England’s Day of Royal Excess would not be complete without green indulgence. That gorgeous ‘69 Aston Martin that Will & Kate drove off in at the end the day runs on wine.
That’s right, wine.
Like his rich green mates stateside, Papa Charles uses the public dole to play out his green fantasies, including an expensive conversion of his beloved Aston to run on surplus wine. Like recycled cans at a Goracle rock concert, the Aston was a green tassel on the Royal Wedding’s giant carbon footprint. Daddy gave William his car for the day — and who knows, maybe it ran on champagne for the special occasion.
Via Hot Air, that’s the headline of a post by the smart folks at ThinkProgress — illustrating once again that some people will politicize about anything, even the death of 267-plus Americans:
The congressional delegations of these states — Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, and Kentucky — overwhelmingly voted to reject the science that polluting the climate is dangerous. They are deliberately ignoring the warnings from scientists.
For the rest of our lives, every time a natural disaster strikes anyone, anywhere, conservatives who support lower taxes or less intrusive government will be faulted. (You know, even if all Southern representatives believed in anthropogenic global warming theory, you hope they’d vote against lefty environmental policy simply because it’s far more destructive than global warming ever could be.)
US meteorologists warned Thursday it would be a mistake to blame climate change for a seeming increase in tornadoes in the wake of deadly storms that have ripped through the US south.
“If you look at the past 60 years of data, the number of tornadoes is increasing significantly, but it’s agreed upon by the tornado community that it’s not a real increase,” said Grady Dixon, assistant professor of meteorology and climatology at Mississippi State University.
“It’s having to do with better (weather tracking) technology, more population, the fact that the population is better educated and more aware. So we’re seeing them more often,” Dixon said.
But he said it would be “a terrible mistake” to relate the up-tick to climate change.
[. . .]
Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), also dismissed Thursday climate change as a factor in the deadly tornadoes: “Actually what we’re seeing is springtime,” he said.
“Many people think of Oklahoma as ‘Tornado Alley’ and forget that the southeast United States actually has a history of longer and more powerful tornadoes that stay on the ground longer.”
Wednesday’s deadly tornadoes, according to Imy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were unusual for being “long track,” meaning they were on the ground for a longer period of time than usual — in this case, roiling across the land for 30 miles (48 kilometers) or more.
An average track would be less than five miles, said Imy.
However, the stronger-than-usual tornadoes affecting the southern states were actually predicted from examining the planet’s climatological patterns, specifically those related to the La Nina phenomenon.
“We knew it was going to be a big tornado year,” he said. But the key to that tip-off was unrelated to climate change: “It is related to the natural fluctuations of the planet.”
The big day has arrived: it’s a national holiday in the UK and everyone has either fled the country or is watching it on the telly. It seems churlish to complain about the carbon footprint of the wedding, but someone has to do it…
Actually, a number of people have done it and come up with the conclusion that the one day will cause 12 times more carbon emissions than a whole year at the Palace. Blame it on the Beckhams… and all the other international celebrities and Royals flying in for the event.
Landcare Research, a New Zealand think tank has been hard at work calculating the impact of the wedding. The biggest offenders are all the foreign Royals and celebrities and tourists flying into London. A quarter of the 1,900 guests will come from abroad.
Got that? I can’t use a regular light bulb, but the “green” Prince of Wales can destroy the planet? It’s good to almost be king, I guess.
We’re told time and time and time again how great a crisis we’re causing with carbon emission, yet whenever the someone who’s telling me it’s a crisis has an opportunity to act like there’s a crisis, they punt.
(Reuters) – A federal judge on Friday ruled that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers can blow up a Mississippi River levee, which would flood Missouri farmland but prevent flooding an Illinois town.
U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr. ruled that the Corps had the right to breach the levee to prevent flooding in Cairo, Illinois, as permitted by a 1928 law.
The levee breach would flood 130,000 acres of Missouri farmland, which contains about 90 homes. Missouri had filed suit to prevent the Corps from carrying out its plan.
Limbaugh wrote that he found that the Corps is committed to implementing the plan only as essential to provide protection to all citizens. He wrote “this Court finds that no aspect of the Corps’ response to these historic floods suggests arbitrary or capricious decision-making is occurring.”
The Corps plans to decide this weekend whether to blow up the Birds Point levee, depending on the level of the water on the river. It will detonate explosives in the levee if the Cairo river reaches 61 feet. At 8 a.m. CDT (1300 GMT) on Friday, it was at 59 feet and forecast to rise to 60.5 feet, according to the National Weather Service.
Dan Andros has a great post over on Glenn Beck’s The Blaze on New Jersey’s solar-power mandate. It’s a controversial piece as he uses long division and multiplication to prove his point, something that seems to have proven too complex for New Jersey’s enviros. An excerpt:
People are already voicing extreme displeasure at these ‘eyesores’ popping up around the community. Not only are they ugly, they are expensive. This from the New York Times:
“The solar installations, the first and most extensive of their kind in the country, are part of a $515 million investment in solar projects by PSE&G under a state mandate that by 2021 power providers get 23 percent of their electricity from renewable sources.”
Got it? The utility company is being forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to meet a stupid mandate. But, you say, what about all the savings! Ah yes, the savings.
“When complete, this project is expected to provide half of the 80 megawatts of electricity needed to power 6,500 homes.”
Impressive, half the power for 6,500 homes. That’s ALL of the power for 3250 homes. Let’s do something the environmentalists hope you never do: the math.
$515 million dollars was spent to eventually power 3250 homes. That means approx $158,000 was spent per home. The average electric bill in the United States is approx $105 a month, or $1260 a year. See where this is going? It’s going to take a long, long time – 125 years to be exact – to break even on this wonderful green project. And the panels only have a lifespan of about 25-30 years so they will need to be replaced long before the money is recouped.
Predictably, the utility company is already beginning to pass the costs on to consumers
“PSE&G officials said solar energy was still more expensive to produce than more traditional power sources and acknowledged that bills were going up 29 cents a month. Each panel produces 220 watts of power, enough to brighten about four 60-watt light bulbs for about six weeks.”
And the best news for last — the solar panels will only produce barely 1% of the state’s electricity. So they only have to repeat THIS disaster 22 more times and the mandate is met!
Ready-made energy incoherence as a gallon climbs towards $4.
Man-at-the-pump angst is harming President Obama politically almost as much as gas prices surging toward $4 are hurting the middle class economically, which explains the energy panic that Washington began in earnest this week. The 2011 debate isn’t likely to be any more instructive than its 2000, 2005, 2006 or 2008 vintages, but maybe this time politicians can keep things in the general vicinity of planet earth.
They’re off to a lousy start. Mr. Obama usually begins his gas price narrative, now a campaign trail staple, by explaining that there aren’t easy solutions. That’s true—there’s not a lot the political class can do to change gas prices in the short run—but then the President goes on to mention that there happens to be one easy solution: raising taxes on the oil and gas industry. This is also his stock answer on the budget deficit, world hunger and everything else.
In a letter to Congressional leaders Tuesday, Mr. Obama called for repealing some $4 billion a year in “subsidies” in the tax code, and even Speaker John Boehner chimed in that oil companies “ought to be paying their fair share.” No doubt the reporting of first-quarter profits this week will be a demagogic moment, but really? The junk economic theory is that increasing the U.S. costs of investor-owned oil producers—which together hold a mere 6% of world reserves—is supposed to lower the price of a global commodity.
Oh, and Mr. Obama wants to devote the proceeds to even more spending on “clean energy.” The problem here is that some renewables (ethanol) increase the cost of driving, while the others (wind, solar) are irrelevant in transportation. We trust anyone not recharging his federally subsidized $109,000 electric sportscar at his personal windmill is blinking in amazement.
David Harsanyi, from his new home at The Blaze, writes:
Finally. It‘s about time the administration began taking on the ogres of the left’s imagination seriously. Attorney General Eric Holder has formed the “Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group to Focus on Energy Markets” to expose the speculators, the gougers and those fat cat millionaires. And if we can’t confront make-believe distractions with “working groups,” well, we are surely a nation in decline.
But of course, Holder will find the biggest frauds right in his administration, which — as a matter of policy, as a matter of faith — believes the price of fossil fuels ought to be extortionate and has done all it can to ensure it.
The left’s “energy” initiatives of the past decade — the entire purpose of energy policy, in fact — have been aimed at artificially driving fossil fuel prices up to incentivize the bitter clingers to embrace the government’s Utopian energy schemes. No secret has been made of it. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama was asked by CNBC’s John Harwood, “So could the (high) oil prices help us?” Obama: “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment.” Sudden spikes are bad (politically speaking), but gradual price spikes? Helpful. That same year, current U.S. “Energy” Secretary (then just a zany professor) Steven Chu clarified that “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
Who says this administration doesn’t get things done?
What we need are clean energy investments, properly inflated tires, Chinese-style rail systems — all free of the distraction of capitalism. Also, we must rid the nation of oil subsidies. This I completely support, as long as the funds are reinvested into projects beneficial for the struggling American worker, say, bike paths or public service announcements.
We all, you see, have to make adjustments. As President Obama explained, “if you‘re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon … you might want to think about a trade-in.” What kind of trade-in, sir? Let me guess. A $41,000 economy-class government-made Chevy vehicle (a real cost of 100K-plus without taxpayer support) that plugs into expensive government-subsidized energy produced by the sweet howling wind? Yes, these are the serious people.
When oil prices blew sky high in 2008, ExxonMobil paid $36.5 billion in income taxes, $34.5 billion in sales taxes, and $45 billion in other taxes, for a total of $116.2 billion in taxes paid and collected in 2008. That’s according to Mark Perry at the Carpe Diem blog.
Exxon will report earnings later this week. And while oil prices aren’t quite as high today as they were three years ago, it’s all a bit like 2008.
I read somewhere that either Exxon or the whole oil industry pays more in taxes than the bottom 50 percent of the whole income-tax system. So while president Obama is out there ragging on oil companies to remove so-called tax subsidies, it’s odd that he doesn’t mention how much in taxes the energy firms actually pay to Uncle Sam.
There’s a laundry list of tax credits that go to oil, both large and small firms. Basically, these tax credits allow for the expensing of high-risk investment. That’s what this is about.
Of course, if you really wanted to stop expensive subsidies, you’d kill the ethanol subsidies that have a big carbon footprint and drive corn and wheat prices sky high. But the liberal-left progressives hate oil and gas companies, period. That’s really what all this is about.
Ironically, besides the usual plea for wind, solar, and biofuels — which amount to virtually nothing in terms of our energy use — the president does include natural gas. But natural gas is produced by oil and gas companies. And you have to drill for it. Therefore, oil expenses in the whole drilling process — including leases, permits, geology research, and dry holes, and then drilling, producing, lifting, and ultimately refining for sale — should be 100 percent expensed.
So it would be great if the president understood that you have to drill for natural gas. It also would be great if the president and his pals, instead of harping on a measly $4 billion a year in so-called subsidies (compare that with a $1.5 trillion deficit), focused on real pro-growth corporate-tax reform that drops the rates and includes permanent 100 percent expensing.
The Corner 'Deeper Than Politics'
The president's remarks from tonight's congressional dinner:
Obviously we’ve all had disagreements and differences in the past. I suspect we’ll have . . .Go
The Agenda Stray Links for 02 May 2011
* Matthew Rognile is blogging again. Here he is on the liquidity trap and finding effective targets for stabilizing economic . . .Go
The Feed First Shave Since 9/11
A middle school teacher vowed after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, that he would not shave his beard . . .Go
Exchequer Why Didn't I Think of That?
Hey, forget about all that budget-balancing stuff I've been writing about: All we really need is a historically atypical high . . .Go
