Africa die each year over a hoax. So you think the EPA cares about truth? Hah.
“the pursuit of happiness and the American dream.”
It has worried me that attemps to reduce the carbon footprint headed straight for a quite necessary function, the generation of electricity.
Just for a moment, pause to think how much the carbon footprint of USA would be reduce if all organised sports were banned instantly to reduce GHG and side effects. Think of all the sports injuries; the many people doing less than productive work; the gas used by cars going to events; the valuable space taken by stadiums; the night lighting of the latter…….
For that matter, the cosmetics industry could be wiped out overnight and the staff set to making useful things like compact nuclear reactors.
If you want some controversy, ban religious observance and set the buildings to use by the homeless.
Why is the USA so single minded as to want to destroy electricity plants when so many less useful alternatives have not even had a look in?
Look at the title of ‘your act’ above compared to her claim above … in short, you have gone ‘a bridge too far’.
Now, let’s stop cluttering up Anthony’s fine site with Ale x Jone s/prison planet (dot) com class-conspiracy fodder and claptrap like this …
(Maybe the link sanitized ver will post.)
.
I have a grandson and also feel some obligation to future generations who may wonder why rapid burning of the world’s fossil fuels in a few hundred years was thought to be a responible action.
“Headline-grabbing disaster scenarios forecast for 50 or 100 years in the future are the product of speculation, assumptions, unreliable computer models, and articles by climate activists falsely presented as peer-reviewed scientific papers in IPCC reports, news stories and political speeches.”
Actually, the headline-grabbing disaster scenarios are the product of heaps and heaps of Climate Ca$h being gobbled up by climate scientists and their political enablers to support their expensive offices, computers, labs and equipment, travel budgets, and six figure government salaries. And, as I always emphasize, all as we, in the US, pile up MASSIVE DEBT and sustain nearly 10% unemployment! Of course, we will end up paying dearly next year when (if things don’t change this November) all Americans will receive a massive tax increase (not including the proposed “cap and trade” taxes).
But, hey, it’s a great time to be climate scientist!!
Let’s Party in Cancun!!
Those of you discussing government regulation of food products, even those home grown, are on the mark. The Supreme Court upheld, in the 1940s, government mandated restrictions on acres planted by farmers even when the crops were planted and used on the same farm. Those home-grown, home consumed crops were deemed an impermissible interference in interstate commerce. (Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942)) The concept was upheld in the Raich case in California, where a consumer of marijuana for medical reasons was prohibited from growing her own because it interfered with an (admittedly illegal) economic activity (the sale of marijuana for non-medical use), in violation of the Commerce clause. (Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005)) Thus, any time do-it-yourself interferes with someone else’s opportunity to do it for you for pay, do-it-yourself is an economic activity that may be subject to regulation, depending on the whims of Congress. If there was ever a good reason to vote this year, this is close to the top.
BillD says:
August 1, 2010 at 6:18 am
I have a grandson and also feel some obligation to future generations who may wonder why rapid burning of the world’s fossil fuels in a few hundred years was thought to be a responible action.
“Rapid-burning?”
I find myself questioning that assertion regarding ‘rapid.’
See here: The geologic processes which produce mineral crude, have been in operation for millions of years. It is self-renewing.
In fact, there are Biblical accounts of leaks in the Middle East, especially in the Dead Sea, where tar was collected and used for mummification.
From where I see things, we are actually doing ourselves a VERY BIG favor by burning the stuff before it actually reaches the surface and commences to incinerates us when it auto ignites!
Here we have a relative ‘blessing’ in the name of a basic fuel source, which may be used when all else fails, and there you are condemning the use of what’s essentially ‘free.’
Your remarks come across as something akin to ‘don’t pump water from a well.’
You just might want to reconsider your stance here …
BillD said:
“I have a grandson and also feel some obligation to future generations who may wonder why rapid burning of the world’s fossil fuels in a few hundred years was thought to be a responible action”
You and your grandson live a comfortable modern life that would seem to be a paradise to those who lived a mere 100 years ago and it was ALL built on the fossil fuels you have been duped into believing are somehow evil.
Read ‘Dickens’ and envisage a life without modern healthcare/machines/cars/computers/safe water and food/freezers/cars/busses/planes/trains/roads from the smallest conveniences like plastic bottles to the MRI scanner you may one day need and the transport to get you to that lifesaver.
Dear Sir,
Everything you take for granted from a ball point pen to the internet would not be invented or available to you if it were not for fossil fuels. Take a pen and write down every item that has fossil fuels products as part of their ingredients or needed fossils fuels to make and deliver them to you, its a very long list! Think of your grandchild and the comfortable life he/she lives and then go back 150yrs and research to find out just bone grindingly hard and soul destroying daily life was for the children of his age. You have been subjected to outrageous lies about fossil fuels, a poisonous campaign against the very lifeblood of our civilisation.
Please think about the facts and rethink your position for the sake of your grandchild and his/her children . If it were not for fossil fuels then there would have been no modern civilisation.
They haven’t even found conclusive evidence that “fossil” fuel comes from fossils, they are sure that dinosaurs have nothing to do with it. There is debate as to where it comes from, there is certainly no evidence that it is a one time process. It is now and will continue to be an ongoing process. Telling everyone that we are running out, without knowing for sure where it comes is chicken little science at best.
A classical case of “It depends on what the meaning of ________ is.”
Home grown – a dozen tomato plants, couple 5′ rows of onions, some beans, a few rows of lettuce – planted on the average city lot or even aside the house in the country, all this sounds reasonable to the average Joe as the definition of ‘home grown’.
Planting and harvesting 11.1 acres * (45,000 sq. meters, yielding about 20 bushels of wheat per acre, ) gives about 220 bushels of wheat – is this on the same scale as ‘home grown’? Sounds like a stretch to me.
A stretch, as the definition of “home grown” is expanded beyond reasonable proportions in order to start this particular cattle stampede …
* Wickard v. Filburn
.
(Sarc On)
The Fall of the West
Theory No: 4697 – Climate Change
“Before The Great Evil Empire expired in 1989 the Soviet Politburo passed, the Supreme Soviet blessed, and the Soviet President signed, the Omega Project Authorization Act. This project was to infect the West via its water supplies with several secretly developed hallucinogenics that would cause crazy thoughts about Climate Change and bring the West to its knees. It was expected that all this would take just over 20 years; at which time the West would begin to crumble like a house of cards due to its incurable paranoia.”
(Sarc Off)
PS: If it were only so simple! People can be dumber than the look.
Mods –
I’ve got a post (or two?) stuck in limbo – could you take a look? Can’t believe it’s for any other reason than a link or some obscure term I’m not aware of ‘triggering’ a post’s placement into purgatory …
_Jim says:
August 1, 2010 at 8:31 am
Home grown – a dozen tomato plants, couple 5′ rows of onions, some beans, a few rows of lettuce – planted on the average city lot or even aside the house in the country, all this sounds reasonable to the average Joe as the definition of ‘home grown’. [–snip rest–]
Who are you to decide what the limits of ‘home-grown’ is/are?
Do you have a large family?
Do you can your foods to last several years?
Do you can foods for those times when there WON’T be any food?
Do you donate the food you grow?
Do you even grow your own food?
Do you live on a farm where you have to grow the necessaries for the animals?
Any such thought as you and the IDIOT USSC might suggest would be COMPLETELY antithetical to what the Founders of this nation had in mind when they formulate the U.S. Constitution and the amending articles.