Graham Endorses Cap and Trade

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) joined with Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the chamber's leading Democratic advocate of climate legislation, to promote a bipartisan plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The bill does little for nuclear power beyond new training programs and is silent about offshore drilling.

With friends like this, who needs enemies?

Here is a link to the original article from The Washington Post.

Compact Fluorescent Bulbs Pretty Dim Idea

Michael Heberling at The Freeman wrote an article about the truth behind compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs). And questions why the incandescent bulbs have been outlawed. In Europe they are illegal now and in the U.S. it will be 2012.

Here are some myths and facts about the CFLs:

Myth: CFLs last ten times longer than the old bulbs and are as bright at the end as they are at the beginning.
Fact: A Department of Energy study found that after 40 percent of the advertised service life, a quarter of the CFLs started to become dim bulbs. If you don’t mind having dim bulbs for 60 percent of the service life, then CFLs should make you happy.

Myth: Even though CFLs cost much more than incandescent bulbs (up to 25 times as much), they last so much longer so the cost over the life of the bulb is less.
Fact: It turns out that the lifespan of a CFL depends on how many times you turn it on and off. Failure to keep the light on causes the bulbs to burn out just as fast as the Edison bulbs.

Myth: Incandescent bulbs lose most of their energy as heat, and that's bad.
Fact: The old bulbs do double duty when they are on: they provide light and heat. When it is light outside, most people don't use the bulbs. They also don't use the bulbs that are on in rooms that aren't being used.

Myth: CFLs aren't harmful to people.
Fact: In some people they trigger headaches or even migraines because of the nearly imperceptible flickering. The BBC reported that the bulbs can also increase the risk of seizures in people with epilepsy. According to the Winnipeg Free Press, the United Kingdom’s Health Protection Agency recommends that people be no closer than about a foot from these lights for more than an hour a day. The ultraviolet radiation emitted by CFLs is like direct sunlight on bare skin.

Myth: CFLs are good for the environment.
Fact: It turns out that the each CFL contains five to ten milligrams of mercury. Mercury is one of the most toxic substances on earth; it can cause serious health problems, including nerve and kidney damage. The mandate will result in millions or billions of CFLs ending up in landfills where the mercury will leach out to contaminate the soil and groundwater.

A note about the environmental aspects of CFLs. If one breaks in your home, here are the Environmental Protection Agency's recommended guidelines for cleanup:

1) open the windows and evacuate the room for 15 minutes;
2) shut off the heating or air-conditioning system;
3) carefully scoop up the glass using stiff paper and place it in a glass jar or sealable plastic bag;
4) after vacuuming, wipe the canister and put the bag or debris in a sealed plastic bag; and
5) throw away clothing or bedding that comes in contact with the broken glass or the mercury-containing powder. I must not wash contaminated clothing or bedding because mercury fragments may also contaminate the washing machine or pollute the sewage.

Heberling questions why, if the CFLs are so much better than incandescent bulbs, why ban the old bulbs? Won't the market take care of the old bulbs?

You can find the original article here.

You can find the EPA's cleanup guidelines here.

Indians to Environmentalists: Get Lost

The Durango Herald News has an article today about the Hopi Indians and the environmentalists.

Although Indian tribes and environmentalists have worked together sometimes on issues, coal is not one of them. The tribes have a plentiful coal source and sell it to power companies with coal-fired plants. The environmentalists oppose the use of coal in favor of other sources such as wind and solar.

"Environmentalists are good at identifying problems but poor at identifying feasible solutions," said Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. in a news release. "Most often they don't try to work with us but against us, giving aid and comfort to those opposed to the sovereign decision-making of tribes."

On the Hopi reservation, revenues from coal mined by Peabody Energy in northern Arizona's Black Mesa area make up 70 percent of the tribe's $15 million budget. On the Navajo Nation, those revenues make up nearly 10 percent of the tribe's budget.

In 2006, environmentalists successfully forced the shutdown of the Mohave Generating Station on the Arizona-Nevada border - the only other customer for the tribes' coal - when the owner failed to install pollution-control upgrades as required by a settlement with environmentalists.

"The tribe is still reeling from that," said Hopi legal counsel Scott Canty. "To talk about taking the remaining revenues away is just unfathomable. It would just set them back tremendously."

You can find the original article here.

Who or What Is to Blame for the California Wildfires?

If you ask one of California's congresswomen, Representative Linda Sanchez, it's global warming. She appeared on MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports" on September 1st and said the wildfires have increased "in magnitude" over the years.

"Yeah, it’s really interesting because I'm a native Californian, born and raised here and periodically we would have fought wildfires when I was younger, but nothing of the magnitude that we’ve seen in the last several years," Sanchez said. "And, obviously, a big contributing factor to that is that we’re in drought condition. We don’t, we aren’t receiving the amount of rainfall that we should or, quite frankly, that in years past we did." (1)

Sanchez blamed the lack of rainfall on changing weather patterns due to global warming. But let's look at some other possibilities.

Partly to blame is the federal government. Months before the huge blaze erupted, the U.S. Forest Service obtained permits to burn away the undergrowth and brush on more than 1,700 acres of the Angeles National Forest. But just 193 acres had been cleared by the time the fire broke out, Forest Service resource officer Steve Bear said (2).

Government firefighters set thousands of blazes each year to reduce the wildfire risk in overgrown forests and grasslands around the nation. Prescribed burns can also be used to improve overall forest health and increase forage for wildlife.

Slightly more at fault are the people who are building in the areas that are prone to wildfires. That and more restrictive environmental laws have hampered government efforts to make controlled burns.

But the most likely culprit is environmental whackos, who have been keeping the government from clearing underbrush. The brush has been allowed to build up for the past 40 years. I think that is long enough to make it seem to Representative Sanchez that it's getting worse.

"This brush was ready to explode," said Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, whose district overlaps the forest. "The environmentalists have gone to the extreme to prevent controlled burns, and as a result we have this catastrophe today."

"Special interest groups that don't want them to do it have appeals and litigation through the courts to stall or stop any project they wish. Consequently, the Forest Service is not able to put a dent in the problem," said Steve Brink, a vice president with the California Forestry Association.



============================
1. Poor, Jeff (2009, September 1). "Democratic Congresswoman Blames 'Global Warming' for California Wildfires". Business and Media Institute.
Retrieved September 3, 2009, from Business and Media Institute

2. Blood, Michael (2009, September 2). "Feds Didn't Clear Brush in Wildfire Area". The Associated Press.
Retrieved September 3, 2009, from The Associated Press

Getting Rich Off Green Jobs

"Green jobs" are being touted as the wave of the future and are an integral part of the stimulus plan rammed through by Obama and the Democrats. But don't be fooled into thinking the average American is going to get rich off the green jobs push. The money is going to be collected by the unholy trinity on the left: environmental whackos, big labor and community organizers like ACORN.

The first group to get rich off the money is the Apollo Alliance. In late 2008 the Apollo Alliance -- with Obama's 'Green Jobs' Czar Van Jones then serving on its board of directors -- seized on the financial crisis as an opportunity to repackage the ideas it had long been promoting as a stimulus bill. Many of those ideas would be incorporated into the enacted legislation, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), in February of 2009. The PDF of the legislation can be found here.

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) said, "The Apollo Alliance has been an important factor in helping us develop and execute a strategy that makes great progress on these goals and in motivating the public to support them." (1)

Although this legislation is supposed to generate a lot of "high tech" jobs, it just takes away white collar jobs and replaces some of them with blue collar jobs. Spain tried a green jobs program that President Obama and his allies have held up as a model for cap-and-trade. According to researchers at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, the results have been disastrous -- every "green job" created by government intervention destroys 2.2 real jobs in the private economy. Since 2000, Spain has spent $753,778 on each "green job," while their greenhouse gas emissions have increased nearly 50 percent (2).

This brings us to the second group -- the unions. All of the jobs created here are union jobs. And who do the unions support? Democrats. It's not just payback. It is now the law (3).

And probably the most hideous of the three is ACORN and groups like it. It is now eligible to apply for as much as $4.19 billion of stimulus funding under the so-called "Neighborhood Stabilization Program" and are likely eligible for other stimulus programs as well. A vote was taken to try to prohibit this from happening but it was defeated. (As a side note, I am happy to see that the senators for Nebraska, one Republican and one Democrat, both voted to keep the money out of the groups' grubby little hands.)

But this doesn't end the money hunt for these groups. They are now looking to get more money from the cap and trade bill. Blue-Green's executive director, David Foster, said, "It is an economic restructuring bill for the global economy. We should not pretend that it isn't. Instead, we should do it right." (4)

The original article from Phil Kerpen can be found here.
===================================
1. Schneider, Keith (2009, February 17). "Recovery Bill is Breakthrough on Clean Energy, Good Jobs". The Apollo News Service.
Retrieved September 2, 2009, from Apollo News Service

2. Kerpen, Phil (2009, September 2). "Obama's 'Green' Groups Eye Lots of Greenbacks". Fox News.
Retrieved September 2, 2009, from Fox News

3. "DOL Issues Guidance on Davis-Bacon Requirements for Stimulus-Funded Projects". (2009, June 12). AGC of America.
Retrieved September 2, 2009, from AGC of America

4. Geman, Ben (2009, August 28). "Can Push for Climate Bill Forge a Lasting Labor-Enviro Alliance?". The New York Times.
Retrieved September 2, 2009, from The New York Times

Smelt Are More Important Than People

In the deranged world of animal rights whackos, the smallest of animals is more important than people. In Mendota, California, population 10,000, the unemployment rate is at 45%. Fresno County, where Mendota is located, has an unemployment rate at 15%. And that is including the seasonal help that is temporarily working to harvest what crops are left.

What does this have to do with animal rights? You see, there's a tiny fish called a delta smelt that the Fish and Wildlife Service says is now endangered. It is being killed by the irrigation pumps so the government shut off the water to Fresno County. The fields are withered but the farmers are still paying the bills for the water.

They have "food lines, hunger lines, people unable to pay their bills, people unable to pay their mortgages, people out of jobs." The State of California has already declared it a disaster area but the federal government has been silent on it so far.

Ben Shapiro, writing at Townhall.com, says Mendota is 94.7 percent Hispanic or Latino. Fresno County as a whole is 47.6 percent Hispanic or Latino. He asked Mendota's mayor, Robert Silva, if he thought this might be racist. "It could be," Silva says. "I can't prove that, but it seems to me that if this happened in New Hampshire or New York City, the relief would be there automatically. As for us, we have to beg agencies. We have to beg them to put food on the table for these people. And they still won't open the spigots."

Silva has a good point. The government acted slowly for Katrina, but still acted. It has done nothing for Mendota or Fresno County. We all know it would have snapped to attention if New York City was in a similar situation.

Shapiro's article is found here.

Now We See the Light

Pretty soon it will be illegal to sell incandescent light bulbs in the United States and throughout the European Union. GE, the biggest manufacturer of the compact fluorescent bulb that is replacing the old bulbs, lobbied for the change in the U.S. law (1). GE is winning in several ways:

1. They make more money per bulb over the old style of bulb.


2. They save on labor costs because the bulbs are made in China and not America.


3. They have no environmental regulations to work under because China does not have the laws the U.S. does.


4. They get to work under a single federal standard instead of several state standards.


5. They get points with the environmentalists for selling "green" bulbs.

GE is shedding 400 U.S. jobs, although it says it may make a better bulb in the future and bring those jobs back.

And now we find out from the European Union that the ratings given the bulbs are lies from the manufacturers. For example, an 11W CFL is said to be as bright as a 60W incandescent bulb when in reality it is a 15W CFL that is that bright (2).

===================================
1. Carney, Timothy P (2009, August 28). "How GE's Green Lobbying Is Killing U.S. Jobs". The Washington Examiner.
Retrieved August 31, 2009, from The Washington Examiner.

2. Gray, Richard and Julia McWatt (2009, August 29). "Energy Saving Light Bulbs Offer Dim Future". Telegraph.
Retrieved August 31, 2009, from Telegraph.co.uk

Greenpeace Admits Arctic Ice Melting Exagreration

Gerd Leipold, the retiring leader of Greenpeace, admits in an interview with a BBC reporter that the group's forecast of an ice-free Arctic by 2030 is wrong. He admits the information was misleading when they released it.

He went on to say that economic development in the United States and elsewhere needs to stop and says, "the lifestyle of the rich in the world is not a sustainable model." Who, exactly, is the rich? Anyone not living in a hut?

The original (misleading) press release can be found here.

The original article can be found here. It also includes a link near the bottom to the video of the interview.