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John Kerry Looks At The Bright Side Of The Recession

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  October 8th, 2009 at 12:45 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

When you’re rich, really eight-figure inherited/married wealth rich, a recession means you might opt for the pre-owned Gulfstream IV over the new. If only to let the little people know that you feel their pain.

When you’re poor, bad times threaten your job, your family, your health, or your life. Bad times hurt people at the margins.

The liberal ruling class displays an astonishingly callous disregard of the human cost of bad economic times on the huddled masses whose interests they claim to safeguard.

But even the most clueless patrician among our elected elite would never suggest that a recession is a good thing.

Would he?

Get this:


John Kerry: If You Enjoyed This Year’s Recession, Just Wait for Cap and Trade

Let me emphasize something very strongly as we begin this discussion. The United States has already this year alone achieved a 6 percent reduction in emissions simply because of the downturn in the economy, so we are effectively saying we need to go another 14 percent. [emphasis added]

So it’s the nebulous value of a speculative decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured as a change in concentration of a few parts per million, versus the tangible certainty of human hunger, pain and privation for millions of Americans.

John Calabrese at the North Star National elaborates:

What did Kerry just unwittingly admit? He admitted that cap-and-trade advocates and like-minded global warming believers see economic prosperity as a huge source of the supposed problem. That’s why they’re proposing the perfect solution – from their perspective – in the form of a massive tax increase directly on industry.

Nothing discourages productive economic activity like confiscatory taxes on said activity. The same people who lament the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States now seek to multiply these losses many times over by making it economically impossible for manufacturers to operate. …

But the recession, hey, that’s working like a dream. Carbon emissions are down 6 percent. Damn. How many more big industrial conglomerates do we have to put out of business to get to 20 percent?

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  • Achance
    • The_Gadfly

      But we’re not supposed to say things like that where tender ears might hear them.

    • blooch

      http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/menu/fstack/can_i_get_me_a_hunting_license_here.guest.html

  • http://www.redstate.com/tnjim TNJim
  • redpens

    Why do you people insist on re-electing this out of touch elitist snob? He knows nothing about what regular people endure on a daily basis.
    Please retire him to his Gulf Stream jet when Sen. Lurch is up for re-election.

    • http://hillbillypolitics.com Steph C

      I’d opine that it was to keep him out of their hair.

  • http://www.suvstrategery.blogspot.com SoFiMil

    Vlad, can you give us some back-of-the-envelope numbers for what would happen to the U.S. (and world) economy if the U.S. should decrease emissions by an additional 70% to achieve Kerry’s utopia?

    • Vladimir

      The #1 industry, if we did that, would be “foraging”. The #1 energy source would be cow flops, and I can’t find those statistics on Google.

      • Next93

        It appears that the majority of “green jobs” to come about so far is the creation of statistics pulled directly from one’s posterior.

        For example, can someone tell me how every person on an airliner has a carbon footprint of “tons”, when the aircraft itself carries at best one ton of fuel?

        These people are worse than Muslim fundamentalists (who have a tendancy to slip the decimal point one or two places to thier favor). I don’t trust a single number they put out anymore.

        • yoyo

          Depending on the aircraft:

          I am intimately familiar with F-14′s and S-3′s [Navy aircraft] and I know that the F-14 carried ~ 18,000 lbs of fuel topped off (9 tons) and the S-3 carried ~ 17,000 lbs topped off (8.5 tons).

          I would garner that an A-319/320 or a 737-600 would carry a lot more than either of the F-14 or S-3.

          I am not disagreeing with your premise (that the statistics are bunk); only that the weight of fuel carried is a lot more than you thought.

        • The_Gadfly

          Remember the plane only has to carry the fuel, not the oxidizer which it pulls from the atmosphere. This is one of the reasons the fuel requirements for space shots go up so quickly; they have to carry both fuel and oxidizer.

          According to Boeing a 747 carries either 48,445 or 52,410 U.S. gal (183,380 L) of fuel. A completely accurate calculation requires knowing specific gravities determined experimentally and depends on batch processing, temperature and fuel type. Searching Google for a back of the envelope calculation I found this which seems to agree reasonably closely with a couple of other places I looked. So depending on fuel type we have 290670, 331363.8, 314460, and 358484.4 pounds of fuel for options. Using a weight converter (I didn’t recall the conversion factor and found this searching Google) we get 131.85, 150.3, 142.64, 162.61. But we’re not quite done yet. The atomic weight of carbon is 12.0107 and the atomic weight of oxygen is 15.9994. Which gives us a maximum output of 483.12, 550.73, 522.66, and 595.83 tons if we assume all of the fuel is carbon, which it is not. Working through the various passenger configurations and you wind up at maximum productions of between 1.05 and 1.63 tons per passenger. A Google search for direct conversions without the math shows a typical conversion rate of about 3 pounds of CO2 per pound of jet fuel, which accounts for water being the other primary output of the oxidation reaction. Using the higher 3.1 pound rate I saw in the Google blurbs the worst case tonnage is 0.89 to 1.38 tons per person, assuming all the fuel is burned on the trip.

          So while the plural is wrong, about 1 ton of CO2 per passenger looks reasonable as a rule of thumb. The real issue isn’t so much whether the math is correct on these sorts of easily checked calculations, it is whether or not the models they use to predict the catastrophic warming have accounted for all of the feedback loops, including the ones that mitigate warming.

      • blooch

        They produce too much methane, anyway.

  • http://www.nighttwister.com NightTwister

    who live at the margins all over the country continue to vote for people like John Kerry, believing that this time they’ll do something to get them out of the ghetto. It’s kinda like this…

  • onlyme

    In John Kerry’s own words:

    “Let me emphasize something very strongly as we begin this discussion. The United States has already this year alone achieved a 6 percent reduction in emissions simply because of the downturn in the economy, so we are effectively saying we need to go another 14 percent.?”

    Yes, that is Kerry sayin in effect, we have reduced emissions by 6% and it has only cost 3.6% of the nations workforce losing their jobs in the past year so we only need to lose another 2.33 times that number of jobs to hit 20% reduction.

    Yay for the US.

    Maybe we can lose 20% MORE jobs and reduce CO2 emissions by 30%!!