The most anti-industry president we’ve ever seen continues his rampage against success with his inexplicable anti-scientific and draconian cuts to CO2 emissions. Why anyone liberal or otherwise doesn’t have the common sense to see the error of this policy is beyond my understanding. We are violently attacking the very thing which makes us successful — energy. The costs of these policies are so underestimated they are simply lies, the consequences will be negative to the environment and the negative consequences to industry are intended to be dramatic. From here:
By clamping down on power plant emissions, Obama is also working to increase his leverage and credibility with other nations whose commitments he’s seeking for a global climate treaty to be finalized later this year in Paris. As its contribution to that treaty, the U.S. has pledged to cut overall emissions 26 percent to 28 percent by 2025, compared to 2005.
The people who support this policy are comprised of complete idiots, power hungry politicians and anti-industry left-wing radicals who pretend to have knowledge. Some of you read here so if you support this idiocy, you can find your own grouping. Of course all of the pro-government nonsense is funded by theft of our money through unsustainably high government taxes.
The actual price is unknown until states decide how they’ll reach their targets, but the administration has projected the rule would raise electricity prices about 4.9 percent by 2020 and prompt coal-fired power plants to close.
Does 4.9% even begin to pass the smell test for costs created by stopping power generation from combustion – without the introduction of safe clean nuclear power? NO it doesn’t, for those who can’t figure it out. You need to be an idiot to believe that it might but plenty will ‘feel’ exactly that. Rocks and feelings do not make good decision engines.
I’m not alone in this, America just does not have enough thinkers anymore to see clearly and overwhelm the political nonsense.
the Air Vent 
You are right, Jeff.
This is yet another reminder of the blinding arrogance of those who ignore the great fountain of energy Copernicus discovered at the gravitational center of the solar system in 1543: The pulsar remains of the supernova that made our elements and birthed the solar system five billion years (5 Ga) ago, . . .
the creator, destroyer and sustainer of every atom, life and planet in the solar system today!
Arrogant leaders of religious and scientific organizations do not like to admit there is a Higher Power that rules the solar system and sustains their lives.
Ok guys, Solar crap aside, we need money to be green. It is a critical point that the enviro socialists never pay attention to. People with money, can afford not to burn dung or run unfiltered coal plants. People without money cannot. Fixing industry so that it has little power or money is the opposite of what ‘green’ thinkers should be doing. Reducing economic output is a huge mistake. They imagine this brown trashed world where everything is industry but the opposite is true. Modern countries have proven that without question across the globe, of course they have also proven that capitalist societies have greater economic opportunity for the poorest (and generally lowest ability people), but that is also ignored.
I am extremely grateful to you for distributing the Climategate emails in late Nov 2009, Jeff, because the scientific revolution was
1. Almost aborted at birth, following Copernicus 1543 death.
2. Effectively aborted when nations were united on 24 Oct 1945
3. Given another chance by release of Climategate emails in 2009
Peter Toth, Carl Rouse, Paul Kazuo Kuroda and Fred Hoyle are four scientists who recognized and reported errors in the 97%-consensus model of a H-filled Sun.
You seem to be missing the leftard point. Destroying the economy and the social structures are exactly what is desired so they can REMAKE the world in the image they hallucinate on bong hits with shrooms.
It isn’t going to end pretty. There is simply too much stupid in the world these days to support our democracy. It’s a post which is formulating in my mind. The ability for humans to believe completely in non-factual conceptualizations is actually frightening. Muslims, enviros, anti-industry folk all kinds of anti-reality thought which apparently can overwhelm common sense. Our minds are quite obviously susceptible to nonsensical input.
Don’t leave out the Prohibitionists. They don’t even bother with science anymore. The vast majority of the science, and social experiments (Portugal, Colorado) is running against them.
I expect to see the same thing as cooling sets in.
What amuses me is bringing up one group in context with the other. Because of Left/Right biases the groups don’t like to be seen as mirror images of each other
Each group’s last bastion will be morality. “Never mind the science. What about the morality?”
the concept that white on black crime is racist, yet black on white crime is not. Or when it is ok for a black professor to scream about racist whites while slurring them, and it is not only accepted, but considered a reasonable opinion.
I frankly won’t put up with that sort of thing in our office, but it is free speech so she should be able to say it BUT why is it even moderately ok for a university to pay some one to speak it.
You do a disservice to bong hits and mushrooms.
If you do a deep study you will find that there is a large overlap between bong hitters and people with PTSD Each about 10% of the population. No study has ever been done to test the overlap. Interesting. No? Anyway you will have to make inferences.
Mushrooms? Good for alcoholism. Which is a symptom of PTSD.
People with PTSD are definitely not rational thinkers. Maybe if we left them alone they would leave us alone. Well it is worth a try.
The controllers used to be charged by the thinkers with lowering the cost of electricity delivered. It worked.
There is hope: There are people writing in the AE magazines about grid costs. And total costs. Reality is starting to intrude.
Reality is not starting to intrude. It is going hard to the side of the road to make way for the eco-freight train. I just listened to an ‘expert’ talking about the quality of the ‘experts’ who are recommending we shut down our coal plants in Michigan. I am so pissed off about the insanity of shutting down our own power generation system, to be replaced with happy (stupid) thoughts, I can’t think of the words.
A few experiments along these lines and reality will put an end to the insanity. I do not believe the US population will stand for a 95% uptime grid given that they are used to 99.9% uptime.
And don’t underestimate the voice of reason. Climate Change is not a universal Faith. Thanks to you and a few others. And we have a Congress and some states willing to fight.
> I can’t think of the words
Despair, Jeff … that is the word. Hilary Clinton will, I think, win the Presidency as well (I’m not a US citizen, but the Republicans cannot gather sufficient charisma to sway the 4% needed)
For myself, and perhaps you too, this won’t resolve itself in any way before I fall off my twig
@M Simon
Grid failures will be blamed on extreme weather (caused by earlier coal burning), and “overuse”, and the air-conditioning of “the rich”, and the price of a clean planet, and … endless blah. Unless you own a public megaphone, combating this is hopeless
Hello Jeff,
Replacing most coal generation with natural gas (coal has already been cut in half since 2005), gives you about a 10% economy-wide reduction in CO2 emissions compared to 2005. The problem is not closing coal plants… these are closing already because gas is much cheaper than coal. The problem is trying to get from 10% to 25%-28% reductions economy-wide. There may be a few percent additional emissions reductions from wind/solar boondoggles, but the rest has to come from reducing transportation, residential/commercial, and industrial emissions; these will dominate total CO2 emissions once most coal use has stopped. Increasing energy costs for individuals and commercial enterprises, while shielding industries which compete with overseas suppliers from those increases (a la Europe), will still damage significant pieces of the US economy, since individuals will have much less money to spend after paying exorbitant energy taxes, and retail prices will have to increase to cover higher energy costs. People will live economically diminished lives, which seems to me the ultimate objective in Mr Obama’s scheme. Planes and cars are not going to use significantly less fuel than today, so you just won’t be able to afford to fly or drive as often. There will be less total travel, and what there is will be more expensive and less pleasant (think trains and buses).
If the green mullahs insist on steep industrial energy taxes, that will just further “de-industrialize” the US economy, with no reduction in global emissions, due to a shift of emissions to producing countries like China and (soon) India, which are exempt from emissions restrictions for many years. Of course, Mr Obama probably can’t see the obvious economic consequences of his green lunacy, or if he can, doesn’t give a sh!t…. remember what the man said… “You didn’t build that!” I have a hard time imagining who he thinks did, but is sure wasn’t lefty (actual and figurative) politicians like him.
One can only hope that voters will elect a president who will reverse some of Mr. Obama’s lunacy… and that isn’t Billary Clinton.
I just learned that Obama has passed 32000 laws in 2014. In 97, congress managed 147. Not sure if the data is perfectly accurate but that shows exactly what modern ‘liberalism’ is about. Congress has ceeded lawmaking completely and the extreme court has fully allowed it. We ARE going to find out the hard way just how badly this president and the incredibly ignorant anti-industrial movement is going to affect our lives. Well, our children’s lives anyway.
Love your post, in Michigan’s case, my understanding is that the plants are being closed without replacement in many cases. There is simply too much pressure from the new laws. We are also stuck with some 50 year old but otherwise beautiful nuke plants that should be shut down, but actually make money because the liberals won’t let new ones be built.
Industry is dying everywhere in the US. We haven’t even reached 75% of the recreational market of 2008. I think we should base wealth on the size of the recreational market, don’t you? Anyway after seven years, you would normally expect an increase in personal disposable wealth. Instead the always recreating left hasn’t figured out that they are using old stuff to recreate now, and their slightly older cousins they don’t think about used to use new stuff.
Twenty years and it will be really obvious that the capitalists have stolen everything from them. Poor little lefties with no boats to play on and extreme weather to deal with. If we elect a liberal president again, I’m seriously considering selling the business except that we are getting big enough to work the leftist political game. Of course I’ll have to ditch the blog.
No matter how big you become, don’t sell your soul.
I have tried, over the years, to identify people with the combination of traits needed to build a profitable business (Mr Obama’s views aside). There are relatively few who can, and even fewer who succeed. What sticks in my craw is that people like Mr Obama have never employed anyone, never met a payroll, never delt with federal, state and local taxes, never worried about the cost of regulations, worker’s compensation, health insurance, and most of all, never worried about what does (and does not) create real economic value (IOW, what makes a country wealthy).
Yet Mr Obama and his ilk are the first to discount the contribution of those who actually do create employment…. and national wealth. IMO, he is too inexperienced in the real world to understand the consequences of his policies, something he shares with both Clintons, and it leads to the kinds of economically destructive policies he and the Clintons advocate. I do not claim he is evil. But I do claim that he is frighteningly inexperienced, grotesquely incompetent WRT economics, and utterly unaware of how the productive economy functions.
When Jimmy Carter left office I celebrated a bit, imagining we could never have a less competent president in my lifetime….. my celebration was premature. I will be happy to see Mr Obama gone in January 2017.
Of course, Hillary could be even worse.
Steve…There are many different paths to success. Some profit through the process. Smart decisions at every level. Cost controls. Inventory controls , Sales strategies…etc. And some have such a superior product or unique product that the competition has not yet caught up. . The latter is desirable.and a hell of a lot easier. But I would say most successful businesses are a little of both. I have two close friends that developed very successful business’s. One has 2500 employees. the company started because his friend an co founder knew someone in a fortune 500 company. They developed a reputation but without that “in” who knows. The other friend found a product to resell.. I’m not going to go into the details but he found a product that was being sold off so cheaply that he could resell it and make a 40 to 50% profit. Both these individuals had fortune smile their way. But if they didn’t jump on the opportunity …well who knows. I believe most of us have these opportunities…probably more that once…. .dropped on our plate. It’s those that savor the opportunities that are successful. The rest ….they fear the opportunity….because failure is not the conclusion that they can accept. The successful for the most part accept failure but realize that failure is not the conclusion. Failure is just a chapter in the story. Both of my friends had some luck but most people would not have recognized the opportunity or had the guts to follow up on it. Anyway that’s my tip on how to recognize potential successful people
Allinsky was for social parasites like Clinton and Obama what Machiavelli was for scheming princes. Allinsky coupled with modern tech that can monitor nearly everyone nearly all of the time, it is a dangerous game changer.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
Robert A Heinlein
Well he had a Republican Congress. Otherwise he might have done better.
SteveF, you make a serious mistake when you claim gas is cheaper than coal. It is only cheaper since the cost of coal has been forced higher by STUPID LEFTARD ECO regulations formulated to kill coal. I also complain about people yapping about the high cost of nuke power. STUPID LEFTARD ECO regulations cause it to be substantially higher also.
Good point.
Ayn Rand is being vindicated in some ways.
Did the public lose control of government when nations were united into the UN & EU?
https://rogerhelmermep.wordpress.com/2015/08/03/shock-horror-2/
Jeff,
The cost to the USA was actually figured out by Dr. Peter Vincent Pry who is the executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a Congressional advisory board dedicated to achieving protection of the United States from electromagnetic pulse and other threats. He was speaking of a EMP from a geomagnetic super-storm like the 1859 Carrington Event or a nuclear EMP attack from terrorists or rogue states like North Korea but it gives you an idea of what will happen if the grid collapses.
He says the above threats are “both existential threats that could kill 9 of 10 Americans through starvation, disease, and societal collapse.
A natural EMP catastrophe or nuclear EMP attack could black out the National electric grid for months or years and collapse all the other critical infrastructures, communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water, necessary to sustain modern society and the lives of 310 million Americans….”
Click to access CHRG-113hhrg89763.pdf
All Obama and they others are doing is causing this collapse to happen in slow motion.
SInce racism has been brought up,
Lets add up a few points.
1. Obama’s constant agitation of racism, the agitation of the professional agitators like Al Sharpton and the idiotic statement by the Baltimore Mayor: ‘Gave Those Who Wished to Destroy Space to Do That’
2. Militarization of the police and the Department of Homeland Security buy of 1,6 billion rounds of Ammo, enough for a 20 year hot war in the USA.
3. The closures are mainly along the East coast and will hit those cities the worse.
4. The massive riots that hit NYC because of the 1977 blackout
http://www.wired.com/2010/07/0713massive-blackout-hits-new-york/
Then the clincher:
The way Christchurch NZ is being rebuilt.
http://thedemiseofchristchurch.com/2012/11/29/hello-world/
You have to read that to understand the full horror that may be in store for anyone in a city in the USA.
“…Why completely demolish our old city including perfectly good and functional privately owned properties in order to build a different new city?
…Finally we have imposed on us a “Plan” for the new Christchurch CBD which bears no resemblance to the Christchurch we all know and love….
…There it is in black and white. The Christchurch City Council is committed to making Christchurch a “Carbon Neutral” city!….”
Thanks, Gail, for speaking frankly.
Gail,
Please explain in understandable terms how this relates to my post. I know government is naughty across the world as a matter of practice but beyond that, how is it associated in any way with what is happening in the US>
1.6 Billion rounds of ammo? Given 10,000 shots for every kill in a shooting war and you come up with 160,000 bodies.
And lest we forget. The militarization of the police in America has been done as a support for Prohibition ’til recently. The Progressives invented Prohibition and have repented. The Conservatives have been (not as much as they used to) loving it. Prohibition is Racist to the core.
The crime began with a Republican.
“Look, we understood we couldn’t make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue…that we couldn’t resist it.” – John Ehrlichman, White House counsel to President Nixon on the rationale of the War on Drugs.
And as that repression dies out what will be the new purpose of all these police?
That is how it all came about. An out of work Prohibition Agent, Harry J. Anslinger, was looking for something to do.
===
My trouble in all this? I’m not seeing any moral high ground. The parties give a a choice: “How do you wish to be repressed?” My answer? Not at all.
Still popular awakenings on particular topics are not out of the question. CAGW has passed peak popularity and Prohibition is dying.
@M Simon
> CAGW has passed peak popularity and Prohibition is dying
Sorry, that simply doesn’t matter. You can’t stop them – there’s been shrieking galore over OBama’s actions but nothing is able to deter him
Best to sort out how you and yours can best fare. There’s little else to be done; the madness is rampant
A quick look into the history/origins of Obama should concern any thinking person.
Without consideration of where exactly he was born; His early schooling was in a Muslim School. He attended Jeremiah Wright’s church for 15 years where Jeremiah preached hatred of the US. Obama’s first act on day one was to lock all of his school history, and nobody knows how he was funded to run for the presidential election in the first place. There is a very long list of suspicious activities.
If he is a plant to destroy the US, he’s doing a very good job. If he’s trying to make the US a better, stronger country, he’s making an epic fail. If he’s a socialist or something similar, he might be lining up the US for someone else to raise the red flag (just like they did in China).
I keep wondering what will happen when energy prices become prohibitive. The house I live in was once heated with coal which is plentiful around here. I can see folks sneaking into the old mines in the middle of the night, digging out a few loads and carting it home. Those unable or unwilling to do that will probably just chop down trees. Boy, this scenario will certainly wreck the local air quality, won’t it!
The absolute safest form of energy production is, of course, the dammed up river, but I’ve lost count of how many of those projects have been stopped before building even began because some little fish, usually a snail darter, might become extinct. (I always have wondered why the fish can’t be relocated to a similar environment).
Almost none of the “concerned” enviro-kids seem to have a clue about how any of this will effect their lives. Did you see the kayak protest at the oil well out off the west coast somewhere? Not only were the kayaks themselves made from petroleum products, but the paddles and most of the clothes and accessories were, as well. Made the protesters look sort of silly, but I doubt they ever figured it out! Ironic, isn’t it – protesting a petroleum mine while all decked out from head to toe in petroleum products. It’s a little like a group showing up to protest the killing of baby seals while wearing seal fur coats.
Thanks to newfound unity among bickering climate skeptics, we may be able to move forward and repair damages after WWII to constitutional governments and to these fields of government-sponsored science:
1. Astronomy
2. Astrophysics
3. Climatology
4. Cosmology
5. Nuclear physics
6. Particle physics
7. Planetary physics
8. Solar physics and
9. Theoretical physics
https://brittius.wordpress.com/2015/08/16/dr-o-manuel-ph-d-stalins-science/
“Why anyone liberal or otherwise doesn’t have the common sense to see the error of this policy is beyond my understanding. We are violently attacking the very thing which makes us successful — energy.”
I have seen myself as a liberal most of my life, and I do object to such policies.
Making energy more expensive harms everybody (except, maybe, “carbon traders”).
It makes the cake smaller.
I’m not generally a political person, but this issue motivates me enough to ‘change sides’.
It’s just not logical, Captain.
“It’s just not logical, Captain.”
Love the reference.
We need more power!