Quotulatiousness

October 14, 2011

Green beliefs, but brown realities

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:35

Patrick J. Michaels reviews a new book by Todd Myers, Eco-facts:

Just about every organo sacrament withers under Myers’ scrutiny. “Buying local” often means more dreaded greenhouse gas emissions from inefficient short-term shipment compared to the economies of scale when carloads of spuds ride the Burlington Northern Santa Fe across the country. “Certified Organic” means so much paperwork and oversight that mom-and-pop farms (another organo icon) get pushed out by corporate agriculture, which can afford to spend the time and resources satisfying bureaucrats.

Then there are “green jobs.” Solyndra is no outlier; governments are just very bad at picking winners and losers in the energy world. Myers documents the decline and fall of biofuel plants throughout the northwest. Inefficiencies destroy jobs. The Teanaway “Solar Reserve”, supported by an ever-increasing feed of taxpayer dollars, was supposed to be the “world’s largest”, supplying power to a grand total of 45,000 homes. That’s all you get?

John Plaza, CEO of the failed biofuel facility Imperium Renewables (you would think a better name would have helped) thinks it’s all the government’s fault. “What the industry needs,” he said, “is a two-fold support, a mandated floor, and incentives and tax policy to get the outcomes we’re trying for.” In other words, more expensive energy subsidized by you and me, and the government rigging the market. That will create jobs!

What is missing here (and everywhere else) is a comprehensive analysis of how much money the organo fads, follies and delusions cost us. Hopefully that will be in Myers’ next book. The incredible constellation of policy errors, wrongheaded logic and downright stupidity has to be extracting a dear cost from our very sick economy. It’s time to stop this. It’s time for you to read this book.

Harper back-pedals promises to adjust number of seats in the Commons

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:53

Quebec once again demonstrates that you don’t have to have many of your MPs in the government benches to “wag the dog” about representation in the House of Commons:

Fears of a Quebec backlash have delayed the Harper government’s plan to give the growing parts of Canada a larger share of seats in the House of Commons.

As a result, the changes the Tories promised in the spring campaign may not be in place in time for the 2015 election, leaving millions of voters once again underrepresented in Parliament.

The bill to change the way seats are allocated, which would give Ontario an expected 18 additional MPs, British Columbia seven and Alberta five, aims to redress the severe shortage of seats in large and growing urban areas.

But the Conservatives are still grappling with the fact that the change would disadvantage Quebec, which it continues to court despite being virtually shut out there in May. The province has 23 per cent of Canada’s population and 24 per cent of the seats in the House, but its share would fall to 22 per cent under the new formula. The NDP, which achieved a breakthrough there in the election, and many Quebec politicians vehemently oppose the plan.

When will Tuvalu be inundated?

Filed under: Environment, Media, Pacific — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:48

The answer, according to Lorne Gunter is . . . not very soon, if at all:

For nearly a decade now, the tiny Pacific island-group nation of Tuvalu has made news for its government’s claim that the archipelago is being swallowed up by rising sea levels caused by global warming. The island government has even considered suing the world’s largest industrial powers for emitting the carbon dioxide that many scientists believe is trapping solar radiation in the atmosphere and leading to allegedly higher global temperatures. When the highly vaunted UN climate summit in Copenhagen in Dec. 2009 failed to produce a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto accords, the Tuvalu delegation was not shy about expressing its disgust and outrage, claiming that world leaders had consigned them to a slow extermination. (So slow — over 100 years — that almost no current Tuvaluns will live long enough to be killed by the encroaching oceans and their descendents will have plenty of time to row to safety. But let’s not pick nits.)

[. . .]

Two American experts on coastal construction and sea-level — James Houston, director emeritus of engineering research and development for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Robert Dean, professor emeritus of civil and coastal engineering at the University of Florida — examined decades worth of data from all the tidal monitors around the U.S. and determined earlier this year that “worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years.” indeed, the rate at which oceans have been rising has “possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years.”

Houston and Dean are committed warmists. They started their study with the expectation that their results would show rapidly increasing sea levels. Instead, they found that the oceans around the U.S. had risen little in the 20th Century and that the far from rising faster due to global warming were actually rising more slowly. If the trend of the past 80 years continued, the pair estimated that at most worldwide oceans would rise by 15 cms (ankle depth) by 2100, rather than the one to two metres most recently projected by the UN, or the 10 metres estimated by Al Gore.

Jonathan Turley: “President Obama is a perfect nightmare when it comes to civil liberties”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

In an interview at NPR, Jonathan Turley explains that while President Bush was bad news for civil liberties, President Obama has been even worse:

It is a strong language, but I think civil libertarians are coming to grips with what is really a building disaster for our movement, and it’s been a rather difficult process. You know, I have a large civil liberties blog, and there’s a lot of soul-searching among civil libertarians about what exactly happened. But we are engaging in a sense of collective denial when we deal with President Obama.

[. . .]

And I think that’s part of the purpose of this column, is to address the fact that President Obama is a perfect nightmare when it comes to civil liberties. He not only adopted most of President Bush’s policies in the civil liberties areas when it comes to terrorism, but he actually expanded on them. He outdid George Bush.

And they range. His position on torture and refusing to have people investigated or prosecuted for torture, on privacy lawsuits. He pushed aggressively for the dismissal of dozens of lawsuits brought by private interest organizations. He’s for immunity for people who engaged in warrantless surveillance. He has fought standing for people even to be able to get courts to review his programs, much like George Bush. He kept military tribunals and the authority to make the discretionary choice of sending some people to a real court, some people to a military tribunal. He has asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens based solely on his own discretion, that he believes them to be a threat to the country.

His administration has, once again, as with the Bush administration, cited secret law, that — and including a case of assassinating citizens — a law that we’re not allowed to see, but we have to trust them.

[. . .]

They just have a very difficult time opposing a man who’s an icon and has made history — the first black president, but also the guy that replaced George Bush. And the result is something akin to the Stockholm syndrome, where you’ve got this identification with your captor. I mean, the Democratic Party is split, civil libertarians are split, and the Democratic Party itself is now viewed by most of libertarians as very hostile toward civil liberties.

Senators and members of the House, it turns out, were aware of many of these abuses and never informed people.

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