Current climate policies mean energy deprivation, poverty, disease and death for billions
Guest essay by Paul Driessen
You’ve got to admit, liberal are masters at describing every initiative they launch as “the moral thing to do.” Their campaign for draconian energy regulations and a new global warming treaty is no exception. Protecting people, wildlife and ecosystems from climate catastrophes is the greatest moral cause of our time, alarmist scientists, activists, politicians, bureaucrats, clerics and journalists insist. Rubbish.
It has nothing to do with morality. It’s all about money, power and control. It narrowly defines “morality” to ignore the incredible benefits that fossil fuels and electricity bring to people everywhere – while dismissing the enormous harm their policies will wreak on families and ecological values that they profess to care so much about. And it makes no mention of the fact that they will rarely, if ever, be held accountable for their falsehoods and fraudulent science, or the damage and deaths they cause.
On March 31, President Obama promised to slash America’s carbon dioxide emissions 28% below 2005 emission levels by 2025 and 80% by 2050, taking us back to Civil War era emission levels, 150 years ago. He wants U.S. taxpayers to contribute our “fair share” to a new UN $100-billion-per-year UN slush fund to help poor countries adapt to and mitigate rising seas, storms and other climate change disasters that our plant-fertilizing CO2 emissions allegedly cause. He instructed his federal agencies to implement a host of new rules prior to the December 2015 United Nations climate conference in Paris.
Mr. Obama’s EPA will use “Clean Power Plan” and other regulations to shutter more coal-fired generating plants, issue new methane rules for landfills and natural gas production, funnel countless millions of dollars to activist and propaganda groups, and use sue and settle lawsuits to impose even tighter restrictions. FEMA will require that states use CO2-based computer models to determine how manmade climate change threatens communities, if they want disaster preparedness funding.
The Council on Environmental Quality will require that all applicants for federal project permits fully evaluate greenhouse gas emissions and potential impacts on climate change, to the satisfaction of bureaucrats and litigious Big Green pressure groups. The Department of Energy will issue new efficiency standards that double the cost of pickup trucks and appliances, and spend more taxpayer billions on wind, solar and biofuel loans and subsidies. The Interior Department will close more federal lands to drilling, and exempt more wind and solar projects from endangered species and other environmental laws.
The Overseas Private Investment Corporation and World Bank will refuse to lend money for coal-fired power plants, and even most gas-fueled generators and hydroelectric facilities, in developing countries.
These actions will have disastrous consequences. According to the Heritage Foundation, NERA economic consultants and other experts, EPA’s actions alone will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and a $100-billion loss in gross domestic product. By 2030, America’s electricity output will drop by nearly 10% even as we add 54 million people to our population. Brownouts and blackouts will occur regularly, and we will be told to get used to using expensive electricity when it’s available, instead of when we need it.
Poor, minority and blue-collar families will have to find thousands of dollars a year for soaring electricity, vehicle and appliance costs. Small businesses will have to find tens of thousands of dollars to keep the heat and lights on. Factories, malls, school districts, hospitals and cities will have to pay millions more.
Millions of middle class workers will get laid off – in coal mines, power plants, factories, shops and other businesses. Entire families and communities will be impoverished. Bread winners lucky enough to find work will be forced to work multiple jobs, commute longer distances, and suffer severe sleep deprivation.
Families will have to cope with more stress, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, spousal and child abuse. Nutrition and medical care will suffer. More people will have strokes and heart attacks. More will die. But the White House, EPA and other federal agencies studiously ignore these impacts. The only moral issue they want to talk about is alleged impacts from exaggerated and fabricated manmade climate change.
Two-thirds of Florida’s endangered manatees survive cold winters by huddling in warm waters that flow from coal-fired power plants. EPA’s plant closures could cause hundreds of them to die, while millions of birds and bats will be slaughtered every year by proliferating wind turbines.
Meanwhile, thousands of elderly people perish every winter from hypothermia, because they can no longer afford to heat their home properly, due to soaring electricity costs under Britain’s climate policies.
In poor countries, millions already die every year from lung and intestinal diseases, because of polluted air from open cooking fires, filthy water, spoiled food, substandard hospitals and squalid living conditions – because billions still do no have access to electricity. Imagine your life following hurricanes or other natural disasters that make electricity and safe water unavailable for a week or month. Then picture living that way for decades on end. White House, World Bank and OPIC policies will save people from “climate disasters” decades from now by killing them tomorrow. This they pass off as morality.
In the years since EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus banned DDT in 1972, tens of millions of Africans and Asians died from malaria. Now his daughter is promoting similarly deadly policies, as lead author for the National Climate Assessment, which hypes every exaggerated and imaginary climate scare imaginable. Other Big Green and Climate Crisis radicals oppose GMO crops and chemical fertilizers, and insist that starving, energy deprived families limit their living standards to what is dictated by climate activists and supported by wind, solar and biofuels. The death tolls continue to mount.
African Development Bank’s president Donald Kaberuka says poor nations will no longer tolerate these hypocritical, lethal policies. His bank will continue loaning money for coal-fired generating units. But in a perverse irony, the absence of World Bank and OPIC money means those projects will not have sufficient funding to install modern, readily available pollution controls. So millions of families will finally have electricity and won’t be sickened by wood and dung fires, but new pollutants will needlessly afflict them.
Japan is also financing coal-fired power plants in Japan, India and Bangladesh – often using Green Climate Fund money! It points out that these high-efficiency units burn coal with less pollution and fewer carbon dioxide emissions than older plants – and stresses the importance of helping impoverished countries get reliable, affordable electricity to create jobs, improve living standards and save lives.
China, India, Germany, Poland and other countries are also building coal-fueled power plants at a steady clip. And Russia says it will “comply” with any new treaty primarily by emphasizing CO2 reductions due to absorption by forests. At this rate, the United States will soon be the only nation that strangles its economy and imperils people’s health and welfare in the name of stopping climate change.
But the Obama Administration is imposing its authoritarian policies anyway – and justifying them by falsifying temperature data and ignoring the reality that: (1) rising carbon dioxide levels are improving crop and tree growth; (2) temperature, hurricane, sea ice and other trends contradict climate models and manmade disaster hysteria; and (3) any human influences on the climate are drowned out by the sun, deep ocean circulation patterns and other powerful natural forces. No wonder alarmists won’t debate skeptics.
Earth’s climate and weather will continue changing, because the forces driving them are always in flux. We simply have to adjust to them. But Obama prefers the Lewis Carroll approach to climate and morality.
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less,” Humpty Dumpty told Alice, “The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things,” Alice replied. No, Humpty responded. “The question is, who is to be master, that’s all.”
We the People will not let Obama & Co. be our master. Congress can and should refuse to ratify any climate treaty. It can and should defund these totalitarian initiatives. The next president can and should review and revoke every one. States can and should challenge them in court and refuse to knuckle under.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death, coauthor of Cracking Big Green: Saving the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine, and honored as a bona fide manmade climate disaster denier by Inside Climate News, though the blog could not manage to get his name right. (“David Paul”???)
money, power, control and your attempt at influence are all values pursued by somebody who regards them as worthy of pursuit and that’s what morality is for.
john whitman- tell this man what hidden premises you have detected and what he’s won!
frikn sophomoric solipsisms never hold an audience for long cuz they are about as entertaining as an infected, ruptured appendix.
Fact-free overwrought rant. Zero value-added.
warrenlb, you say:
While that does describe your comment quite exactly, warren, I fear I don’t see how it applies to a well-cited post such as this one. If you were to make clear what you disagree with, we might be able to understand your objection.
w.
The links are as fact-free as the blog post. In some cases they actually have nothing at all to do with the linked text.
Which fact(s) are you disputing Flashman? Easier to have a rational conversation if you pick something concrete to debate.
Eric Worrall,
When the central premise is perversion of morality, it’s difficult for me to see how one can have a reasonable debate by appealing to evidence, especially when the evidence is so anecdotal in nature.
Brandon, Paul has claimed that Crisis radicals oppose GMO crops and chemical fertilizers, and insist that starving, energy deprived families limit their living standards to what is dictated by climate activists and supported by wind, solar and biofuels. The death tolls continue to mount.
Even the UN admits that biofuels cause mass starvation – http://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-04-20/food-price-rises-are-mass-murder-un-envoy/2410012
Obama admitted that his goal was to cause energy prices to skyrocket – so there is no doubt green policies will place excruciating pressure on poor people.
Its difficult to see how hurting poor people who are helpless to defend themselves against your policy assault does not have a “moral dimension”.
Eric Worrall,
I repeat: So sorry, but [Paul is] not my spokesperson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_rate
World historical and predicted crude death rates (1950–2050)UN, medium variant, 2008 rev.
Years CDR
--------------- ------
1950–1955 19.5
1955–1960 17.3
1960–1965 15.5
1965–1970 13.2
1970–1975 11.4
1975–1980 10.7
1980–1985 10.3
1985–1990 9.7
1990–1995 9.4
1995–2000 8.9
2000–2005 8.6
2005–2010 8.5
2010–2015 8.3
Yup, skyrocketing.
Even I “admit” that cornfed automobiles are a bad idea.
Obama has perpetual hoof-in-mouth disease. There’s not enough duct-tape in the world to shut him up sometimes.
You should probably try to figure out what my position actually is first before continuing to pass judgement on it in abject ignorance.
Ah, the trolls are working again today.
For their ‘argument’, they either avoid discussing specific claims or they post distant unrelated ‘facts’ but fail to explain why those unrelated items matter?
The plain fact remains; they’d rather deny the reality of impoverished suffering and the reality that reducing emissions to late iron age is another form of impoverishment.
Don’t feed the trolls! Ignore them!
Willis says:
While that does describe your comment quite exactly, warren,…
I’d like someone to post evidence that the warrenbot is an actual person. His comments seem canned. And as Willis points out, the warrenbot comment above is 100% projection.
Yes, that is quite agitating. OTOH, cornfed Midwestern gals on a hot spring day can be a sight worth seeing. Pardonnez-moi s’il vous plaît whilst I slip into a reverie of the past glories of my youth ….
“But the Obama Administration is imposing its authoritarian policies anyway”
He needs to do this to get a climate treaty in Paris and a proper job in its global government when he later has to leave office?
YEA
NObama16
+1
Drill here. Drill now. Drill early, and often.
You always know when a leftist has dropped by. He just insults everyone who disagrees with him, and then pretends that it is beneath his dignity to bother responding to the facts and arguments given.
@warrenlb
Actually, there are plenty of facts although, yes, a handful of statements are wrong. For instance, referring to democrats and those in the “political left” as liberals is a factual miscomprehension of the word liberal.
What I miss in Driessen post is a political proposal. It does fine to present an opposition to someone’s agenda but fails to produce his own. This is, of course, a long-standing problem of the so-called “political right”, not just of him.
@Brandon
The central premise of Driessen is painfully correct. I don’t remember the last time a US administration did not act, even speak, without recourse and appeal to a self-justifying moral imperative fabricated to fit.
Brute,
It’s the implicit “mah side’s poo don’t stank” faux moral high ground Driessen takes which galls me. I know for sure when I take a dump it smells, but I really do try to direct it into the bowl instead of categorically smearing it all over the place.
I saw nothing about this posts author claiming or promoting himself as an apostle of virtue. His criticisms are well known and very well documented in the study of sociology in general, and the current administration in particular.
“Such is the nature of the tyrant when he appears, at first he is a protector.” (Plato)
A short post such as this only begins to touch on the very extensive evidence of such a tendency in all statist political philosophy. (I suggest finding a copy of “The mythological origins of Marxism” if you want to see an academic treatment of this well established reality.)
it would be better to address what was actually posted, then to critique something not even said or implied.
And, yet, he still has a valid point. The moralizing of the “left” is reprehensible and over-the-top. It also represents the mainstream in mass media so, imo, its denunciation is appropriate.
David A,
I did not read those exact words either.
And?
Plenty of historical precedent there. Keep going.
I may take you up on that; however, my reading the Manifesto was an effective eyebrow-raiser in and of itself.
I’m glad we finally agree on that point.
Brute,
So says the “left” about the “right”. Tie ballgame.
Ok, sure. The tendency of an unchecked majority is toward exclusion and suppression.
Even if it is “fact free overwrought rant” as you say, it only matches the hysterical fact free diatribes put out by the alarmists. Maybe this hype is what is needed to hit the headlines then some of these “facts” might stick in peoples’ minds and so begin to conter the alarmist propoganda,
Alarmism at its worst. There is zero evidence that an orderly transition to a post-carbon economy will do anything except create jobs and clean up the planet. While fossil fuels – including coal – aren’t going to disappear anytime soon, emerging economies like India and China are betting on renewables to electrify the rural poor. Why? Because it’s faster, more cost-effective, and a vastly better long-term solution than building out a dirty fuel infrastructure which will always be at the mercy of coal or gas producers. http://cleantechnica.com/2014/05/26/narendra-modi-plans-bring-solar-400-million-people-electrify-rural-india/
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/03/14/china-introduces-70-solar-subsidy-poor/
According to Google Corporation, renewables don’t work, and are unlikely to be viable replacements for fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Betting on renewables is a bet which has already been lost.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-google-engineers-say-renewable-energy-simply-wont-work/
That must be why they’re creating a huge solar power fund for small scale users …http://theweek.com/articles/545077/google-bring-solar-power-masses …and putting big dollars into large scale renewable energy facilities. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/06/google-backs-utahs-largest-solar-power-plant/
Apparently the business case disagrees with the engineers.
I’m sure renewables are a good investment, providing the deluge of taxpayer subsidies continues to flow. And there are cases, such as isolated small scale power systems, where solar power makes sense. This is not the same as renewables being a viable replacement for fossil fuel.
Eric Worrall,
That wasn’t the conclusion reached by the actual article: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
The caption to the R&D graphic reads:
A balanced energy R&D portfolio proposed by the authors would allocate the bulk of resources to proven technologies like hydro, wind, solar photovoltaics, and nuclear; devote 20 percent of funds to related technologies like thin-film solar PV and next-generation nuclear fission reactors; and keep a pot of money for “crazy” ideas like cheap fusion.
Annoyingly they don’t mention geothermal, which works well where it has been done (e.g.: The Geysers in California). I’m not a big fan of hydro and wind.
The body text contains this quote:
Unfortunately, most of today’s clean generation sources can’t provide power that is both distributed and dispatchable.
The only two near-term technologies which can do that in my estimation are fission and geothermal. That doesn’t mean the other technologies aren’t at all viable: http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf
47.90 geothermal
66.30 conventional combined cycle natural gas
80.30 wind (onshore)
84.50 hydro
96.10 advanced nuclear
95.60 conventional coal
130.00 solar PV
Figures are estimated total levelized cost without subsidies in $/MWh (2008 dollars) for new installations deployed in 2019. External costs from putative environmental impacts are not included.
Thinking about this issue in black/white, all-or-nothing terms not factual, nor is it at all constructive or useful.
Brandon, if geothermal was remotely viable everyone would be doing it. But drilling a hole several miles into the Earth’s crust, to a source of geothermal heat, is hideously expensive – the kind of money normally only spent on oil wells and political vanity projects. So except for a few places like Rotorua in New Zealand, where you have to watch where you walk in case you accidentally step in a puddle of molten lava, geothermal is a non starter.
And the google report was quite explicit – they want to see more research into renewables, but they were very clear that renewables in their current form simply won’t work – that significant advances are required, to make them a viable replacement for mainstream energy systems. The fact that politicians think that pouring taxpayer money into keeping a bunch of gas turbine generators on standby for when the wind drops is “doing something” about CO2 does not alter the reality of the situation.
Eric Worrall,
Not necessarily. Geology is important. It will not work everywhere for that reason. All-or-nothing thinking is again your failure, not mine.
The fuel cost is zero, and speaking of oil wells, done with pretty much exactly the same expertise and equipment. Not all bores pan out, so the primary concern is capital risk — which I think is justifiable, but also not insurmountable. Here are the numbers, again:
47.90 geothermal66.30 conventional combined cycle natural gas
80.30 wind (onshore)
84.50 hydro
96.10 advanced nuclear
95.60 conventional coal
Which is the smallest figure in that list?
I’m not making those numbers up, they come from the US Energy Information Administration. Go argue with them. Bring some informed statistics when you do. Until then all you’ve got is handwaving.
The rest of your post is reworded repetitions of your leading arguments which I’ve already rebutted.
Brandon, if the LCOE figures you provided are correct, in all except special circumstances (e.g. geothermal hotspots like Yellowstone and Rotorua), then no intervention is necessary – geothermal will sweep the world. Good news, then – zero carbon geothermal will dominate all future energy production.
Eric Worrall,
Obviously intervention is required, else it would have already happened. The figures I cited may NOT be correct, but they’re the most credible numbers I’m aware of. The only way to actually find out is to do it, and that need not break the bank — as I said before the main hurdle seems to be capital risk. A functioning legislature would be able to figure out how to get it done without sending everyone to the poor house or back to the Stone Age, and a populace not hell-bent on aping their demagoguery and partisan hackery would realize it.
But such is the world of stupid we presently live in. In my most humble opinion of course.
At some point, CO2 concerns aside, zero-carbon energy will have to if future populations are to be sustained in present style. Deeper geothermal wells (~6 km or better) might just do it, technological innovations being favourable. But baby steps. Something many people annoyingly assume about me is that I’m looking for radical change, tomorrow or bust, which I most decidedly am not. Steady progress, in mutually cooperative fashion as much as possible. That, unfortunately, is NOT what I see on my radar.
I’m sure you did not invent them, but still they’re wrong. Why? As said if geothermal was cheapest, it would quickly replace other energy sources. That will not happen.
Having said that, the question arises what is wrong with the analysis and why it is spread when it is plain incorrect? I assume there are people who wanted it to be true, for example those who sell geothermal energy, or those who want people stop using coal. Lots of people, lots of will and lots of money talking. Lots of talk to collect investors.
Another question which arises is do we talk about producing heat or producing electricity? If you can sell the excess heat, then producing electricity might be feasible, but producing only electricity from geothermal is obviously optimistic, if not unproductive.
Oh yes, and informed statistics are very difficult to produce. I’m sure big energy companies have best tools to guess how to do cheap energy. And how to get subsidies.
Sir Harry Flashinthepan;
A huge solar power fund that although SolarCity is expected to lose more than $1 billion through 2016, it still seeks to score more taxpayer subsidies out of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which has already kept the industry going for far too long.
Are you also aware Sir Harry Flashinthepan, that the U.S. Treasury Department are to investigate SolarCity, the biggest player in the solar installation subsidy industry, for possible misrepresentations about the “fair market value” of its systems and services.
Read more here on this latest solar scam.
“Eric Worrall
April 5, 2015 at 6:28 pm
So except for a few places like Rotorua in New Zealand, where you have to watch where you walk in case you accidentally step in a puddle of molten lava, geothermal is a non starter.”
From memory, there are no geothermal power stations in Rotorua. Sure, plenty of uses of that geothermal heat to heat pools and spa’s etc. In fact, a good few years ago, the local council banned people from heating their pools because the “energy” was being, literally, sucked out of the ground and was rapidly disappearing. But since the ban, more and more “hot spots” have been appearing proving to be risky for people. There have been people killed by falling into a pit fully of hot water, mud etc.
Now, I believe the geothermal plant just north of Taupo is still functional but it’s only a small plant.
Have to comment on Geothermal. I did a bit of consulting work on a Geothermal installation out of Jakarta. It worked. It was also extremely dangerous with the Hydrogen Sulphide release release. You could smell it. The problem was high releases overwhelmed the sense of smell and would kill you.
They kept the number of employees on site as small as possible.
It was not environmentally friendly, although it was built to satisfy Green Environmentalists lobbyists in the USA.
Hugh,
As said, the up front capital risk is the biggest issue.
According to figures I already posted, natural gas-fired power plants have lower total levelized system costs on a per kWh basis than both coal and nuclear.
Check the logic of your previous arguments.
Lotsa people like making money.
Just because you haven’t read about it doesn’t mean it’s not being talked about. Or done. Google “Iceland geothermal heating” and read some of the numbers.
True. Much easier to simply make things up; usually not advisable, however.
That’s been true of every major industry in first world nations for quite a long time. Sometimes it fails spectacularly. On balance, I find it difficult to argue that subsidizing industry is a net failure. Very difficult.
“Patrick
April 6, 2015 at 10:50 am
From memory, there are no geothermal power stations in Rotorua. Sure, plenty of uses of that geothermal heat to heat pools and spa’s etc. In fact, a good few years ago, the local council banned people from heating their pools because the “energy” was being, literally, sucked out of the ground and was rapidly disappearing. But since the ban, more and more “hot spots” have been appearing proving to be risky for people. There have been people killed by falling into a pit fully of hot water, mud etc.
Now, I believe the geothermal plant just north of Taupo is still functional but it’s only a small plant.”
New Zealand actually has 14 geothermal power stations, with the last one having the largest power output being commissioned just last year. Geothermal stations produce about 13% of our nation’s power needs. Mind you, we only have a population of around 4 million.
“Peter
April 6, 2015 at 6:08 pm
It was also extremely dangerous with the Hydrogen Sulphide release release.”
Having lived in New Zealand and been to Rotorua a few times I know exactly what you mean. You can smell it miles before you enter the town and it remains in your nostrils for days after.
“SRD
April 7, 2015 at 6:37 am”
Didn’t know there were that many, but I have not lived in New Zealand since 2005.
Lead by example. It seems pretty clear to me from studying history that the more cheap energy there is around the higher the standard of living people enjoy.
If you really believe that you can create employment with expensive energy then please show us the way. I will be happy to watch you get rich, I just do not have much faith it will happen.
It never ceases to amaze me how the alarmists twist reality in order to justify their desire to kill billions.
The way their simple minds work is thus. Anytime they are threatened with data that they don’t wish to know, they scream and yell. That’s how they can honestly claim that there is no evidence that their plans are anything other than honey and roses.
Whatever they don’t want to know, just doesn’t exist.
I’m just providing facts backed with links. Normally I don’t respond to the lunatic conspiracist strawman argument about killing billions, but the reality is that rejecting the next generation technology that moves beyond fossil fuels is akin to rejecting steam power in the 18th century, or antibiotics in the twentieth.
It’s simple fear of change, and if you’re genuinely concerned about human lives recognize that this fear is probably the biggest threat to the human enterprise in history. I’m not claiming to be more moral than you, I am claiming to be more educated.
SHF:
So, just what is this mythical “next generation technology” we supposedly fear that WILL provide more power than today’s sources that you demand we shut down in order to make electric power, water, transportation, food, and heat both more expensive AND less reliable?
I have no interesting in asking, let alone “demanding”, that we shut down today’s power sources. Please don’t put words in my mouth.
Sir Harry Flashman April 5, 2015 at 7:23 pm
Do you know why human caused global warming and nuclear power objections arise usually from the same camp?
I don’t. I’m very much in favour of nuclear power.
Thank you Harry. Likewise. Perhaps you can see why nuclear power fears from many AGW-theory supporters in my opinion also justify many concerns about their perverse morality. Cost-effective electricity is necessary for constructing an elementary infrastructure in developing countries, starting with sanitation:
The world will not boil over if young Africans can afford themselves a big house with air-conditioning and a car. To me it’s progress.
There is zero evidence that an orderly transition to a post-carbon economy will do anything except create jobs and clean up the planet
========================================
There is extensive evidence that you are incorrect, and jobs have been lost , and for every “renewable” job created, two to three jobs are lost. Energy is the life blood of every economy.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/21/renewable-energy-solar-and-wind-power-capital-costs-and-effectiveness-compared/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/09/13/offshore-wind-power-even-germany-cant-get-it-right/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/28/germanys-green-tech-forces-400x-increase-in-power-rates/
Please tell Google to stop asking for the Fed govt to throw good money after bad regarding the pay back of the building costs of the Ivanpah Solar facility. (I never found clarity regarding if this was a government loan, or a government loan guarantee, but the tax payer is being asked to foot the bill for the poor Google wag, since electrical output is 1/2 of predicted (about like warming, models vs. reality)
I also recall a whole bunch of rich green folk contributed to Obama’s campaign and received government loans that were not paid back, (Solyndra plus a host of other failed investments.)
Of course the greens will argue and show bogus statistics of how much conventional producers and oil is subsidized. They will assert, “big oil gets ten to 20 times the subsidies of wind and solar}
(They get the same tax write offs, applied to PROFITS any international company gets) Wind and solar is massively subsidized, top to bottom.
Ask yourself how much tax wind and solar paid vs. conventional? Not only is “Big Oil” and conventional power production not subsidized, it pays about between 200 to 400 billion every year in taxes, after tax write offs. (What greens call subsidies) So taxes revenue paid from profit of fossil fuel companies, equal about 3to six trillion dollars paid over the past 15 year time period. Over that same time period how much NET taxes paid have wind and solar generated, while losing billions to get to 5% of the grid being wind and solar?
Do not forget all the individual tax paid by all the workers, and all the companies that work for big Oil, that manufacture well heads, ship the product etc…
When you consider the tax revenue that all the subsidized green is NOT generating, that conventional replacement could be, plus the Government imposed inefficiencies on regulating conventional power to the back seat, thus raising the cost of power on every poor slob with a utility bill, or who buys ANY product made with something we call ENERGY, the life blood of EVERY economy, then you will no longer think that Green equals jobs and or cleans up the planet.
You can’t replace productive work with unproductive work without going backwards in development. If you do that, you’re not progressive, you are regressive.
SHF says “There is zero evidence that an orderly transition to a post-carbon economy will do anything”
Duh, there’s zero evidence for anything that hasn’t happened yet!
“except create jobs and clean up the planet.”
Survival jobs: The survivors hunting and gathering. It is the reverse of automation that eliminated many “jobs”, particularly many of the more dangerous “jobs”.
Sir Harry Flashman April 5, 2015 at 5:22 pm
There is also zero evidence that there is such a thing as an “orderly transition to a post-carbon economy” … especially because to date, the “transition” has been marked by huge subsidies and immense numbers of bird and bat deaths …
w.
+1 Willis. Renewables are not a viable replacement for mainstream energy.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-google-engineers-say-renewable-energy-simply-wont-work/
I recommend a look at this report on “Avian Mortality by Energy Source” to see what’s killing the most birds. http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/08/22/pecking-order-energys-toll-on-birds
Interesting.
“Power Lines: Between 12 and 64 million birds a year are felled by transmission lines, according to a study published July 3 in the journal PLOS ONE.”
Gee, good thing only fossil fuel generated power is transmitted on those lines.
/sarc
Interesting link Harold, but looking further
SOLAR
Est 1000 (Brightsource) to 28,000 (independent expert) is for 1 unit
WIND
Est 140,000 to 330,000 for 133 windfarms (per Audubon it is 575,000 and 880,000 bats)
COAL
Est 7,900,000 for over 600 coal plants producing 1,857,000GWh
WIND farms currently produce 51,630MW and so would take over 3000 times as many wind farms to equate the energy produced by coal. So let’s do a little math and equate the Bird deaths…
Per energy produced, coal plants producing just 51,630MW would equate to just over 2,600 birds relatively while increasing wind farms to a capacity of 1,857,000 would, by increased exposure, equate to Bird loses of 420,000,000 to 990,000,000 or as much as 1,725,000,000 birds but Audubon numbers
I missed the very bottom of the page where it indicates that the majority of bird kills are from cats at 1,400,000,000 to 3,700,000,000. If wind farms produced as much energy as current coal, wind farm kills could rival cats
Ivanpah, by comparison, produces 392MW to vaporize the 1,000 to 28,000 birds. It would take 4,730,000 Ivanpah installations to equal coal power production levels and at Brightsource estimates of killing 1000 birds each would rival cats but 28,000 birds each would be 131,440,000,000
131 billion birds annually
I would like to see a source for this contention that cats kill as many as 3.7 billion birds every year.
I think the numbers are exaggerated, and may possibly have been made up out of thin air.
Most cats have never caught a bird. Some do, and are good at it, but tens of millions of such cats?
Hogwash!
Also, cats kill mostly, if not exclusively, small songbirds. I believe these wind farms and solar plants may be killing large numbers of large migratory birds.
Such birds are fewer in number and slower to breed.
I am not as sure about some of these other numbers, but I for one am outside all day every day, and am constantly observing. I have never seen a bird killed by a power line. (Do they fly into them, or what?) Dead birds lying about are a rarity, and if this (power line kills) was occurring in urban or suburban locales, they would be noticeable, dropping from the sky in these numbers.
And we have all heard the stories of birds flying into glass buildings and being killed, but having lived in several large cities with many such buildings, I would be surprised if this were occurring every day in large numbers.
Such dead birds would be falling onto the side walks below. I have never seen or heard of dead birds falling onto city streets.
I welcome rebuttal from anyone who has a different view, experience, or opinion on these points.
Pardon me:
” I have never seen or heard of dead birds falling onto city streets”…outside of the rare news reports, which tend to portray such as unusual events, related to storms or some such.
Menicholas,
Working on the distribution side of the electric utility industry I can attest to the fact that animals (squirrels, birds, etc. account for almost 60% of the annual outages reported. Most are from either wing contact with multiple wires or with jumpers at equipment mounted on poles. Small birds and Squirrels are generally found on top of Transformers or at the base of those poles.
Current estimates of 96,000,000 domestic cats and possible estimates of 50,000,000 feral cats with outdoor domestic and all feral predating any rodent or Bird that can be caught. If just 10% of feral cats caught a Bird a day that would be 5,000,000 birds daily.
As far as birds flying into glass buildings, consider exposure ratio….number of building Windows per Bird kills vs number of wind turbines vs Bird kills
Bryan,
Good info, and thank you for responding. I do not question or dispute that such birds deaths are occurring, just the numbers.
Taking power lines, and using the upper estimate of 64,000,000. Assuming an equal number are killed each day of the year, and the number of deaths is proportional to the human population in a given area, that would mean in the county where I live in Florida (pop. about 650,000) there are 350 birds being zapped every day.
Using the lower limit it would still be 75 such. I suppose it is possible, but day in and day out, it would have to happen to every transformer in the county before a year is up.
Is the problem that big? Or is it a handful a day at most in a single county? I think if there were millions of instances every year, steps would be taken to prevent reoccurrence, such as when we see nails and other means t keep birds from landing.
Similar reasoning with the cats. Cats can catch plenty of animals when they want to, but having had many cats, over many years, and observing them closely, I am pretty sure birds are not so easy as ground prey.
I have seen estimates from the humane society of 74 million cats owned. This is based on one in three households having at least one cat, and the average cat household having two cats. Since the majority of households have one cat, that would mean that the rest have three or more, on average. I do not think the number of people who have lots of cats add up t enough to make the math work as they are estimating. I could be wrong, but I think 74 million is a very high estimate.
As for feral cats, there are feral cats, and plenty of them. But one feral cat for every six people in the country?
Come on…there would have to be cities and towns of feral cats for this to be true. These estimates are exaggerated. Using the math I used to estimate bird deaths, it is easy to see that 50 million feral cats would be 100,000 cats in a county of 650,000 people. No way! 10,000 would be a stretch. I have friends and relatives in the feral cat trap and release business. There are cat villages, can outposts, plenty of loner cats…but not those numbers.
There are obvious places with virtually zero stray cats.
And I do not think even the expert hunters are catching a bird every day. A dozen cats in a square mile catching a birds a day each would leave few unwary birds in short order.
With 19,492 municipal governments within the USA and the estimated 50,000,000 feral cat population, this averages out to less than 3,000 feral cats and about 5,500 – 6,000 domestic cats per municipality.
In 2004, according to Nat Geo http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/09/0907_040907_feralcats.html
There were estimates of 74,000,000 feral cats in the US
Bryan,
That’s cool, and thanks again.
I started out just wanting to see how these numbers are arrived at. What studies or polls were done? Did one person make a perhaps well meaning but high estimate, and ever since everyone has quoted that source without reference and without checking?
I presented my reasoning, which is based on math and a generally high awareness of outdoor life etc.
One cat for every six people means very many cats. Cities have high rises and apartment buildings with dozens and hundreds of people living on a acre sized footprint.
I have seen very little to indicate that there are cat populations within an order of magnitude of the number of people in this country. I have seen the estimates, and looked for the methodology. Zilch on how they arrived at the feral cat numbers. Maybe I just need to get out more:
http://scs.viceland.com/int/v17n2/htdocs/meow-meow-meow-329/cafe-of-cats.jpg
I mean, sure, the great Wyoming cat herds were legendary, to be sure. But since the Big Round Up of ’67, it has been relegated to a memory.
But, if you ever fancy a clean game of poker with some serious gents…head on out to Cat Vegas.
http://militantlibertarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/HerdingCats_opt2.jpg
http://pixgood.com/
Sir Harry’s link is a bunch of carp. It says: that ‘coal’ kills millions of birds. How?
Huge numbers of birds, roughly 7.9 million, may be killed by coal, according to analysis by Benjamin K. Sovacool, director of the Danish Center for Energy Technologies. His estimate, however, included everything from mining to production and climate change, which together amounted to about five birds per gigawatt-hour of energy generated by coal.
So we can throw that bogus guesstimate in the trash where it belongs.
They also claim that cats kill billions of birds every year. Again: that’s a load of carp.
My better half has 4 cats that go outside constantly, plus two feral cats that live outside in our yard. When the cats kill a bird, they bring it to our door. We can always see where the bird was killed because there’s a pile of feathers about 3′ across.
Those six cats kill one bird every year or two. I suspect the birds they get have problems, like old age or something else that slows them down. Birds are hard-wired to skedaddle when the’re approached by a cat. The cats are almost always disappointed (they catch plenty of mice and gophers, though).
The whole cat/bird argument is deflection and misdirection. Anyone who attributes millions of bird deaths to “coal” is simply pushing his agenda. No credibility there.
So you dismiss offhand a valid calculation on the destructive effects of coal, but you’re an expert on felines and avian mortality because your spouse has kitty cats. Man, you give sophistry a bad name.
WIKI has a fairly good article on feral cats with links to papers regarding Bird deaths
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_cat
DBStealey,
I am right there with you on the coal figure, but I left it alone because I am no firsthand knowledge of coal mining. But my sense of it is, outside of a few caged canaries, there are few birds in the way. (I know, strip mining, etc.) But birds killed by climate change? Um…directly attributable to coal? Just made up number. Unless they are talking about penguins, which have to walk three times further to get to the edge of the ice to feed, and die trying.
Anyway, the number cited for coal is not even one days worth of kill that they are ascribing to Fluffy and her 60 million strong hidden army.
I have been aware of these estimates of feral cats and the number of birds they supposedly kill for a number of years, and have looked into it. Plus I have a lifetime of first hand observational evidence, both in city and on the farm, of how readily cats can catch a bird.
House cats sleep most of the day. Feral cats must hunt for most of the day, and are hence usually out prowling. Where are these armies? Few birds are active at night, so this would have to be going on right under our noses.
Not buying it.
Lots of cats. They catch plenty of small animals.
Birds, not so much. Fledglings, mostly. And small songbirds, almost exclusively. Songbirds can have four to as many as four to six eggs in a clutch, and may lay four times a year.
But the windmills and solar plants are killing large migratory birds and birds of prey. These typically lay one or two eggs at a clutch, once a year. If that.
Actually Flashy…See above. Coal isn’t nearly as destructive to birds as either Ivanpah style facilities or major wind farms capable of replacing the Capacity provided by Coal.
Coal may be attributed to the deaths of 7.9 Million birds but a sufficient quantity of Wind Farms with a similar production capacity would chop between 440 million to 1.725 billion birds and Ivanpah style solar facilities capable of the same production levels would flash cook as many as 131b birds and BOTH would still require Hot Back-up for Gray still days and calm nights
Menicholas says:
But birds killed by climate change? Um…directly attributable to coal? Just a made up number.
But da Flash believes it, so it must be so. If it weren’t for his confirmation bias, he would look at both sides of the debate and easily see how preposterous his claim of “climate change” is. His link says that’s the reason cats are killing *billions* of birds every year. Right. As if.
Some folks are so blinded by their religious eco-beliefs that we will never get through to them. Fortunately, the truth remains as the individual alarmists take their dirt nap. Over time folks will see that Prof Freeman Dyson is right, as usual: the rise in CO2 is a net benefit to humanity and to the biosphere (including birds) — and a very substantial benefit at that, with no verified global harm. Thus, CO2 is harmless. Too bad folks like SHF cannot accept that.
So the Flash can’t credibly answer Willis, and instead changes the subject to birds.
That’s because renewable energy is one giant FAIL.
The proof? Without massive taxpayer subsidies, renewables would comprise about 0.01% of energy production.
I would be happy ending all subsidies from all energy production. Let the market determine what energy people want. Elitists like ‘Sir Harry’ would wring their hands in angst, but the common folks would vote with their wallets: give us cheap electricity!
What makes SHF and his pals think they know better? Because the fact is, they don’t.
Paul Driessen,
So sorry, but you’re not my spokesperson.
Irony. I don’t know what planet you’re from, but the one I live on has this thing called politics.
Well let’s see. One strawman followed an anecdotally supported assertion, topped off with an appeal to hypocrisy predecated on the first two fallacies.
On the bright side, you’re almost shooting par.
Brandon
I live on planet Earth where politics has always been about money, power and control.
Tell it to Driessen, apparently he didn’t get the memo.
Politics is nothing but “money, power, and control”.
Strike one.
The incredible benefits of fossil fuels is well documented, despite your desperate desire to believe otherwise.
Strike two
The enormous harm done by the green policies is well documented, and a small sampling was provided in the article.
Strike three
Rubbish on stilts, to bad you are too blinded by your ideology too see it.
MarkW
Which of these statements is false?
Well what a mistake to make. Pray tell then please have your people tell our people who your spokesperson is so a communication protocol can be arranged.
I do recommend a political consultant as well since they can help explain difficult concepts like how politics uses money, appeals to morality and control to gain power. How the politics described in the article demonizes fossil fuels while fawning over “renewables” all the while implying modern civilization being created and maintained by energy from fossil-fuels was and is a huge mistake. It is not an appeal to hypocrisy, it is hypocrisy, all nations know they will remain heavily invested in fossil fuels with renewables remaining a niche market similar to Tesla far into the future.
BTW Tesla had a banner quarter this year selling 3,550 cars, positively contributing 0.09% to the over 4 million in auto sales recorded in the US YTD. Overall electric cars sold 23,000 vehicles which means fossil fueled auto sales is at “unprecedented” low of 99.4% market share.
Alx,
Yes.
It’s actually pretty easy. When someone like me says, “I don’t support the position you say I do” take them at their word.
Most electric cars ARE fossil-fueled cars.
Your habit of blockquoting is really annoying.
Speaking of annoyances.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/03/and-here-we-have-been-told-its-climate-disruption-causing-local-weather-changes-when-its-actually-deforestation/#comment-1898099
Crickets from Brandon.
clipe,
You’re not the first to say so. Usenet habit. Deal with it. I had not previously seen Willis’ response to me, thanks for the heads-up.
Your comment makes no sense to me.
Speaking of morality, I’m still working my way through Bob Altemyer’s essay on “The Authoritarians”. He’s obvious got some bias against them while seeming not to recognize the evolutionary advantage conferred upon authoritarians.
Morality is simply “what is right” (or correct or socially optimum, etc). Without a magnetic north pole, your compass will probably point somewhere else than mine. It is the magnetic pole that aligns compasses.
So what aligns a moral compass?
In society, it is religion, custom, tradition (almost the same things) that aligns the moral compass. What makes it endure is attribution to an ancient and presumably transcendental source so that no single person, or even many, can alter the moral compass for their own convenience. Bob Altemyer seems to think this is a bad thing; to choose to obey the moral compass that everyone else is obeying, so that you can have a strong nation, community, family.
With the liberal left this is not the case; there is no moral authority becasue you have thousands of moral authorities. Today you will follow this one, tomorrow that one, or you will set yourself up as a moral authority for your dozen followers of Facebook and Twitter.
Michael 2,
Fair enough, I’m never 100% certain that I’m talking sense.
Sure. Couple of things. He unapologetically makes value judgements, so dispassionate academic writing this isn’t. To his credit, he addresses his own potential biases. On the other hand, he does expend a fair amount of ink arguing for why the reader ought to trust his conclusion, some of which are not at all compelling — I paraphrase: my wife’s liberal friends don’t count me among their group. On the gripping hand, he’s quite critical of other researchers in his field who have mangled his testing instruments in a way which he says will certainly bias the results toward a presupposed conclusion.
I’d like to revisit the question of evolutionary factors when you’ve finished the book, please let me know when you do.
Close enough to my own definition for purposes of this discussion.
I agree.
Ditto.
My opinion is that we’ve been asking that question since we invented the concept of morality itself.
I offer you two options:
1) Defer discussing that until you’ve finished the entire book.
2) Provide a direct quote or two by way of illustration.
I’m open alternative proposals.
My view is that authoritarianism knows no one political alignment. I also believe that the process you describe is a universal human trait, so single person or group is exempt. No exceptions, including myself. The differences are in degree, and particular to specific issues. I think there’s a lot of qualitative subjectivity in the social sciences for good reason.
I’m a little better than halfway through Altemeyer’s book. For the most part I admire the way he objectifies his observations as otherwise it would just be a huge blog comment. My commentary on morality and Dog draws heavily from Rosseau (there will always be social forces) mixed with rather a lot of my own experience through a Navy career and having experienced the turbulent times of the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Rosseau’s writing is somewhat opaque. I’m not sure that a “quote” here and there would help much. It is more of a sense or summary of my own that I glean on reading his “Social Contract”. But it made sense on reading it; of course there must be something to align moral compasses. Dog is just a title; you look at what or who is attracting the most moral compasses and label it “Dog”. You need not know anything about Dog other than it is the attractor for many moral compasses.
In Book II, Chapter 7, he suggests that lawgivers often invent supernatural origins for the laws for a similar reason: if people believe that the laws came from the gods, they will be less likely to violate them.(*)
http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/socialcontract/section12.rhtml
* and less likely to willy-nilly change them!
Being “enlightened” isn’t very useful if you are the only one enlightened. Rosseau’s contemporaries were often atheists which put them at odds with actual societies and thus poorly equipped to explain how societies form. I suggest that they were instead establishing themselves as the supreme beings of their own visions; there is always a supreme being in any field of endeavor; Linus Torvalds being the Supreme Being of Linux.
Gobekli Tepe shows that development of society runs apace with development of religion; difficult to assert with authority which came first, but I’m pretty sure there is no society without some form of religion to align people’s moral compasses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
Brandon Gates says “My view is that authoritarianism knows no one political alignment.”
Authoritarianism creates politics. That is why at the top of the Democratic party is going to be found an Authoritarian Leader. Same with any and every political party and alignment.
Without Authoritarian Leaders, politics probably would not exist. But then, very likely neither would the United States (or any other nation) exist.
Let’s get our priorities straight. Banning DDT, GMOs, wind farms, nuclear power, and chemical fertilizers makes sense, because all of these are harmful. Banning CO2 does not, because CO2 is harmless and beneficial.
Your priorities need some work. Most of the things you mention are, like CO2, victims of alarmism. DDT did not kill people, but the banning of DDT killed tens of millions. Nuclear power has killed far fewer than coal mining. The jury is still out on GMOs. So, before you get your priorities straight, try to get your facts straight.
There have been dozens of studies testifying to the safety of GMOs and none that have found any problems with them.
I love it when the clueless chime in.
There is no evidence that DDT, when used properly is dangerous.
There is no evidence whatsoever that GMOs are dangerous.
Nuclear power is much less dangerous than every other form of power.
Ban chemical fertilizers, and you condemn 1/3rd of the population to starvation. There is no evidence that when used properly they are a problem.
Go back to your cave and leave the rest of us alone.
“There is no evidence whatsoever that GMOs are dangerous.”
From the cave: The recent classification of the GMO herbicide ingredient glyphosate as a 2B carcinogen by the World Health Organization now designates it in a class directly alongside the sexually transmitted, cancer causing human papillomavirus (HPV) as well as the Human Immunodeficiency virus (HIV.)
David Bennett Laing says “Let’s get our priorities straight.”
There is no “our”. You are free to straighten your priorities and I am free to straighten mine.
Taking flack from the warmist shills right after posting. Note to self: This article must be over the target so I will read it for good understanding.
Excellent observation, sir. Forge ahead.
+10
Exactly my thoughts, Pierre. I love it when alarmist panic shows, I know the article has hit a nerve and covers some topic they don’t want seen or talked about. I guess truth hurts.
Morals are an individual matter, no-one should be forced to use fossil fuels in their daily lives if it offends their sense of decency.
Nowadays it should not be difficult to give consumers, individuals and corporations, a choice of energy source when settling energy bills and the like.
I mean unsubsidised energy source.
If you want to set up a windmill in your backyard, feel free to do so.
Chris Hanley at 6:11 pm. I agree 100%. Maybe YOU should go 100% free of any sort of fossil fuel or “fossil” derived product.
No more steel. No more plastics. No more acrylic paints. No more lubricants or bicycle chain grease. (Well it could be made from vegetable oil but NO MORE BICYCLES – made using petrochemicals.) No more imported goods (bunker fuel or diesel transport fuels you know). No more of a lot of things. What are the wind turbines made from? How about solar panels? Insulation on the wires (can’t use vegetable oils, tried that, rodents eat it.) No concrete – can’t make cement using our current kiln technology with fossil fuels (mostly coal).
Welcome back to the bronze age (assuming you can find enough wood to burn).
Not sure where you will get your shoes and clothing though, most city dwellers wouldn’t even know how to skin an animal, never mind make shoes from it. And forget about beef or pork. Can’t supply current levels of food production without fossil fuels. Can’t run (or build) your electric car as construction of the transmission lines and towers requires fossil fuels. Oh, and you will have to hollow out a log to make a pail to haul water and waste to and from your cave since water and sewer pipes are made from petrochemicals as is the throne seat most people sit on in the washroom.
I’ve lived in a log farm house with no electricity or running water. The trip to the outhouse isn’t fun at 40 below. Watching the frost grow overnight on the nails used as hangers on the inside of the logs is interesting, but not fun.
I think I’ll stick with current and future technologies. I know you said people should have a “choice of energy source” but I think you have to consider how pervasive fossil fuels and petrochemicals are in our society.
However, I agree with giving people “choice” … if they PAY for it.
I looked at solar and wind when I built my current farm house. It doesn’t work where I live. (I wonder how all those solar panels in Boston worked under two metres of snow this winter? Of course those things are just subsidy farms.) I did put in a water to water heat pump in my farm house but my primary heat source is wood off my land. (I burn more dead fall each year than I use in my fireplace.)
If people in California or Arizona can justify going solar or wind then let them pay an appropriate rate. I have no problem with that. I do have a problem when it is regulated that everyone has to pay for the choices of a few.
Sorry if this seems like a rant, but I keep having discussions with ant-fossil fuel folks who arrive in their fuel guzzling SUV with their four bicycles on the racks towing a boatload of toys made of plastic and telling me how I should manage my land … and how bad the oil companies are – while they are mindlessly using products provided by the very industry they rail against.
/rant off
Has anyone else noticed that the more accurate and hard hitting the topic post,
the more the trolls come out?
Coincidence?
/cynic
Actually, the more egregiously wrong a post is, the easier it is to point it out. Trolling is a lazy man’s game.
He, he.
The fact that you bit on my post simply amplifies my point.
I now know that the answer to the question, “if you poke a troll, does it respond?” is “yes”.
LOL
John
Flashie deserves some sympathy. I don’t think he is being contrary. He actually believes what he says
“Trolling is a lazy man’s game”
Self awareness is totally lacking in this one.
And humor in this one.
Kind of too bad. I was thinking of asking whether trolls float in water.
Do Trolls float in water?
Only the successful ones that own their own heated pools.
Only one critique of this article. The danger to the economy is not that jobs in coal will be lost, but that jobs in “renewables” will be gained. Our prosperity comes from the lack of labour needed for basic services such as farming, clothing and energy. It is this reduction of labour for basic services that has freed up people to produce luxuries and have a better standard of living.
The “green” jobs claim by Obama is real, but it is not good! It takes us backward not forward. The increase in the price of energy is precisely because it employs more people. We don’t want green jobs! We want technology and Capitalsm to reduce labour in as many industries as possible so that more people can be musicians, inventors, hotel staff and yes, even scientists.
Yes! Nail, meet hammer! Here is the choice: Pick the vegetables in the hot field at less than minimum wage, or make the complicated equipment that picks it for you at technical school or higher pay grade. Drive the tractor yourself or monitor the satellite-based equipment that drives the tractor and the amount of seed or spray to apply. Glue the plastic together, or make the complicated computer equipment that carves it out of a solid plastic block 3-dimensionally. Wickedwenchfan has hit the nail with a loud hammer. Worth repeating:
“Our prosperity comes from the lack of labour needed for basic services such as farming, clothing and energy. It is this reduction of labour for basic services that has freed up people to produce luxuries and have a better standard of living.”
Reason at its finest.
wickedwenchfan,
Well thought and well said.
Excellent.
Totally agree, wickedwenchfan. The points you raised would make an excellent article in itself. Well said.
Well I am not so sure about this statement “”Our prosperity …….”” One setback is the rapid developing in technology reducing the labour force. To balance this effect by non productive jobs is questionable.
Production of goods is the primary driver in the economy and despite the increase in production and demand
it will require a decreasing labour force. Creating an artificial nonproductive labour force requires a redistribution of wealth and that will be a main problem. Another trouble is the distribution of production by country.
What Obama proposes is that we all should fall in love with government power and never question the goodness of government action. Most of the goodness that occurred during Obama’s term was due to the free market finding the most efficient way of extracting energy with fracking. The explosion of natural gas production is the only reason the EPA proposals killing coal have any chance at all of working. Most of the government regs just follow the technology which would have used less energy even without government action. The moment government regs kill the economy the party in power will be thrown out and the regs nullified.
Not so perverse if an underlying value is reduction of human population by any means available.
Yup, and all this based on the moronic hypothesis that a simple unintelligent trace gas in the atmosphere which has about 8 orders of magnitude less thermal capacity than the massive thermal capacity of the Ocean’s of the Earth is controlling the temperature……… Truly Magical stuff those “Greenhouse Gases”, more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet……. Make’s people that should otherwise be somewhat sane totally INSANE.
Sure, we totally understand the climate, and better yet WE CAN CONTROL IT…….. All we need is for all you previously sane people to “STEP ASIDE” while “We the people of the consensus” will now CONTROL THE CLIMATE, you deniers should just step back and watch in SHOCK AND AWE while we determine the future temperature of the Earth…… Heck, we made life “fair” for everybody didn’t we…..
Cheers, KevinK.
Leftists define whatever they do as moral, which is how they justify their desire to jail and or kill anyone who disagrees with them.
If a few billion peons have to die in order to create the left wing version of heaven on earth, that’s a price they are willing to make other people pay.
The physics and empirical evidence show ECS (CO2 induced warming by 2100) under Business As Usual CO2 emissions (BAU), will be somewhere around 0.5C~1.5C, plus or MINUS whatever the sun and natural climate variability decide to do between now and 2100.
Moreover, since the sun seems to entering a cool phase (Umbral Magnetic Field has been crashing since 1996), there is a very real possibility that global temps may actually be COOLER by 2100 than they are now:
http://www.leif.org/research/Livingston%20and%20Penn.png
CAGW advocates’ false premise is that if CO2 emissions continue to increase at Business As Usual (BAU) levels, there will be 3.0C~6C of ECS. To avert this untenable premise, Warmunists plan to waste an estimated $70+ TRILLION on CO2 sequestration/alt-en boondoggles to keep ECS below 2C…
Hmmm… I say lets adhere to the Scientific Method for CAGW and see what happens to global temp trends between now and 2020. Global temperature trends have been near 0.00C/decade for almost 19 years, despite roughly 30% of ALL CO2 emissions since 1750 being made over the last 19 years.
Already, CAGW hypothetical projections exceed reality by 2 standard deviations (RSS data). If global temps continue to remain flat/marginally rising over the next 5~7 years, the discrepancies between CAGW hypothetical projections vs. reality will EXCEED 3+ standard deviations for over a quarter of CENTURY, which is sufficient duration and disparity to toss the CAGW hypothesis on the trash heap of failed ideas.
For TRUE environmental and energy sustainability reasons, private enterprise and governments should develop cheap, efficient and unlimited alternative energy technologies like Thorium Fission Reactors or Compact Fusion Reactors and not waste ONE MORE DIME on expensive, unreliable, diffuse, inefficient and intermittent solar/wind/food-for-fuel boondoggles. (BTW, China’s first test Thorium reactor goes online THIS YEAR, with a goal of having a commercial Thorium reactor design ready by 2014).
Based on empirical evidence, CAGW is, for all intents and purposes, already a dead hypothesis, AND moot given China’s Thorium reactor plans.
“Truth is the daughter of time.” ~Sir Francis Bacon
Here is the first sentence of the essay:
You’ve got to admit, liberal are masters at describing every initiative they launch as “the moral thing to do.”
=============
I can’t write worth a wit, but I think I can recognize good writing, and this ain’t it.
Typo’s in the first sentence just …..drive me to distraction.
Got subterfuge?
Hum?, proper discernment of the placement of a comma, does not account for a post normal CAGW coma.
IMV, the article is correct, even if the opening grammar is lacking.
I would have been tempted to believe that ten years ago. Today however they face overwhelming evidence that there is neither an impending “climate catastrophe” nor measurable evidence of human CO2 raising earth’s temperature. Their continued agenda to commit economic suicide in spite of the abject failure of their modeled predictions, their diversionary tactics of inverting their prior predictions to match reality and their refusal take action to mitigate actual ecological harm being caused by some of their alternative energy agendas has gone on long enough for me to rule out the chance of them still having any “noble intentions” IF they had any to begin with.
How much longer do you need?
even Japan seems ready to join the AIIB – they will make a decision by June – and this is one institution that could be a CAGW game-changer, but not in the way the CAGW crowd would like!
Nov 2014: IBTimes: Mugdha Variyar: Can China-backed Infrastructure Bank Solve India’s Power Crisis Through Coal Investment?
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which is sponsored by China, of which India recently became a founding-member, could allow funding of coal-based power plants, Reuters reported…
The World Bank had cut off funding for coal-fired plants except in ‘rare circumstances’ last year in a bid to support ‘low-carbon growth’. The move came close on the heels of the Obama administration’s decision to stop funding for coal projects to fight climate change…
“When you have 1.3 billion people starved of electricity access and the rest of the world has created a carbon space, at this point denying funding is denying access to cheap energy,” a senior Indian official told Reuters…
http://www.ibtimes.co.in/can-china-backed-infrastructure-bank-solve-indias-power-crisis-through-coal-investment-613227
17 March: Foreign Policy Mag: Daniel Runde: Britain Launches European Rush to Join AIIB (Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank). Now What?
The Obama administration must take some blame for the rise of the AIIB because AIIB fills a void due to administration policy decisions around energy financing. Through policies and executive actions, the World Bank, Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), and the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) are turning away from coal, nuclear, hydro, and even oil and gas projects because of environmental concerns and pressures from environmental lobbies. Asia is the largest consumer of coal in the world, and the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal. You could see the AIIB financing U.S.-built coal-fired power plants, or situations where the United States is providing the coal when OPIC, EXIM, and the Bretton Woods institutions have turned up their noses to these projects. These environmental policies, pushed largely by the Obama administration (although the OPIC “carbon cap” was regrettably instituted under President George W. Bush), are largely opposed by developing countries who have major energy demands and are making decisions based on “energy poverty” first…
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/17/uk-washington-china-world-bank/
Some memories, I was born in 1951, I remember clearly living prior to the discovery of natural gas. ( and have verified the memories with older brothers and family members). Not to sound like I had to walk uphill to school 5 miles and uphill 5 miles back to home but I clearly remember our small 2 story rowhouse being heated with a coal stove and cooking as well. A bath was in the wash bucket Saturday afternoon. Water for washing ( Mondays was an endless heating up of buckets of water and no “hot” rinse) I do recall vividly going to the coal shed with a scoop as a ten year old as part of the “chores” we all did. Then in 1963 an enormous gas discovery was made and within 2-3 years our neighbourhood was dug up and gas was installed. And soon after we had instant running HOT water ( Geysers) , A shower was remodeled into where the “Bathroom” used to be and my Father did not have to wait for his hot shaving water to come upstairs from the coal stove in the morning any longer.( I used to crawl into his side of the bed after he got up to watch him, nice and warm after he got up)
This is all the Thirld world would need to come into this century. The Obama’s on this planet are trying to stop this with their “morality”. (I was going to leave some four letter words here but you get the point). The other thing that clearly came out of this was that industries exploded and our lives were for ever changed for the better. Are there downsides? maybe but the benefits are by far superior just look at the amount of farmland one 500hp tractor can do compared to a few horse powered plows.
Holland 1950’s-60’s ( My wife’s experiences very similar in Winnipeg Manitoba at the same time!)
How to save $1000,000,000,000,000,000,l a year
For a little bit over $300,000,000 the “Antonov Aircraft Company” would finish building the second Antonov An225 Mriya aircraft into a firefighter, with a takeoff cargo weight of over 350 tons of water it would sure put paid to most fires. Hello out there any greens listening ???
The author of the post writes in part:
Since I have lived in Florida, on and off, since ’59, love manatees, and am too poor to afford sky-high power bills — this essay caught my attention.
I wrote a post about this issue once:
The State answers Winston Smith https://markstoval.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/the-state-answers-winston-smith/
At first some here might not see the connection clearly, but it is there for those with eyes to see. The State seeks domination over the majority and it is said best in George Orwell’s 1984.
I failed somehow to close the blockquote tag and it looks like some of my poor words are part of 1984. Unfortunate that. The blockquote should have ended at ~1984
Students of phislophy understand that there is no objective moral standard, and therefore it is possible to argue that anything is moral, if a sufficiently considered set of axioms are selected: E.g. the classic ‘9 sick men, one whole man, whose body parts can cure the 9 sick men’ dilemma. Killing the one healthy man for body parts is ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’…
Also, the classic green reductio ad absurdum that the most green position is in fact a nuclear holocaust that eliminates all human life, thereby restoring ‘Nature’ to her presumed ‘balance’.
Faced with the understanding that all morality is relative to the axiom set chosen, it is but a short step to understand that all moralities are in the service of anyone with a desire to gain power or sell you a product…
Those who sincerely espouse such moral positions are, in the end only atheists in search of a religion.
Those who insincerely espouse such moral positions are, in the end only salesmen in search of a sale…
The real axiom set that has meaning, is Darwinian. A modified Nietzschianism, in that a social morality that destroys the society it infests, is not a long lived morality after all.
Might may not be Right, but it may be effective. In either destroying a society or ensuring its survival.
Autre temps, autre moeurs…
Good point. If I have to choose
1) Earth’s billions of poor having an easier access to food and water in their country of origin or
2) maintaining Earth’s statistical average atmospheric temperature 0.5 °C cooler,
my choice (1) is very easy. And not only that my stance holds even if hockey-stick hadn’t shown how temperatures can be cooled retrospectively.
Nowadays, it seems that all we ever hear about atmospheric CO2 are the presumed negative consequences of its increasing concentration. Time and again, world governments, non-governmental organizations, international agencies, societal think tanks, and even respectable scientific organizations attempting to assess the potential consequences of this phenomenon, have spent multiple millions of dollars writing and promoting large reports about it. Yet, nearly all of these endeavors have failed miserably, by not evaluating, or even acknowledging, the manifold real and measurable benefits of the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content. As a result, the many important and positive impacts of atmospheric CO2 enrichment remain underappreciated and largely ignored in the debate over what to do, or not do, about anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
(Adapted from ‘The Many Benefits of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment’ – Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change)
[image]http://imaksim.com/images/goremons_530.jpg[/image]
Current climate policies also means a “double faced” effect. Let’s take, for example, the offshore wind -parks. They seem to be green energy, many countries seem to agree this idea, but, if they would look and think twice maybe will realize that these wind parks also affect the climate. I’ve read an very well documented article on this issue and I sincerely recommend it to you: http://climate-ocean.com/2015/K/k-.pdf.
“Current climate policies mean energy deprivation, poverty, disease and death for billions”
Absolutely correct!
Any student of economics could affirm the truth of this statement.
Only thing missing is the fact that the “elite” will not share the above fate.
Check out this blog which explores who these people are etc.
http://www.green-agenda.com/
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
a pricelist –
47.90 geothermal
66.30 conventional
combined cycle natural
gas
80.30 wind (onshore)
84.50 hydro
96.10 advanced nuclear
95.60 conventional coal
130.00 solar PV
Figures are estimated
total levelized cost
without subsidies in $/
MWh
– but the basic question is:
why don’t producers of wind turbines use their own products, supplying the needed process energie ‘for free’.
How do we explain the great rift between the American public and scientists in their understanding of scientific issues? Including evolution, homoeopathic remedies, vaccines, genetically modified food and climate change? Lack of education, ‘political correctness’ or religion, or all three?
– Religious people, republicans and climate deniers have in common the ability to cherry pick information that support their faith (or lies), and facts makes no impression on them.
Add to that rape culture mythologists.
Lapis have you stopped beating your wife?