Recently in Global warming Category

I recently read Obama’s Oil Spill To-Do List by Heritage Foundation Director of Strategic Communication, Rory Cooper and found it to be a sensible task list that identifies and enumerates things I think most on the right side of the political spectrum wish the administration were doing to address the oil “spill” in the Gulf Of Mexico.

The very first item mentioned in this list is to “waive the Jones Act,” which, as Cooper explains, “requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried in U.S.-flagged ships, constructed in the United States, owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed by U.S. citizens.”

This law obviously restricts what ocean-bound vessels can be used in the cleanup efforts. But, the restriction can be lifted, as it was by DHS secretary Chertoff during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. Doing so would allow a much greater diversity of equipment to be used in the cleanup effort.

In recent news, BP and the U.S. Coast Guard are apparently testing a giant Taiwanese oil skimmer. I assume using this ship, owned by a Taiwanese shipping company, will require a Jones Act waiver or exclusion. If that’s the case and they get the legal right to use this skimmer, that’s good news for everyone.

A lot of the talk about the Gulf oil “spill” has been about enormous amounts of money. It is apparently going to cost a lot of money to clean up the oil out of the water. It will apparently cost various Gulf Coast industries (fishing, tourism, etc.) lots of money in lost business. It will apparently cost the oil industry a ridiculous amount of money if the administration gets their way with these ridiculous moratoriums.

One area which I wonder if the money might be spent in vain is the cleanup efforts. I’ve read many sources that indicate that oil in water is pretty well handled by nature. We can maybe add a little fertilizer to speed up the growth of natural bacteria that break down the oil particles, but other than that, nature handles it.

The outlook becomes more muddied — no pun intended — when oil reaches land. Nature will take care of it, but it will take longer… years longer. So, it’s shocking to learn that the administration is seemingly blocking many attempts to do sand-berm dredging along the coast that would catch oil before it reaches coastal beaches and wetlands.

Finally, I completely agree with Cooper that the administration should stop using the oil “spill” as a wedge or lever issue to promote climate change (i.e. “Cap and Trade”) legislation.

Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Evolution of Thomas Paine's Revolution by Glenn Beck

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Anyone who knows me or has read some of my previous reviews probably knows that I'm one of Glenn Beck's biggest fans, so it will come as little surprise that I now have 4 copies of this book and plan to distribute it to family and friends.

As with his previous non-fiction work, An Inconvenient Book Real Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems, this book is, for the most part, a repackaging of things Glenn says every day on his television and radio shows. It discusses the corruption in government, the loyalty to special interests among those in congress, the amassing of power by the executive branch, and the cancer that is the Progressive movement.

That being said, this is definitely a book you can give to your friends who aren't necessarily one of Glenn's biggest fans. And, encourage them to pass it on when they're done. Sign your name on the inside cover and include the date your read it and encourage others to do the same. This book is a rallying cry to all those who feel their voice is held in contempt or just plain ignored by the political class in America.

I would like to share one of my favorite parts of this book. It is very near to the end of the book (before the Thomas Paine section starts) and addresses religion in a democracy.

So why is religion so important to the proper functioning of a democracy? Well, once again, our Founding Fathers had the answer. In a letter to the president of Yale University, Benjamin Franklin once wrote:

Here is my creed: I believe in one God, the Creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is in doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion.

It wasn't about any one particular creed, dogma, or church, but rather about all religions that inspired men to selflessness, virtue. and godliness. Our Founders understood the thing that we try so hard to forget today: there is far more than unites us than divides us. Virtue, honesty, and character aren't the purview of any particular congregation; they can be found in any church that has God as its foundation. We have forgotten this lesson and instead of using religion as our anchor, we use it to shame or blame. To many in this country, those who attend church regularly aren't pillars of their community, they're freaks or extremists.

But that mind-set can be changed by setting an example of tolerance and unparalleled acceptance toward each other. Let's stop using our religious symbols to score political points. Are we that insecure in our own faith that the religious symbols or public prayers of a different religion cannot be welcomed with open arms? As Thomas Jefferson once said:

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homeage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear... Do not be frightened from this inquiry from any fear of its consequences. If it ends in the belief there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise...

Religions and their followers must stop turning on each other. We are a land founded through divine Providence, a land where, as James Madison said, the "spirit of liberty and patriotism animates all degrees and denominations of men."

Very well said, Glenn.

View all my reviews.

I just returned from vacationing with my family in California, a state that is hurting terribly right now economically and is also a “leader” among states in the fight against global warming. While vacationing, we spoke with a few locals and just about all had personal stories to tell about the economic perils of the state. One older couple described how one of their sons had been laid off from his job and wasn’t enjoying being “Mr. Mom.” Another couple told us a story of gettign IOUs from the state in place of a state tax refund.

In a previous post, I presented the notion that “cap and trade” legislation was, in reality, a tax on businesses. Proponents of cap and trade have argued it is not a tax because the revenue from the purchases of carbon credits (the permits required to emit the restricted materials) does not go to the government. But, it’s just the same to the business- a penalty they must pay which is calculated more or less as a portion of their overall production.

Politicians like to say things like “This isn’t a tax on the individual. This is a tax on corporations.” A lot of people buy into that, but people who understand how business works realize a tax on business results in a burden on individuals because businesses aren’t going to eat the cost of those taxes — they’re going to pass it on to the consumer. Cap and trade is no different.

Over the last couple of years, there has been talk about a carbon tax instead of cap and trade. This would be a literal tax and would provide revenue to the government from companies that emit over the prescribed capped levels. Either way, it’s still an additional cost on production for companies that are already struggling in today’s tough economy and operating in a country with some of the highest corporate tax rates in the the world.

What do large companies do when the cost of operations in a region is high? They do what many “evil” American companies do: they move operations to a region where operations can be done under more friendly terms. Case in point: California. Increasing regulations, taxes, and red tape have prompted California employers to relocate to other more business-friendly regions over the last decade. The result: A recent headline indicates unemployment numbers in California around ten percent!

Finally, here’s some food for thought: American companies, whether out of principle or because of the intimidation of the Environmental Protection Agency, generally conduct the cleanest operations in their industry, worldwide. This doesn’t surprise me after I see automotive manufacturers repeatedly include verbiage in their marketing about how little energy they use, how much recycled material they use, or how much they do to offset their impact on the environment.

If you buy into the idea of global warming gradually destroying our planet, you should realize that almost all regulatory schemes like cap and trade are based on older, flawed models like Kyoto. If these regulation schemes force companies to move operations to regions with less cost/regulation or force manufacturers to purchase their raw goods from producers in other countries, the overall impact to the planet probably isn’t going to change. Countries with inexpensive labor costs like China, India, Russia and others have practically no incentive to regulate their impact on the environment whatsoever.

The best policy, both for our economy and for the good of the planet (if you’re an alarmist) is to promote production in the United States where we do things clean, efficiently, and under a watchful eye.

I was skimming articles on Real Clear Politics and saw a couple talking about the monster issue conservative talk radio was sounding the alarms about during the 2008 election: Cap And Trade.

What is “Cap and Trade,” exactly? Well, at it’s most basic level, it’s a tax on companies that produce carbon dioxide emissions. At a closer level, it is a system by which companies, industries, and even states and countries purchase and carbon credits on an open market. But, in the end, it’s a tax, because when everything is said and done, the revenue generated by cap and trade transactions goes to… well, nobody really talks about where it goes, but it goes to some government account.

There’s an obvious similarity between cap and trade and the SCHIP legislation recently signed by President Obama: the government maneuvers itself into a situation where it is actually encouraging the bad behavior it was supposedly trying to discourage.

In the case of SCHIP, the legislation signed calls for a large tax increase on cigarette and other tobacco product purchases. The rationale here is that the increased fee will create a burden on those in society that purchase these unhealthy products and, therefore, will encourage them to stop engaging in behavior like smoking. The money collected from these taxes is funnelled into programs to guarantee health insurance for children.

If you haven’t figured it out already, while legislators called this tax increase a penalty on smokers that should decrease the number of smokers, they actually want more smokers in order to fund SCHIP!

It’s will be just the same with cap and trade legislation. Replace a person smoking cigarettes with a company that produces carbon dioxide emissions as part of their operations and you’ve got the same thing. The money collected from this scheme will be funnelled to some program or group of programs that are then dependent upon companies doing something government really does not want them to do.

The conflict of interest here is interesting, but to muddy the waters more, it seems apparent, to me anyway, that the urgency of addressing carbon dioxide emissions is still far from settled.

In one article I read, 10 Ways To Trade Up by Kevin Drum with Mother Jones, Drum compares cap and trade ideas to the 1970 Clean Air Act and uses it as a proof of cap and trade’s inevitable success.

We found out in 1990, when the Clean Air Act was modified to address acid rain pollution caused by sulfur dioxide from coal-fired power plants. Instead of requiring every plant to install a specific cleanup technology or meet a specific emission rate, the epa simply set a nationwide cap on the total volume of SO² emissions and required power plants to own a permit for each ton of SO² they emitted. Each plant was allocated a certain number of permits, and if a plant reduced its emissions to the point where it didn’t need all its permits, it could sell them to the highest bidder.

The problem I have with this comparison is the “well, duh!” assumption that there’s nothing wrong with comparing carbon dioxide to sulfur dioxide. They’re both bad for the environment, one might say.

The problem is that sulfur dioxide is a poisonous gas that can be used to produce sulfuric acid in the atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide has been well documented to cause a wide variety of health issues in humans and animals. Carbon dioxide, not so much. In fact, carbon dioxide has been shown, time and time again, to improve the production of plant life and has little or no effect on humans.

It should also be mentioned here that carbon dioxide accounts for anywhere from one tenth of a percent to one percent of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (the evil, nasty water vapor being the largest constituent of these insidious chemicals bent on destroying life on earth.)

The global warming alarmists claim rising carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere are to blame for seemingly corresponding rising global temperatures. This is intriguing until you match up temperature fluctuations on Earth with temperatures on other planets in our solar system and match that to solar energy output from our sun.

As silly as it may seem to create an ellaborate trading market (to veil a taxation scheme) to plunder companies for generating a mostly harmless gas into the atmosphere, it’s very likely it will happen. President Obama has been consistent in statements about environmental policy and the “rightful place” of science.

Drum writes, “The backbone of (President Obama’s) climate policy is actually an ambitious program (Cap and Trade) that, if done right, will reduce greenhouse gases and raise desperately needed revenue—and, most important of all, has a fighting chance of making it through the congressional sausage factory in one piece.”

The country and the world seem to be slowly waking up, however. Most of the online comments to the Mother Jones article seem to be indicative of this as most of them decry global warming alarmism and question the logistics of cap and trade legislation.