President Obama’s Energy Speech at the University of Miami February 23 added more details to his energy thoughts as given by his State Of The Union Speech and 2013 Fiscal Year budget submitted to Congress.
His ideas are based upon curtailing use of fossil fuels, in particular coal, due to fears carbon dioxide produced from combustion cause catastrophic global warming. This is the reason why given for our failed energy policies. Detailed discussions of climate science are too lengthy to be given in this paper.
There is little experimental data to support combustion of fossil fuels play a big part in climate. However, there is a vast amount of data showing the role of carbon dioxide is minor compared to other factors influencing climate such as the sun, earth’s orbit, volcanos, ocean currents (El Nino and La Nina), and clouds. The administration’s actions should be taken as future energy policies for the next four years. Policies implemented and policies ignored will lead to a dismal future for the United States.
The United States has the most abundant fossil fuel reserves in the world, the greatest agriculture system, and the most innovative population which should lead to prosperity for centuries. A few remarks about energy policies follow.
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The USEPA has a problem: the air in the United States keeps getting cleaner and cleaner. Obviously the Agency can’t justify its current level of funding if they say the air is clean enough, no matter how clean it is. The game that the Agency has played on a regular basis is to use its authority under the Clean Air Act to effectively redefine what clean air is. Thus, while the vast majority of the nation has long since met the ambient air quality standards set forth in the original Clean Air Act, the EPA has kept itself in business by continually moving the goalposts farther and farther back.
This behavior isn’t limited to the Obama administration. They did the same thing under Clinton and under Bush II. (The difference being that environmental groups applauded reductions in standards under Clinton, but when Dubya lowered a standard even lower, he was condemned for not going far enough). Under Obama, the EPA has reduced the ambient air quality standards for two common air pollutants: nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide. The former is generated by any form of combustion (cars, trucks, fireplaces, power plants, water heaters, etc.). The latter is primarily generated by coal combustion.
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I’ve written before that President Obama seems shockingly ignorant of
legal principles, including but not limited to constitutional law, surprisingly for a law school instructor who taught that specialty for over a decade.
But according to Victor Davis Hanson, writing this week on National Review Online, it’s not so much that Obama is ignorant about the law but that Obama believes the law is irrelevant. [click to continue…]
Some ideas sound so plausible that they can fail nine times in a row and still be believed the tenth time. Other ideas sound so implausible that they can succeed nine times in a row and still not be believed the tenth time. Government controls in the economy are among the first kinds of ideas and the operations of a free market are among the second kind.
-Thomas Sowell
The Thomas Sowell Reader
In the 2006 State of the Union address, President Bush promised the nation that he will use taxpayer funds to develop cellulosic fuels (fuel made from grass, woodchips, or other plant material) to power our cars by 2012.
In 2007, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her fellow members of Congress were big believers in cellulosic ethanol and subsequently mandated that the following quantities be produced. You might wonder how Congress could do that when no facility, no technology, and no idea how to make commercially viable cellulosic ethanol existed. These facts were apparently brushed aside as unworthy considerations, as is the tendency with facts regarding legislation labeled with the words “energy independence.”
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NOTE: Part One of this series of posts can be found here.
The top one percent of federal income taxpayers paid more than the bottom 95 percent, according to the Tax Foundation in 2009, based on the latest figures (2007) available from the IRS at that time.
Note the trends. The share of taxes paid by the bottom 95 percent has been declining for 20 years. The share paid by the top one percent has been increasing over the same period.
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The headline above was seen a lot in the latter part of the Carter administration. We can only hope that it’s as wrong then as it is now. But we are at a bit of a turning point.
Decline is a choice. Many millions of Americans aren’t yet ready to make that choice … I hope.
From Gideon Rachman at the British Financial Times:
Recently I met a retired British diplomat who claimed with some pride that he was the man who had invented the phrase, “the management of decline”, to describe the central task of British foreign policy after 1945. “I got criticised,” he said, “but I think it was an accurate description of our task and I think we did it pretty well.”
No modern American diplomat – let alone politician – could ever risk making a similar statement. That is a shame. If America were able openly to acknowledge that its global power is in decline, it would be much easier to have a rational debate about what to do about it. Denial is not a strategy. [click to continue…]
Of course, Obama says he is for those things, but his actions work against all of them. Ben Franklin said, “Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other.” Obama has learned nothing from the Keynesian experiences of the U.S. or other nations. He hasn’t even been able to learn from the already evident failure of his own Keynesian policies.
For him, it is as though economic history never existed. He fits Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek’s observation that the most orthodox disciples of Keynes have consistently “thrown overboard…all that used to be the backbone of economic theory, and in consequence, in my opinion, to have ceased to understand any economics.”
Obama claims we need a $447 billion spending bill to create jobs and stimulate the economy. He has learned nothing from the results of his earlier $800+ billion stimulus. It and other federal spending produced a massive increase in the money supply, as shown here, yet were ineffective in stimulating the economy or job growth. Unemployment remains stubbornly at 9 percent. [click to continue…]
According to conventional wisdom, Solyndra, Inc. failed because of recent, unforeseen competition from Chinese solar companies with vast government subsidies.
Or because the Obama administration rushed through its approval of the Solyndra $535 million loan guarantee to reward an Obama campaign contributor.
Or because Solyndra misrepresented its financial position to the feds.
These explanations may be entirely true or partly true. Whatever.
But there’s an even more important and frightening explanation not being reported at all. That is the incompetence of the Obama administration. The Obama administration’s incredible, mind-bending incompetence.
Someone should go to jail. Maybe Energy Secretary Chu. [click to continue…]
I just finished listening to President Obama’s jobs speech. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” appears to be his motto. He wants more temporary tax breaks, more targeted tax increases, more politically targeted beneficiaries, more government spending. No failed policy that puts power in the hands of government can fail badly enough to stop Obama from trying it again.
Here are just a few thoughts on the specifics:
1) He laments public school teacher layoffs. Based on this information from education researcher Eric Hanushek writing in Education Week magazine last year, maybe we should lay off many more teachers: “Reporting about projected teacher pink slips is an annual game, dating back well before the current recession. Little note is made, however, when teacher employment actually continues to grow much more rapidly than student enrollment. In the most recent data, for example, we see that student enrollment in 2007 is 22 percent greater than in 1990, but teacher employment is 41 percent greater. Since 2000, the comparable figures are 5 percent for growth in enrollment and 10 percent for teachers.”
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