By Steve Goreham
Originally published in The Washington Times
In his speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday, President Obama announced, “So today…I’m directing the Environmental Protection Agency to put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants and complete new pollution standards for both new and existing power plants.” This is the first proposal in the President’s new climate initiative. The President also called for expanded efforts to use “clean energy” and for the US to lead the world in bold actions to “combat climate change.”
For the last decade, an obsession with global warming has dominated a wide array of US government policies. Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate, skews federal automobile, transportation, energy, and infrastructure policies. Billions are spent in the ongoing effort to fight climate change.
Today, US policies toward the automobile industry are “driven” by Climatism. In his speech, the President praised new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards that rise to 54.5 miles per gallon by year 2025 and that are designed to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Plug-in electric vehicles are promoted and subsidized as a solution to global warming.
Transportation is shaped by climate policy. Ethanol mandates result in the consumption of 40 percent of the US corn crop in vehicle fuel. Biodiesel is promoted as a way to reduce emissions. Even high-speed rail is proposed as a solution to move citizens from airplanes to trains to reduce emissions.
US energy policy is dominated by Climatism. Earlier this week, Dr. Daniel Schrag, an advisor to the president on climate, stated that “a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.” Despite the fact that more than 30 percent of US electricity is produced from coal today, regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency will make it impossible to build a new coal-fired plant. At the same time, the Obama administration provides loans and subsidies that promote wind, solar, and other forms of renewable energy.
At Georgetown, the President addressed the proposed Keystone Pipeline, which has been delayed for almost five years, stating, “…the pipeline’s impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determine whether this project will be allowed to go forward.” When operating, the Keystone Pipeline can replace 45 percent of Persian Gulf oil imports with oil from Canada and the northern United States. But our President considers emissions to be a larger issue than reducing OPEC oil imports.
US infrastructure policies are heavily impacted by global warming fears. Reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is at the core of LEED building standards. Urban planning aims to reduce emissions by replacing private automobile transit with public transit. The current administration proposes tens of billions for a “smart electrical grid” to promote renewable energy and residential “smart meters” to promote energy efficiency, both pushed forward by the ideology of Climatism.
The bad news is that US citizens pay twice for the President’s war on climate. First, taxpayers subsidize green energy. The Production Tax Credit for wind energy will cost over $12 billion this year. Department of Energy loan guarantees to more than 20 bankrupt renewable energy companies, including Abound Solar, Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Solar Trust, and Solyndra have cost taxpayers billions. Taxpayers also pay for US military efforts to make biofuel out of algae at exorbitant prices.
Second, citizens pay higher costs for electricity, automobiles, and housing from green policies. The Department of Interior offshore wind program will deliver electricity to homeowners at three times the price of conventional power. Fuel economy mandates will raise the price of automobiles. Consumers must pay for smart meters that can curtail electricity usage.
The good news is that, despite fears, man-made emissions have very little effect on Earth’s climate. Water vapor, not carbon dioxide, is Earth’s dominant greenhouse gas. Emissions from human industry cause only about one percent of Earth’s greenhouse effect. And contrary to predictions by all 73 of the world’s top climate models, global temperatures have failed to rise over the last 15 years.
Someone needs to inform the president.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
The title says “bad news and good news” ….Where was the good news? I know you mentioned some good news, but all of it is old, rehashed, tired, wan & listless news. Obama has lost it. He’s appeasing the green lobby, with unattainable gobbledegook. Directing the EPA to become climate nazis. This the day I begin to mourn the decline of the USA in earnest. Even if the KXL is built, the US economy will be so wrecked that it won’t make a difference….and the envioro-klatch will have simultaneously gotten what they want, and created the seedbed for revolution, provided, of course, that the sheeple can notice it. Obama is pure evil, I’m afraid. An ignorant narcissist. The worst kind.
Maybe Obama needs to do this, pursue international Marxism for USA, to get a place or good job in this international political movement?
What the voters should do is to defund it as soon as possible?
Biofuel kills! How would You like to be the woman in Asia or Africa watching your child die because your meager income can no longer purchase subsistence food? Forty per cent of US corn farmland is devoted to biofuel; how many people,, poor and starving, in the “undeveloped” world would be saved if we stopped this nonsense. Is one of them the next Gandhi? Television commercials tell us to contribute to “Save the Children” and “Care”. If you really want to do something for those starving children; stop the nonsense, stop biofuel. Now.
Obama more and more shows his true leftist elitist colors, consistent with his alma mater and the teachings of professors like Elizabeth Warren. A partial answer is to insure that the 2014 election preserves the House and recaptures the Senate. Then things like the legislatively delegated EPA mandate scope can be revised to stop the nonsense if the body politic so votes. Obama obviously thinks actions such as he has just taken will help the Democrats recapture the House from Luddite Republicans who disagree with him on many things including climate change. So the election season has begun.
What Obama says seems to indicate that he is a totalitarian with a third-world mentality who hopes to strangle free market and individual freedom in America.
What Obama does seems to indicate that he works for sheiks.
Mutually exclusive possibilities? Not necessarily.
@Alexander Feht…
“Mutually exclusive possibilities?” Heck no!
Just taking a leaf out of Al Gore’s book.
Well, here in the PDREU state of UKoGB&NI, we have Building Regulations. These came about largely after the Great Fire of London, to prevent such a occurrence happening again. They recommended how a building should be built to prevent structural failure in service, & protect them against fire, etc. Well since the “Oil Crisis of the mid 70s, they have concentrated on the insulation of our homes, workplaces, & factories. Now, don’t get me wrong, like any engineer, I like more bang for my buck, & using less energy to light & heat my home means less buck is spent on doing so, so that more can be spent on enjoying life. Unfortunately like many rules, they are based on lab experiments, under lab conditions. They are not based on day to day usage, but upon “simulations” (may the lord forgive) of day to day reality in use! They are well meant & well intended. However, the cost of heating & lighting our homes has not reduced in real terms, the energy companies are share-holder profit driven, nothing wrong with that. But it also means that the energy companies have to produce returns for the shareholders, which means prices have to rise accordingly & proportionately to adjust for any reduction in usage of said energy! Couple that with taxation on energy, introduce some PDREU style renewable energy obligation bollocks, & the price will skyrocket, making people poorer, with less dosh to spend on enjoying themselves, which of course is the whole raison detre of the ecostalinist movement! It really is amazing that people swallow this crap, it’s a classic intellectual onanistic approach to life, I have, I want more, but I don’t want the plebs to rise out of the gutter I put them in, because I am an intellectual, probably a lawyer to boot,……oh, I forgot, that’s what President Obama is, isn’t he? So was Clinton, why is it that the Democrats seem to get caught with their zipper undone? Why is it that socialists seem to know what is good for everyone else? Just wait, he’ll introduce a Human Rights Bill before too long, just like we have enshrined in British Law now, where murderers, rapists, paedophiles, terrorists, & the like, get to have rights to a family life, to reside where they choose, oh & mustn’t be offended by people, they get upset, apparently. Their victims? They get Sweet FA. Another brilliant, egalitarian, left-leaning, well intentioned, badly thought through piece of crap legislation produced by lawyers, used & abused by lawyers to get their clients off the hook! End of rant, thank you.
“Alan the Brit says:
June 27, 2013 at 2:01 am”
Still, it was a very good rant. And in the, once, Great Britain, those public utilities were once all owned by the state and paid for by the taxpayer and should have remained so (I am not ignoring the fact that privatisation brought with it, as well as higher prices, improvements) IMO.
This the continuation of the policy of using the EPA to by-pass Congress. This is what Lisa Jackson said to a “Power Shift” ralley in 2009, described here,
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/lisa_p_jackson_epa_administrator_fulfilling_the_un_mission.html:
“The new Administrator also promised the (2009) crowd, that she would seek to overturn the Bush administration “midnight regulations”. The most critical of these to the environmental lobby was the memorandum by outgoing EPA chief Stephen Johnson, which stated that carbon dioxide was not a pollutant to be regulated and officials assessing applications by utilities to build new coal-fired power plants could not consider their greenhouse gas output when approving power plants.
Jackson also revealed the administration’s pre-determined policy on CO2, when she said that:
“Our first steps on taking office were to resume the CO2 endangerment finding and to seek fuel efficiency standards to reduce carbon pollution. The Law says Greenhouse Gases are pollution.”
Cultivation of biofuel is at best foolhardy or as stan stendera says it kills, and IMO it is stupid, criminally so. It puts a brake on America exploiting it’s own and Canada’s natural resources. Instead biofuels will be forced onto the market at (taxpayers’) subsidized prices, ensuring that food prices rise as more land that could be used for food production goes to biofuel. This will cause transport fuel prices to rise. If more ethanol goes into gasoline you’ll notice as your MPG drop and engine performance reduces. Thus you’ll be forced to buy more fuel.
From Anthony’s link above.
All this and the additional cost will trickle down to cripple some companies and cause even more unemployment. Companies will fail with this extra burden to carry. Biofuel production is not truly green either as the cost of the displaced plants were never put into the original cost/benefit analysis.
Meanwhile as outlined by Anthony above, Obama is promising to pump more money into his crony’s schemes of windmills and solar. We all know that billions have been wasted on so many taxpayer funded foolishness already – so how can it possibly be different this time?
The foreign oil companies will make even more (see http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/PET_MOVE_IMPCUS_A2_NUS_EPC0_IM0_MBBL_A.htm for crude oil import figures) as Obama penalizes coal – the America’s most abundant and cheapest fuel http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Energy.html and coal fired electricity generation becomes evermore expensive. Remember Obama has promised to bankrupt businesses that rely on coal (seehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCk8b2-Vs24). This is to whose advantage? Foreign oil and crony green energy hucksters.
So how will any of this help industry and jobs. Ever higher costs mean that US companies that mostly export will now be less competitive and their market share will reduce, foreign competition wins. US jobs will be lost. For the domestic market prices will rise, imports (not having to carry the extra burden) will be cheaper. Again jobs will be lost.
But for the big player there is a bigger question – why stay in the US when manufacturing abroad is so much cheaper, so much less hassle. Even more jobs will lost.
But that’s OK there’s the dole. Advocates of these green initiative have argued with me just this week saying that the poor are protected, they’ll get more handouts. People don’t want handouts they want productive, regular, employment.
Big governments everywhere LOVE putting people on the dole because it ensures you’re dependent. It also instills a culture of enfeeblement in the unemployed, a lack of confidence, a reduction in self-worth. It is insidious but this government wants you dependent not independent. There will be a change from ‘It my responsibility to do something’, to ‘it my right to get something from the government’. A cultural shift – a culture of dependency. The will to forge ahead, to make something new will erode and dissipate –
the land of the free will become the land of the dependent.
.
.
.
But only if you let it!
I see my comments (June 27, 2013 at 2:59 am) are still in
purdaher..purgatoryno, uhlimboer… awaiting moderation.In he state of ASSR (Australasian Soviet Socialist Republic) our esteemed leader, Joooliar, has been Jooliard. Now we have more esteemed leader KRudd. With Obummer being able to wield far more power in the US of A then I feel very very sorry for you poor 3rd world peasants.
/sarc (sort of)
Patrick, privatizing your public utilities or greening your isle, which is the real poison pill?
As long as one remembers Obama and the Left (collectively, including the politicians and the greens, and the Mann’s, et al) are driven by their agenda, not issues. Climate “Whatever” is merely one issue. As one pundit pointed out, their agenda is not to seek compromise over practical solutions to complex problems; rather, it is to achieve power to create a state where they control all of society according to the dictates they alone determine.
Climate is a nearly perfect issue similar to the “war on women” issue. “Climate”, like most of their issues, never goes away. It’s sort of like fighting a bowl of gelatin dessert with a spoon. Unless you empty the bowl, the gelatin is still there and will merely appear later, reconstituted, so to speak.
If one is to engage them, one should use their weapons against them. You need to firstsargue how their proposals are unjustice their; the impact on minorities; the impact of the third world; the misery they’ll create; the deaths they’ll cause; the starving women and children… And, of course, you can easily counter their “science” but remember, if you start with “the science”, you’ll lose even if you apparently win. For example, suppose one wins one of “the ugly” ones. The Left will merely note the point and either re-assert it later or create yet another “solution”. Oh, and they’ve advanced their agenda even then since they’ll state that the good that must be done, may have to be accomplished using another solution.
Patrick says:
June 27, 2013 at 2:17 am
“Alan the Brit says:
June 27, 2013 at 2:01 am”
And in the, once, Great Britain, those public utilities were once all owned by the state and paid for by the taxpayer and should have remained so (I am not ignoring the fact that privatisation brought with it, as well as higher prices, improvements) IMO.
=============================================
Patrick, privatisation, without a true free market does not lead to the best cheepest energy. (I Aam not advocating that there be no regulations on real polution) Things run by the state, are free to run at a loss.
Right now much of the world is operating in the red and practicing currency debasement policy. Governments around the world call this stimulus. It is not turning out well for them.
Profit, in a semi free market, ensures efficency, which is destroyed by all government run price control systems. Sooner or later, the inefficencies bankrupt the system.
Place a few thousand diversely educated and qualified people in a true free market ,with or without an existing infrastructure, and watch them rapidly find full employment in necessary and service related jobs. Create a system run by goverment decree and mandates, and watch millions of educated talented individuals, sit and do nothing while on the government dole, paralysed by a beauracratic nightmare of regulations and inefficincies,
Oh, thanks this info from your blog. This blog help me to know about global warming and climate
“Joe says:
June 27, 2013 at 3:38 am”
Greening as in wind and solar power farms etc? Then yes, greening is the poison pill.
the president is merely shilling for the following, so watch your retirement funds:
20 June: Ethical Investor: Ross Kendall: International investors will display climate change investments
The development of a Low Carbon Investment Registry to showcase investor action to combat global warming was a major outcome of the First Global Investors Forum on Climate Change held in Hong Kong…
The Registry will be open to institutional investors from around the world, with participants in the recent Global Investor Survey on Climate Change contributing the first entries. The GICOCC will publicly launch the Registry in early 2014…
Video keynote speakers at the forum, Ban Ki-moon, United Nations secretary general and former US vice-president Al Gore, both stressed the essential role of the financial services industry in combating climate change.
http://www.ethicalinvestor.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4743&Itemid=373
Steve Gorham is from the “Heartland” (anti-science) Institute and is author of a two books that mock science using his term ‘climatism.” Not sure why anyone would pay attention to what he writes. He should go back to discrediting the science show that smoking is not healthy.
Yes, I like the pied piper metaphor but personally think a cartoon of King Canute holding back the water (vapor) would be a more fitting allegory. : > )
“david says:
June 27, 2013 at 3:48 am”
I am no socialist with desires for “the state” to provide all things such as existed in the USSR for example. However, privatisation of a state asset, paid for by the taxpayer, sold back to the taxpayer (Usually through “bribes” in the form of “shares”. As a UK taxpayer at the time I recall getting my BT shares, but I don’t recall being asked to “sell” the GPO) and “investors”, leads to all the problems we see in the current system (Higher prices, no re-investment, borrowing to pay “investors” dividends etc etc). Plenty examples of this around.
BillD says:
Typical response by an adherent to the Climatist faith; an ad hominem smear.
What he says threatens your belief system because, deep down, you know he’s right, and that clash creates what’s known as cognitive dissonance.
What drives Climatism which I liken to the Crusades, is greed and lust for power, with the result being a systemic corruption, like a cancer, which spreads throughout the fields of science and into the sociopolitical sphere. Truth is the only cure, but it will take some time, I’m afraid, to rid ourselves of the greatest menace to human society since the evils of once-rampant Communism, and Nazism.
Unfortunately, majority Republican control of the Congress will not stop the statists in the Obama administration from pursuing their goal of wrecking the American economy by administrative fiat. It will take veto-proof majorities in both houses, majorities not necessarily of Republicans but of members of either party willing to rein in the rogue EPA and the rest of this unconstitutional regime.
/Mr Lynn
By the time the less educated voters figure out how much this will cost them, it will be way too late.
BillD – disparaging the messenger rather then the addressing the message. Hum
If my memory serves, in the “90’s, the National Center for Disease Control was going to do studies that would show guns were very dangerous and should be banned as a health hazard. Congress decided that was not an appropriate use of tax money and defunded the NCDC budget for that idea.
Maybe it is time (past time?) for Congress to do their oversight thing and defund some of the EPA budget.
I loved the way he kept mopping his brow, theatrically making some point about the heat. The temperature was about average for June in DC.
So far Obama has accomplished nothing. The low interest rate policies are designed to goose the economy by promoting the sales of oversized vehicles and houses. The lifetime energy wasted by those misguided economiic policies completely dwarfs the energy saved by tweaking a few regulations. The energy wasted on most of the green companies and biofuels is essentially flushed for all time. The only true impacts have been caused by forces out of Obama’s control. Americans use less oil because they are poorer and the price of oil has remained stubbornly high even in a sluggish economy. The coal industry has been hurt by the fortunate boom in the shale gas production which has reduce CO2 emissions. Obama has essentially continued the burn it all as fast as possible economic policies we have followed ever since we learned to utilize fossil fuel energy. They don’t want to admit the free market would utilize energy more efficiently without any government interference. If Obama cared about the environment he would cut the Federal government in half.
I may be delusional, but I keep getting the impression, that skeptics are winning all the battles, but are losing the war, for reality. Fuzzy, feel good, gestures… cannot be defeated. They rule. GK
“Someone needs to inform the president.”
Read the UN’s Agenda 21. They want us living at subsistence levels, as in N Korea, their standard country. Everything he is doing is in line with this agenda. He has no interest in climate, none, nada. It’s all about destroying our standard of living and devolving our industry and economy. Telling him anything is useless. HE DOES NOT CARE. IT’S WHAT HE WANTS.
Meanwhile, his home state of Illinois has two refineries shut down for maintenance (and for switching from winter to summer blends) and the closer you get to Chicago the higher the price of regular gasoline gets. It was $4.25 the past weekend in the city, while only $3.50 or so in Michigan and Wisconsin. Driving Tip: Enter Illinois with a full tank of gas.
A “progressive” leader would be busting his butt to see that the infrastructure we actually use in this country was being modernized, i.e., that the roads we use and the refineries that produce the gasoline needed to use those roads were being built when and where needed. But no, we haven’t built a refinery in the U.S. in a long, long time, and now we get to pay for this “leadership.”
As for the roads, massive traffic jams around Chicago at 2 in the afternoon?
Today’s Democrats, having defiled the word “liberal,” are now well on the way to doing the same with the word “progressive.”
Obama says we have to “put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants…”
This is what comes from measuring carbon instead of carbon dioxide. “Carbon pollution” sounds so menacing, black stuff all over the place, our lungs filling up with it, almost worse than smoking even…
Every time a liberal uses the term “carbon pollution” a dozen sane people should shout back, yes, shout: “It’s carbon dioxide, not carbon. You know, the stuff we exhale every few seconds; the stuff that plants require for existence. It’s not a pollutant; it’s essential to life on earth.”
The language of the Left gets more Orwellian with each passing year.
“Rod Everson says:
June 27, 2013 at 7:07 am”
In Australia, we have had media taking the “carbon pollution” theme to the extreme. We have adverts depicting “black balloon” or “carbon pollution” floating up into the sky!! It’s funny it hurts…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcMNZueIyNI
BillD says:
June 27, 2013 at 4:15 am
No, BillD–they’re scientific, just not YOUR brand of CAGW/AGW “science”. Maybe you should read some of what they’ve published before making a fool of yourself on the most-read Web site regarding climate. You might even change your tune.
If fear of CO2’s impact on the climate drives a WAR ON CARBON, shouldn’t the response to the next flood be a WAR ON HYDROGEN?
Heartland never denied that smoking was bad. It argued that 2nd-hand smoke wasn’t as bad as portrayed, and that the case hadn’t been proven yet (true at the time they argued this). (It’s also true that casual 2nd-hand smoke in restaurants, etc. isn’t in the same category as unremitting smoke from a family member.)
Warmist smearers have deliberately avoided using the accurate term “2nd-hand smoke” when mentioning Heartland and instead stating that Heartland denied the harm of tobacco, knowing that their readers would make the incorrect inference )smoking) that BillD did. This is classic suppresso veri, suggesto falsi. This is a warmist tactic on other topics.
I don’t see that Goreham is “from” Heartland on Heartland’s bio page for him. I.e., no affiliation is mentioned, he’s just described as an “expert.” Here’s the link: http://heartland.org/steve-goreham. Heartland’s “experts” page lists 358 experts for whom it has similar profiles. Here’s the link: http://heartland.org/experts. The lead-in paragraph on that page says:
That, plus the absence of any Heartland-affiliation in his bio, implies that Goreham is independent of it. So BillD is repeating another smear. Or inventing one.
Obama said he wouldn’t approve the Keystone pipeline unless it “does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution”. Let’s try applying some simple logic to that statement.
There are three ways to deliver crude oil: rail, tanker or pipeline, pipelines by far deliver oil with the least amount of “carbon pollution”. Regardless of how the oil is delivered and who buys it, Canada is going to produce it. If we don’t buy it they will deliver it by rail to the west coast put it on tankers then ship it to China, who will deliver it by rail to their refineries which have little to no environmental regulations.
With or without the pipeline the U.S. will still have a shortage and need to import oil from somewhere else, probably the middle east via tanker to our ports then deliver it by rail to our refineries.
If Obama did approve the Keystone pipeline we could reduce the shipping oil all over the world we wouldn’t have to import as much from the Middle East. This would reduce the possibility of tankers sinking and causing oil slicks plus it would reduce the emissions the ships and railroads produce.
So the obvious conclusion is the pipeline would not exacerbate the problem but reduce the problem. Of course there actually is no problem when it comes to CO2 emissions but that’s another subject.
“…a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”
———————————–
war on coal = war on prosperity
In order to curtail some CO2 emissions,
President Obama has ordered the light at the end of the tunnel
to be turned off.
In his speech Obama says America is doing a good job on reducing our CO2 emissions and that “our carbon emissions are roughly back to where they were 20 years ago.” then seconds later he pledges “to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions by about 17 percent from their 2005 levels by the end of this decade” well… we’ve already achieved that. About 17% of 2005 levels is basically where we are today and where we were 20 years ago, we’ve almost already reached his goal. Whatever we are doing now is working, so we don’t need carbon taxes.
G. Karst says:
June 27, 2013 at 6:45 am
I may be delusional, but I keep getting the impression, that skeptics are winning all the battles, but are losing the war, for reality. Fuzzy, feel good, gestures… cannot be defeated. They rule. GK
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The problem is the media is a propaganda outlet for the elite who control the government. How ever I heard a glimmer of hope on the radio today.
On CBS of all things they were talking about how the ‘weird’ weather was caused by the jet steam and science DOES NOT KNOW what is happening to the jet stream and why it has moved. “….Contrary to what some say THE SCIENCE IS NOT SETTLED….”
I was so shocked I nearly drove off the road.
Looks like the AP is a bit upset with Obummer still and may not be backing him up on his Climate Wars.
PS: I see that Heartland’s bio page for Steve Goreham hasn’t been updated in a year, because it contains this sentence: “ href-“http://www.amazon.com/Mad-World-Climatism-Mankind-Climate/dp/0982499620/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372347932&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Mad%2C+Mad%2C+Mad%2C+World+of+Climatism”>The Mad, Mad, Mad, World of Climatism is Steve’s second book on climate change, scheduled for publication in August, 2012.”
I have the original book, Climatism!, and it’s exellent—very readable. Lots of charts, almost all from official sources. The newer book, presumably a second edition of the first, is $12 for the Kindle edition. A free Kindle sample of the first 10% of the book can be downloadd by clicking on a button in the right sidebar of the Kindle-version page, accessible from the link above.
Oops–typo in the link above (delete that comment if possible)
PS: I see that Heartland’s bio page hasn’t been updated in a year, because it contains this sentence: “ href=“http://www.amazon.com/Mad-World-Climatism-Mankind-Climate/dp/0982499620/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372347932&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Mad%2C+Mad%2C+Mad%2C+World+of+Climatism”>The Mad, Mad, Mad, World of Climatism is Steve’s second book on climate change, scheduled for publication in August, 2012.”
I have the original book, Climatism! and it’s exellent—very readable. Lots of charts, almost all from official sources. The newer book, presumably a second edition of the first, is $12 for the Kindle edition. A free Kindle sample of the first 10% of the book can be downloadd by clicking on a button in the right sidebar of the Kindle-version page accessible from the link above.
Oops again. Third time’s a charm, I hope:
PS: I see that Heartland’s bio page hasn’t been updated in a year, because it contains this sentence: “ href=”http://www.amazon.com/Mad-World-Climatism-Mankind-Climate/dp/0982499620/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372347932&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Mad%2C+Mad%2C+Mad%2C+World+of+Climatism”>The Mad, Mad, Mad, World of Climatism is Steve’s second book on climate change, scheduled for publication in August, 2012.”
I have the original book, Climatism! and it’s exellent—very readable. Lots of charts, almost all from official sources. The newer book, presumably a second edition of the first, is $12 for the Kindle edition. A free Kindle sample of the first 10% of the book can be downloadd by clicking on a button in the right sidebar of the Kindle-version page accessible from the link above.
rogerknights says
You can find the html mark-up information for WUWT at Ric Werme’s Guide to Watts Up With That at the bottom of the web page where he also has an index to the posts by category and by date.
Thank You Ric Werme
We all know Obama’s not planning to approve Keystone, he just said so.
But he also left enough wiggle room so that if other special interest group supporters raise enough stink or raise enough money to override the radical environmentalists, he will give it a reluctant go-ahead. After all, the pipeline itself doesn’t emit “carbon pollution.” So if the trade unions and unemployed make themselves heard and felt, we’ll get Keystone built.
Without Keystone, that oil isn’t staying in the ground. Remember, Warren Buffett’s railroads are transporting the oil to refineries right now and the Canadians will build a pipeline to their west coast and sell to China if we don’t want their oil.
Meanwhile back in the UK:
2% spare electricity generating caapacity could lead to blackouts within two years
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/10145803/Risk-of-UK-blackouts-has-tripled-in-a-year-Ofgem-warns.html
Wind turbines get a subsidy for another six years
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/10146403/Wind-farms-get-generous-subsidies-for-another-six-years.html
A rare swift gets killed by a wind turbine
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/10146135/Birdwatchers-see-rare-swift-killed-by-wind-turbine.html
I’m glad I have a stand-by generator
Der Fuehrer is acting out his hatred of civilization and above all of America. He is fully aware that AGW is crap but it provides him the excuse to act out his attitude, which was perfectly summed up in Jeremiah Wright’s “God Damn America.” He WANTS poor people to be strapped by high energy prices (which will make everything else cost more, not just electricity or gasoline, since everything moves by energy). These are NOT unintended consequences. And yes, the object is to reduce people to dependence and slavery and make them support his and the other super-rich alarmies’ lavish lifestyles. That $100 million vacation in Africa is the ultimate screw you to little people trying to cope with the higher costs his policies cause.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but i don’t want to be driving a car that gets 54 mpg with current technolgy. It will be more or less a gokart with plastic fenders. Hopefully new technolgies will be developed that will improve the engine & allow a stronger outer shell.
The cartoon was cute, but he should have had $ flowwing out of the instrument not mucsical notes.
This piece provides some economic perspective on the cost of governmental dogooderism.
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/06/federal-regulations-have-lowered-gdp-growth-by-2-per-year/
Federal regulations have lowered real GDP growth by 2% per year since 1949 and made America 72% poorer
…”But even without considering state-level regulations, the estimated adverse effect of increasing regulation on economic growth since 1949 has been staggering, here’s part of the conclusion:
Regulation’s overall effect on output’s growth rate is negative and substantial.
Federal regulations added over the past fifty years have reduced real output growth by about two percentage points on average [annually] over the period 1949-2005. That reduction in the growth rate has led to an accumulated reduction in GDP of about $38.8 trillion as of the end of 2011. That is, GDP at the end of 2011 would have been $53.9 trillion instead of $15.1 trillion if regulation had remained at its 1949 level (see chart above).
Ronald Bailey provides some excellent commentary on the study in a Reason article titled “Federal Regulations Have Made You 75 Percent Poorer,” where he makes an important calculation of how regulations affect us at the household level:
As a result [of the increase in federal regulations], the average American household receives about $277,000 less annually than it would have gotten in the absence of six decades of accumulated regulations—a median household income of $330,000 instead of the $53,000 we get now.
Finally, I think the burden of federal regulations on economic performance estimated by the authors might actually under-estimate the total drag on economic growth since they only include the cost of compliance and enforcement after the regulations are in place. The cost of federal regulations measured by the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations doesn’t include the burden of wasteful rent-seeking that private firms engage in before the regulations are in place, as they attempt to influence (support, oppose or change) federal regulations when they are first being proposed and considered by Congress or a federal agency. Adding in these costs of rent-seeking, and the costs of state regulations, paints a pretty depressing picture of how much poorer we all are due to the crushing burden of government regulations.”
Here is the paper that is the source for this
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jjseater/regulationandgrowth.pdf
Federal Regulation and Aggregate Economic Growth
Obviously government regulations have accomplished some good over my lifetime, but the costs we have incurred to achieve those improvements have been well beyond estimates made when new rules are proposed. I don’t know that I consider an 85% reduction in median income a good price for even the most valuable of those improvements, especially since the actual reduction is probably much greater.
PS to the above
That cost study terminated in 2011. The last two years have seen the largest and most expensive growth in federal regulations in the history of the country. Add in the costs that The Bamster’s new plans would inflict and we will probably be close to doubling the damage inflicted over my lifetime in just two presidential terms.
Patrick says:
June 27, 2013 at 2:17 am
And in the, once, Great Britain…
If I had a pound for every time I heard that… I’d have £14.
Can I just take the opportunity to quash this fallacy among a few American people that the “Great” in “Great Britain” (Megale Brettania) means “awesome,” “wonderful,” “fantastic” or similar. It simply means “big” in reference to its status as the biggest of the British isles. The island of Ireland is “Little Britain” (Mikra Brettania).
Oh, and the United Kingdom is Great Britain + Northern Ireland.
Dave Wendt says:
June 27, 2013 at 2:00 pm
This piece provides some economic perspective on the cost of governmental dogooderism….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
THANKS! I knew regulations had an adverse effect but never found it quantified.
The biggest problem in quantifying the cost of regulations is determining how many businesses died stillborn because people simply give up after seeing the horrible maze of red tape or finding like I did a $5,000 dollar a year hobby business was going to cost at least $100,000 in upgrades to please the
Little Hitllerinspector. Or as another person in town found, the delays and changing of minds by the inspectors delayed opening the business for more than a year during which time he was have to pay rent on the commercial space. (He finally went to some friends high up in city government and had them give the inspectors a boot or he would still be waiting) Or as another friend found the improvements (costing $150,000) mandated by one inspector did not please the secon inspector and not only did he lose his business, he was fined and then tossed in jail because he had no more money to pay the fine. He lost his home too. To tell you the truth with the red tape maze and worse the fines on things you didn’t even know enough to look into, a person has to be flat out crazy to start a business today.USA Today had an October 2010 story on that aspect of the problem Small businesses losing out to red tape
Fox has a newer story Dell Survey: Red Tape Hurting SMBs but that article seems more geared toward IT type businesses.
David and others are saying:
“… true free market … true free market … true free market …”
(1) your “true free markets” cannot exist unless you replace real people with angels
(2) that’s what Communists use: they say: USSR failed NOT because it was communist, but because it wasn’t “true communism”.
The picture and cartoon are good, but I think I can one up that…..
Picture Obama taking his revenge on the evil ocean that “pollutes our air with carbon pollution” by charging into the ocean to fight the evil carbon pollution. He stabs the ocean and comforts the children telling them he has destroyed the wicked evil carbon pollution once and for all. Remember after all, that if carbon pollution is a serious threat, We must fight the evil carbon pollution where it is the worst. Since the oceans emit 10 times the carbon pollution that humans do, wouldn’t the logical thing be to attack the evil ocean? I wish I could claim credit for this inspiriation by myself, but Family Guy already did it:
I think the best thing our fearless leader could do is start a monty python style army complete with medieval box armor and a trusty “steed” who runs alongside him with those coconuts. I think a good steed for Obama would be Al Gore with the coconuts. You can picture him how you want but my vision should probably be snipped for the children’s sake. Don’t want to give em nightmares of a cute little bikini on a big man…(oops too late)
In any event, Obama charges fearlessly along with the warmists into the evil ocean that emits the evil carbon pollution. I tend to think he would be yelling something just a little ironic as he charged into the sea. Perhaps he would also attempt to find that missing heat while he is at it?
“David, UK says:
June 27, 2013 at 2:39 pm
It simply means “big” in reference to its status as the biggest of the British isles. The island of Ireland is “Little Britain” (Mikra Brettania).”
Well, technically you are correct from a geographical PoV however, politically, it has different meaning. Politically (And on the international stage given “Great Britain” once were rulers of the wealthiest empire on earth which was largely all bluster and bluff, eventually called out in India), the term “Great Britain”, refers to England, Scotland, Wales and a number of islands.
The multivariate question here is who bumped who’s head? MIS-1 will either “go-long”, like MIS-11 did. Or it won’t. Like MIS-19 (and MIS-17, 15, 13, 9, 7, and 5 didn’t).
Beyond that, there are very few things left open to question.
The Holocene might go into a cold climate funk, as MIS-11 did, between its two 1.5 – 2.0 precession cycle thermal peaks. Or AGW, at the presently half-precession old Holocene, will span at least another precession cycle (23kyrs minus 11,716 Holocene years so far)., or not, before decaying eventually into the next glacial.
Without GHGs, what are our chances of falling off into the next glacial, making it to yet another second MIS-11 style peak?
At best, 50:50. MIS-11 went long, MIS-19 didn’t. We are yet again at the 400kyr eccentricity minima.
What on earth could we possibly do to at least insure safe climate passage into the next insolation uptick? Like MIS-11 seems to have achieved?
The only thing proposed to be able to thermally offset natural cooling is anthropogenic warming via CO2.
Which makes for quite the conundrum.
If we strip the late Holocene climate security blanket, we either will, or will not, make it to what might be MIS-1’s, the Holocene’s, second thermal peak Like MIS-11 did, and MIS-19 didn’t.
It is literally a roll of the climate dice. Fail to remove the heathen devil gas CO2 from the half-precession old Holocene interglacial and you might just end-up spanning the climate gap between this thermax to the next. Remove it, and take your chances on the second thermal maxima.
If “it” does not naturally eventuate another MIS-11, or if we do not somehow, anthropologically, avoid onset of the next glacial, what else might we readily deploy save GHGs?
Actually I kind of like the idea of Obama’s “war on Carbon”. He can now ask Michelle and all his rich supporters to turn in all their diamond rings, necklaces, cufflinks, watches, tie pins, drill bits, abrasives and all other carbon materials to the government for sequestration. Oh, wait. Just about everything has carbon in it – steel, tires, clothing, shoes, aircraft, trains, cars, boats, asphalt highways and runways and … Hmm. Oh, yeah, and no concrete as you have to heat limestone to a couple of thousand degrees F to drive out the CO2 and turn it into cement. Looks like he just confiscated everything in America for the purposes of fighting the war.
/sarc off. Well maybe not. Sad day.
Obama is a politician lawyer. He undderstands the debate in his terms- politics and communications, not the science. His ploy is clever: he has claimed what he perceives as the strong PR ground, on the “side of the scientific consensus”, placing the onus of sounding reasonable on the other side who are arleady decried by compliant media as flat earthers etc. . Clever, but open to the vagaries of nature, like one more cold winter. and the increasingly wrong climate models. Merkel tried the same and Fukushima came along, causing her to close nuclear plants and build coal power stations to keep the economy going. It will be an interesting winter.
I am one of the scientist/professors who received a free copy of Steve Gorham’s “Climatism” book and I actually read it. (Note–the Heartland Institute send out free copies of the book to many scientists and professors). It is a complete smear of science and scientists. I have to admit that Gorham has finely tuned his ability to smear and mock science and scientists. After reading his book, I feel that I have a right to more than doubt anything he writes on the subject.
BillD says:
June 28, 2013 at 3:53 am
After reading his book, I feel that I have a right to more than doubt anything he writes on the subject.
Yeah, no it doesn’t. Your whining though leads one to believe it hit close to the mark.