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Energy and the Environment Archive

Thursday

23

April 2009

0

COMMENTS

Criminalizing Politics Is Undemocratic

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment, General/Misc.

The subject of torture is suddenly unavoidable.  I suspect this is a deliberate effort to distract from poor economic news and the recent tea party backlash against big government.  Be that as it may, the narrative needs to be addressed.

America, and Americans by and large, do not believe in torture.  This has always been true, and it’s no more true today than it was in the Bush administration.  Any government that seeks to avoid torture must, by necessity, define just what torture is.  The Bush administration sought to do this.  Now the Obama administration, not happy with the prior definition, seeks to adopt its own.  It’s to be expected that, when a new party comes into power, issues such as this will be readdressed and new positions taken.  But Obama is going one step further.  Not only does he find the Bush definition wrong, he wants to label it criminal.

This is a frightening development for anyone who supports our democratic system.  The United States has enjoyed a long track record of peaceful transitions that most of the world can only dream about.  A large part of the reason for this is that we do not seek to criminalize political differences.  When your average Latin American military junta assumes power, the first order of action is to jail everyone in power previously.  The United States is better than that. It used to be, anyway.

Barack Obama is willing to leave open the possibility that Bush administration officials may be tried for drawing a line in a slightly different place than Obama draws it.  Not, mind you, for wantonly and maliciously running torture dungeons where any and all practices were acceptable, but for approving a single tactic which Obama did not like, and which is routinely conducted on our own soldiers for training.  Peaceful democracies are not supposed to handle complicated legal and moral issues by jailing those who take opposing positions.  If Obama wants to elevate the game to that level, he should keep in mind that his entire economic agenda is flagrantly unconstitutional; whereas if he has his way on waterboarding, we might just have to start calling it criminal as well.

Tuesday

24

March 2009

0

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 18

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

The British are all gonna die…if they don’t kill a bunch of their population first:

JONATHON PORRITT, one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society.

Porritt’s call will come at this week’s annual conference of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), of which he is patron.

The trust will release research suggesting UK population must be cut to 30m if the country wants to feed itself sustainably.

Porritt said: “Population growth, plus economic growth, is putting the world under terrible pressure.

The environmentalists hate human progress and prosperity.  They hate that people can better their quality of life, which is why they are all up in arms over the fact that India now has an affordable car.

Saturday

7

March 2009

0

COMMENTS

Sunday

15

February 2009

0

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 16

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment, Media Bias

We’re all gonna die even faster than we thought:

The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.

“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

This increase in doom-mongering and hysteria wouldn’t have anything to do with the public’s decreasing receptiveness to massive environmental regulation of the economy following the economic downturn, now would it?

It’s also worth pointing how how misleading the WaPo headline is.  The headlines states, “Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates.” This is deliberately misleading. No one actually measured “climate change” and found that it “exceeds estimates.” All they did was change the data input, which does nothing to address the faults in their models.

Wednesday

11

February 2009

0

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 15

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

If global warming doesn’t kill us, the fear of it will drive us all crazy!

Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to climate change, the young man was convinced that if he drank, millions of people would die. The Australian doctors wrote the case up as the first known instance of “climate change delusion.”

Robert Salo, the psychiatrist who runs the inpatient unit where the boy was treated, has now seen several more patients with psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change, as well as children who are having nightmares about global-warming-related natural disasters.

Not to let you think it’s all in our heads, the author dutifully reminded us that we really are all going to die:

Over this century, the average global temperature is expected to rise between 1 degrees and 6 degrees Celsius. Glaciers will melt, seas will rise, extremes in precipitation will occur, according to scientists’ predictions.

Hat tip: Right Wing News

Monday

9

February 2009

0

COMMENTS

Thursday

5

February 2009

0

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 13

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu thinks we need more gut gripping panic!

Reporting from Washington — California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said Tuesday.

…Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation’s leading agricultural producer.

In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.

“I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,” he said. “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.” And, he added, “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going” either.

Climate hysteria is now firmly entrentched in the highest offices of government.  So say it with him now: “We. Are. All. Going. To. Die.”

Wednesday

3

December 2008

0

COMMENTS

Another Obama Promise Goes Down In Flames

Written by , Posted in Economics & the Economy, Energy and the Environment, Taxes

A funny thing happens when you become president, you can’t blindly advocate stupid ideas knowing you’ll never be held responsible for the outcome.  Apparently Obama realized this:

President-elect Barack Obama is not planning to implement a windfall profit tax on oil companies because prices have dropped below $80 a barrel, an aide said on Tuesday.

“President-elect Obama announced the policy during the campaign because oil prices were above $80 per barrel,” an aide on Obama’s transition team said. “They are currently below that now and expected to stay below that.”

Oil prices have fallen from a record $147 a barrel in July to under $50 this week.

That nonsense about the price of oil having anything to do with it (why the hell would you tax companies more for something they have no control over?) is just spin to placate the anti-capitalist left – who wanted to stick it to the big, eeeeeevil oil companies.  Far more likely, his economic team said, “Hey, this is a really dumb idea that will have very negative economic consequences.  Only an idiot would do this again.”

Obama is no idiot, so he probably knew this already.  But he is, apparently, a fraud who will promote idiotic policies, knowing they would be harmful if implented, to pander to his radical base.  It could be worse though: he could actually believe the nonsense he peddled for the last 2 years.

Friday

17

October 2008

0

COMMENTS

We're All Gonna Die! Pt. 12

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

Museum edition:

Water, 16 feet of it, smothers the southern tip of Manhattan, covering the landfill of Battery Park City. Tropic coral reefs are stripped of life, their rocks pocked with contusions. Polar bears rummage in junk heaps seeking food amid construction debris. Glaciers split into ice chips, floods ravage coastlines, droughts parch the Earth and forest fires rage untamable.

If the End of Days were going to be portrayed in a museum exhibition, it might look like the array of natural disasters, both real and imagined, that can be found at “Climate Change,” which opens Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History.

There is something almost biblical about these worst-case scenarios, apocalyptically suggested even in the subtitle: “The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future.” And if the plagues promised with global warming don’t include an onslaught of frogs, there is more than enough to worry about: the exhibition predicts proliferation of malaria and desperate foraging of wildlife.

Just don’t wait for the left to get all up in arms about “fear mongering.”  You’re only discouraged to talk about threats that are real, apparently.

Tuesday

14

October 2008

0

COMMENTS

More On Gas Shortages

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment, Free Markets

More on the government created gas shortages, from Robert Prechter:

Q: Doesn’t reduced supply — scarcity — create shortages?

A: No. In a free market, shortages are impossible; there is only a price. Rubies and Picassos are scarce, but there’s never a shortage of them. You can buy all you want any day of the week. Just pay the price.

Q: So how is the state causing a shortage?

A: The overriding cause of the shortage in the Southeast is state legislatures’ mandates that anyone selling gasoline at market prices will be labeled a “gouger” and fined $10,000 to $25,000.

Q: That’s it? That’s the reason?

A: That’s all there is to it. Only government can create shortages. If the price for gasoline had been allowed to fluctuate freely and rise to $5 a gallon locally, it would have provided plenty of incentive for truckers to siphon gas from other states and haul it to Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Alabama. But as it stands, every one of these states has an “anti-gouging” law, and every one of their governors stood up to announce that he would vigorously enforce it. They may as well have said, “I demand a gas shortage.”

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About Me

profileI serve as Vice President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a non-profit think tank dedicated to preserving tax competition and free markets. This site features my personal views, which are not reflective of CF&P.

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