Tag Archives: energy

People Like Me

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President Joe Biden’s Climate MFWIC, John Kerry, traveled to Iceland to accept an Arctic Circle award for his climate “leadership.” Of course, Kerry traveled by flying in his private jet (which has a much larger per-passenger carbon footprint than a commercial jet, but we won’t mention that).

An Icelandic journalist, Jóhann Bjarni Kolbeinsson, asked him how that works. Kerry said,

If you offset your carbon—it’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.
I negotiated the Paris Accords for the United States.
I’ve been involved with this fight for years. I negotiated with President Xi to bring President Xi to the table so we could get Paris.

Of course. “I’m so special. I negotiated all this cool, yet vapid, stuff. I even got Xi to think about doing something decades into the future so we could get to the emptiness of Paris.

“Did I mention that I’m also rich enough to afford the carbon indulgences, unlike the little people—don’t they look like ants from my jet’s altitude?”

He’s so self-importantly oblivious, too, that he can’t conceive of spending his precious time in a commercial passenger jet. ‘Course, he’d be cooped up with so many of those ants.

I wonder if he invited James Taylor along on any of his private jet travels.

Good Union Jobs

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But not good enough for President Joe Biden (D).  Recall that Biden ran on “good union jobs,” among other causes, and that phrase—”good union jobs”—became so ubiquitous in his speeches as to resemble a tic.

But not all union jobs—labor is another area where Progressive-Democrats choose winners and losers. When Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline, he killed roughly 11,000 good union construction, construction-related, and ancillary jobs. No matter: Progressive-Democrats, led by Biden, don’t approve of those jobs.

And that doesn’t begin to address the job losses in Canada, jobs that depended on both the pipeline construction and on the subsequent flow of oil.

Reusable Grocery Bags

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…and reusable shopping bags, generally. These are supposedly better for our environment than nominally single-use plastic or paper bags (though both, until they wear out, can serve other purposes than holding food or other goods—usually two or three reuses until they’re truly ready for the trash or the recycling bin).

The serious questions, though, and ones that have been missed until the current COVID-19 situation has exposed them empirically, are:

For whose environment, exactly, are reusable shopping bags better?

Who, exactly, are the ones doing the reusing?

The answer to the first is…germs.

The answer to the second is…germs.

And today, the threat to us short-sighted humans is COVID-19, right along with our old foes, bacteria. CDC has said that COVID-19 can remain viable on a large variety of surfaces for hours to days—surfaces like the burlap or canvas of some reusable bags—and especially on the plastic linings of many more reusable bags.

Researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University surveyed grocery shoppers and randomly tested their reusable bags. “Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half,” they wrote in their 2011 study….

And this datum:

In 2013 millions of American piglets died amid an outbreak of novel swine enteric coronavirus disease, and after an investigation the US Department of Agriculture concluded that reusable feed totes were the most likely root cause.

This has been a problem of which we’ve been aware for some years.  And yet….

Does anyone really think these reusables aren’t harboring today’s COVID-19? Or the bug du jour of tomorrow’s outbreak?

Reusable bags have become strongly illustrative of unintended consequence.

Carbon-Free Energy

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To the (very limited) extent such a thing would be useful.  Robert Dyson, in his Letter to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal is on the right track:

It’s worth pointing out that the 7,100 acre (11 square mile) Gemini Solar Project is rated at 690 megawatts (when the sun shines, of course) whereas only a few miles away sits the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, occupying only 12 acres and producing 3.3 times as much electricity, but on a 24/7 basis. That nuclear plant currently produces almost a quarter of all the carbon-free power generated in California, yet it will be closed in five years, largely due to the expense of fighting the same “greens” who oppose Gemini. The main argument against Diablo Canyon seems to be earthquake risk. However, the Fukushima Daichi nuclear disaster in 2011 included a magnitude 9-plus earthquake that didn’t cause any radiation leaks. The leaks resulted from a 40-foot-high tsunami, for which there was no planned defense. Despite the resulting meltdown, only one death was attributed to radiation and now, only nine years later, the surrounding land is fast approaching full utilization again.
If carbon-free power generation is important, logic would point to the necessity of nuclear power, not 11-square-mile solar installations.

There’s also our own Three Mile Island incident, in a different extremity, as an indication of the safety of nuclear power generators.

Plus, we have that Harry M Reid Memorial Nuclear Waste Repository nearly ready to go.

“Clean” Cars

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That’s what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) wants Government to subsidize.  He’s proposing Government spend $462 billion to pay Americans trading in our gasoline-powered cars for electric ones.  He wants to drop $17 billion on subsidies for auto manufacturers to “help” them build more electric cars along with batteries and associated parts, and $45 billion on charging stations and associated “infrastructure.”

In addition to ignoring where this money is supposed to come from, he’s also misleading on the “clean” electric car bit.  He knows, after all, where the electricity must come from to charge those batteries, whether at home or at his charging stations.

That electricity is generated by coal-, oil-, and gas-fired generating plants.  In New York, where Schumer’s fellow Progressive-Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo has banned fracking and additional gas infrastructure, those generating plants can’t use clean gas to produce electricity for Schumer’s cars: those plants are dependent on coal and oil fuel: Schumer’s electric cars will have even larger carbon footprints.

“Clean” electric cars, indeed.

This sort of scheme also is an affront to our free market economy and an insult to ordinary Americans’ intelligence.  If electric cars were ready for market, they wouldn’t need government subsidies to be saleable.  If Americans wanted electric cars, we’d buy them in droves on our own, without needing to be bribed into buying them.