I don’t know who disgusts me more — Sen. Graham, or the oil companies. Senators consider gasoline tax as part of climate bill Estimates put it in the range of 15 cents a gallon. Some oil companies are on board with the plan because it would cost them far less than other proposals to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Leading voices in the Senate are considering | Read More »
If you invent a new currency, don’t be surprised when the scammers and counterfeiters show up. Especially when your currency is itself a scam. Hackers Steal Millions in Carbon Credits The hackers launched a targeted phishing attack against employees of numerous companies in Europe, New Zealand and Japan, which appeared to come from the German Emissions Trading Authority. The workers were told that their companies | Read More »
If you can’t understand conceptually why a Cap and Trade system is such a bad deal, how about a concrete example? The European Union is a signatory of the Kyoto Protocols and have been dealing with a Carbon Cap and Trade system for several years. This article in today’s Wall Street Journal shows how the potential profit from the sale of carbon credits directly led | Read More »
An article in the Oil and Gas Journal reveals the thinking processes of some of our leaders on Capitol Hill. And it’s not a pretty sight. Speaking at a forum on energy and climate policy co-sponsored by Newsweek magazine and the American Petroleum Institute, Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA), Chair of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, and co-author of the Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade Bill | Read More »
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 | Read More »
Last week, President Obama received a letter from ten Senators, most of them liberals and all of them Democrats, who are looking for reassurance that the Cap and Trade legislation pending in the Senate contains language “to ensure that manufacturers do not bear the brunt of our climate change policy.” That’s interesting. We’ve been reassured that Cap and Trade has been designed by the Smartest | Read More »
H/T Cooler Heads Digest, Competitive Enterprise Institute An article in the USA Today Science Fair blog highlights a study published online in Nature Geoscience. Researchers from Rice University, UC-Santa Cruz and the University of Hawaii at Manoa dare to challenge the State Religion scientific dogma (now there’s an oxymoron for you) that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere alone is sufficient to predict | Read More »
With all due respect, it’s not news that Cap and Trade is a tax on energy. Its proponents have never advanced an argument that it proposes to do anything for the environment or global climate. Cap and Trade is insidious because it creates a new entitlement, so once it’s in place it will be next to impossible to kill. If it were just a tax, | Read More »
The Minerals Management Service (MMS), the Department of the Interior agency charged with regulating offshore oil and gas production, notified operators this week that it has been using European Space Agency (ESA) satellite images to spot night time flares in the Gulf of Mexico for the last three years. Flaring of natural gas in small quantities is sometimes necessary for testing new wells (subject to | Read More »
Buried in the 900-odd pages of legislation promoted by Messrs. Waxman and Markey (official name: The Let’s-Hogtie-the-American-Economy-and-Throw-It-In-the-Ditch Act of 2009) is language that would cede control of local building codes to the Department of Energy if states and municipalities fail to meet draconian goals to cut carbon emissions in the future. (See the Washington Post editorial quoted below.) Let’s do a quick accounting of the | Read More »
No, it’s not the American Petroleum Institute, the American Coal Council or some right-wing think tank. Or even Francis Cianfrocca. It’s the Friends of the Earth. The Friends of the Freakin’ Earth. You won’t find me quoting them often. But in a March report titled Subprime Carbon: Re-thinking the World’s Largest New Derivatives Market, Michelle Chan with the FOE does a fine job of laying | Read More »
H/T Cooler Heads Digest, The Competitive Enterprise Institute General Electric Corporation has strategically positioned itself to be a prime beneficiary of The New Green Economy, under Obama’s Prime Directive #1. As Timothy Carney points out in a washingtonexaminer.com opinion piece, not only does GE own the manufacturing technologies (high tech batteries and windmills) to benefit from the Big Green Push, it is positioning to make | Read More »
On my last diary, Congress Invents New Funny Money, Intrepid RedStater izoneguy commented: The states need to fight cap & trade if it gets passed. Last Friday, Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) of Indiana shared his thoughts on Cap-and-Trade in an editorial in The Wall Street Journal. Hint: He doesn’t like it much. Indiana Says ‘No Thanks’ to Cap and Trade Quite simply, it looks like | Read More »
The Constitution authorizes the Congress to coin money and to regulate its value. Hypothetically, if Congress wanted to, it could create an alternative to traditional greenbacks. Such a currency could enable off-balance sheet financing and circumvent the President’s budgeting process. As such, it would be invaluable as a way to get recalcitrant politicians, states and industries to go along with Congress’s bidding, without running into | Read More »
Remember Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, with the “ask the audience” lifeline? Better yet, have you read The Wisdom of Crowds? A new Rasmussen poll will make you rethink all that wisdom-of-crowds business. Given a choice of three options, just 24% of voters can correctly identify the cap-and-trade proposal as something that deals with environmental issues. A slightly higher number (29%) believe the proposal | Read More »
In a Tuesday afternoon conference call with Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA1), the congressman revealed that just this afternoon, the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade Tax Bill was pulled from consideration by the Energy Subcommittee. It will be referred to the full Energy and Commerce Committee. This move comes after three weeks of Subcommittee hearings on the bill. According to Rep. Scalise, Chairman Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) met with key | Read More »
The EPA, in a Friday announcement, declared that six “greenhouse gases”, including carbon dioxide, are “pollutants” worthy of regulation. Quoth Bruce Niles, a Sierra Clubber at HuffPo (find it yourself, if you’re that interested): “Under the Clean Air Act, EPA is now obligated to issue rules regulating global warming pollution from all major sources, including cars and coal-fired power plants. The law specifically states that | Read More »
Sometimes oil men and energy executives are a big disappointment. When times are good, they talk a good game about being free marketeers, “Just get out of our way; drill, baby, drill!” But when Washington starts passing out free money, they’re fighting like pigs at a trough for their more-than-fair share. You can bet, when they start suggesting government policy, they have an angle.
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