Category Archives: energy

A Carbon Tax Proposal

Posted on by
Reply

No less a pair of lights than George Shultz and James Baker III have one regarding atmospheric carbon emissions.  They’re prefacing their case on their then-boss, President Ronald Reagan’s successful negotiation of the Montreal Protocol to rein in the failures of atmospheric CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer.  Not that the two have anything to do with each other, but it makes for good obfuscation.

Shultz and Baker have four “pillars” to their proposal:

First, creating a gradually increasing carbon tax. Second, returning the tax proceeds to the American people in the form of dividends. Third, establishing border carbon adjustments that protect American competitiveness and encourage other countries to follow suit. And fourth, rolling back government regulations once such a system is in place.

Their first pillar echoes ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) promise to let electricity generators use all the coal they wanted; Obama’s policies just would put them out of business.  No carbon emissions. Period.  Never mind that there’s very little need to reduce carbon emissions.  Atmospheric CO2 used to generate acid rain, but that pollution is long since reduced to the point of elimination.  Beyond that, the EPA’s pseudo-science “finding” notwithstanding, atmospheric CO2 is plant food, not a pollutant.  We eliminate that plant food at risk.

Return the tax proceeds to us as dividends?  That’s just wealth redistribution by government fiat.  Haven’t we had enough of Progressive redistribution failure already?  Not to mention the cynically internally illogical mechanism for the redistribution.

A $40-per-ton carbon tax would provide a family of four with roughly $2,000 in carbon dividends in the first year, an amount that could grow over time as the carbon tax rate increased.

How could the dividend grow—isn’t the tax supposed to reduce emissions significantly?

Border carbon adjustments?  Pit importers against exporters again.  That’s the outcome of the existing border adjustment tax being proposed in the House today.

Roll back the regulations once “such a system is in place?”  Really?  Can Shultz or Baker name two programs that have been rolled back once they’ve been enacted?  They’re not that naïve.

This is just more Progressive foolishness, now being spouted by two fine gentlemen who’re past their age of usefulness.

Is It 20 January Yet?

Posted on by
Reply

It’s always someone else’s fault with these Democrats.

At a final press conference in Washington, DC Thursday….

Kerry disagreed with the narrative that Obama failed to enforce the red line, however, saying the president did intend to act—but was steered off course after the British Parliament narrowly voted against bombing Syria in August 2013.

The motorboat skipper said this:

The president of the United States of America, Barack Obama, did decide to use force. And he announced his decision publicly and said we’re going to act, we’re going to do what we need to do to respond to this blatant violation of international law and of warnings and of the red line he had chosen[.]

Now, we were marching towards that time when, lo and behold…before the Friday decision, Prime Minister David Cameron went to Parliament…and he sought a vote of approval for him to join in the action that we were going to engage in. And guess what? The Parliament voted no. They shot him down.

They shot him down.  !?  It’s the Brits’ fault?  No, not a bit of it.  President-On-The-Way-Out Barack Obama (D) and his motorboat pilot were too timid to act on their own.  Obama and Kerry were so used to popping off that they never thought they’d actually be expected to honor their commitment, and so when al Assad called their bluff, they cut and ran for their desk bottoms.  (Would it have helped if James Taylor had sung, in the Rose Garden, about having a friend?)

Say, though, arguendo, that the Parliament vote was somehow legitimately influential in getting Obama to walk away from his proudly announced red line.  The outcome remains: Obama failed to enforce the red line.  Full stop.

Nile Gardiner, Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom Director, had this:

[Kerry’s remarks are] a reflection of a broader disdain for Britain that runs through the Obama presidency[.]

No, it’s much worse and much broader than that.  How despicable can one administration be?

Of Course It Is

Posted on by
Reply

Now that the Obama administration’s end is near, and a new guy is being put forward to run Obama’s EPA, that agency is changing its mind about the impact of fracking.

Fracking can affect drinking water supplies in certain circumstances….

The report, written by Environmental Protection Agency scientists, includes findings that are more open-ended than those in a draft version last year, when the agency said fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, isn’t having “widespread, systematic impacts on drinking water.”

When pressed on the “updated” report, which contradicts that earlier draft, EPA Deputy Assistant Administrator Thomas Burke conceded the draft’s prior conclusion that only a small number of cases of contamination had been found—even though that was left out of this later iteration of the report.

While the number of identified cases of drinking water contamination is small, the scientific evidence is insufficient to support estimates of the frequency of contamination[.]

Even the identified instances of contamination—surface spills of fracking fluids or poorly done cement casing of a wells—have little to do with fracking, but are failures to execute.

Of course this drives the conclusion that when you can’t find the needle in the haystack, you don’t have enough evidence to say that there aren’t many needles in the haystack.  That’s some science the EPA has there.

Keep in mind, too, that this is same agency whose pseudo-science concluded that plant food—atmospheric CO2—is a pollutant.

Apparently rigorous thinking was outside of these guys’ school safe spaces.

Why Trump Needs To Stop Ditching The Press Pool

Posted on by
Reply

At least that’s what Juan Williams thinks in his Fox News piece last Thursday.  He’s far from the only pressman who thinks so, too.

It seems that President-elect Donald Trump was rude enough to want to have dinner out with a few folks without the madding crowd of papparazi and other reporters hanging over their shoulders.  So he and his group evaded the press pool that was following him around.

“THERE’S GUNFIRE—WE’RE MOVING THE PRESIDENT.”

I heard those scary words from a Secret Service agent on October 23, 1983. I was covering President Reagan for The Washington Post and happened to be near the tiny group of journalists—the so-called “presidential press pool,” as he attended the Master’s golf tournament.

Then, as the president was leaving the Augusta National Golf Club the news broke that 241 American servicemen had been killed when terrorists bombed the US Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.

Those were chaotic moments.

Those were the chaotic paragraphs with which Williams opened his screed over Trump’s presuming to decline to not cater to the self-important press.  This sort of thing is an outlier, too, and unlikely to be missed just because a President wants a (relatively) quiet dinner on the town.

Similarly, Trump did not take a press pool with him when he went to the White House last week for his first sit-down with President Obama. He did not have reporters on the plane he used during the campaign.

How rude!  He didn’t bring a gaggle with him to a business meeting.  Cluck, cluck.

These pressmen choose not to consider factors involved in Trump’s decision to ditch the press so he and his family could enjoy a steak dinner, to take one of these plaints.  Personal, individual decisions (which don’t matter to the NLMSM, since they don’t see Americans as individuals, they only see us as either cookie cutter, interchangeable, correct consumers of their stuff or as cookie cutter, interchangeable racists and homophobes who disagree with them), like other folks wanting to go to a restaurant to enjoy a steak dinner.

Now, when a President wants to go anywhere—a steakhouse, let’s say—he unavoidably must be accompanied by his Secret Service protection detail.  These additional six men and women (to pick a number for discussion’s sake) are going to take up space in that restaurant, but that’s unavoidable, and these men and women know how to be discrete and unobtrusive—that’s part of their protection job.

But the press?  They’re crowding around asking questions—loudly, so as to be heard above their fellows—pushing microphones and cameras aggressively, so as to get the audio and the video.  It’s their job to be heard and to be as disruptive as necessary in order to get their question(s) to be the one the President answers.  They’ll even try to get “reaction” shots and questions asked of the other patrons in that restaurant.  And that’s enormously disruptive, to the restaurant, to those other diners trying to enjoy their steak dinners, even to the passersby on the sidewalk outside.

Do the pressmen care?  Not a bit.  These self-important ones care only about their stories and their bylines.

Don’t ditch the press all the time, Mr President.  But unhesitatingly ditch them on occasion when you want to be out and about and don’t want to interfere with the doings of others who also want to be out and about and happen to be near you at the time.