Monthly Archives: May 2010

Graholm is Bullish on Wind Power While China is Discovering “If there’s no subsidy, there’s no hope of a profit”

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Americas worst Governor, Michigan’s very own Jennifer Granholm is still hyping ‘green’ energy in general and wind power in particular. A quote from April 21st, 2010:

Gov. Jennifer Granholm expects Michigan to play a major role in a new green economy, making components for wind turbines.

“I’m so bullish on wind power as a way to diversify manufacturing in the state,” she said. “We want to be the place where climate change solutions are researched, developed and produced.”

Granholm spoke to more than 700 people at a wind energy conference at Cobo Hall sponsored by the Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association. (emphasis added)

Politicians and the news media will not give up the global warming / climate change hype. It has been proven to be a fraud and hoax time and again. Repeating the claims over and over will not make it true.

Another big myth is the ‘green energy’ will create ‘green jobs.’ The reality is that ‘green energy’ creates heavily subsidized jobs:

Growth Energy, an industry lobby group, says increasing the percentage of ethanol blended into the U.S. gasoline supply would create 136,000 jobs. But an analysis by the Environmental Working Group found that no more than 27,000 jobs would be created, and each one could cost taxpayers as much as $446,000 per year. (emphasis added)

What a deal.

While Granholm is bullish on wind power, Energy companies in China are finding that even with their significantly lower cost structures, lax environmental regulations, free land and nearly perfect wind conditions, they can’t turn a profit:

The only opportunity to turn a profit is when electricity is sold to the grid. Even then, say industry insiders, the ability to make money depends on national tariff-setting policies and subsidies: “If there’s no subsidy, there’s no hope of a profit,” one says.

This creates conflict. The high costs of wind power have long held back growth of the sector. But the grid operators, for their own reasons, are also unwilling to buy wind power.

Electricity generated by wind in Jiuquan is currently sold to the grid for about 0.53 yuan (US$0.08) per kilowatt hour, higher than the 0.20 yuan (US$0.03) and 0.35 yuan (US$0.05) paid for coal and hydropower respectively. In Inner Mongolia, Hebei and the north east of China, the wind-power tariff has risen to about 0.60 yuan (US$0.08) per kilowatt hour and, in Jilin, to about 0.70 yuan (US$0.10), creating an even bigger gulf between the price of wind and that of coal and hydropower. (emphasis added)

The power grid doesn’t want to purchase electricity derived from wind power due to its sporadic nature that makes it difficult to balance and manage the power grid, just as Germany is finding today.

Nanny State: Debbie Stabenow And Rachel Ray “We Know What Is Best For You”

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The nanny state movement is growing every day with no end in sight.

Via Stabenow press release:

U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) today met with acclaimed chef Rachael Ray to discuss Stabenow’s work in the Senate to support child nutrition and promote healthy eating habits in our schools and communities. Ray was representing her non-profit organization “Yum-O!” which works to educate children and their families about food and cooking, improve nutrition for children in need, and funds cooking education and scholarships.

“Last year, Michigan served nearly 85 million free and reduced-price school lunches, helping make sure no child goes hungry while they aim for the American Dream,” said Senator Stabenow. “My priority continues to be making sure those meals are healthy and using the kind of fresh fruits and vegetables that we grow in Michigan.   I’m pleased that Rachael Ray and I can work together to promote healthy, fresh, and nutritious meals for America’s children.”

Senator Stabenow worked to strengthen the Fruits and Vegetables Snack Program in the 2008 Farm Bill and worked to give schools the option of purchasing food from local farmers. She also championed an initiative, recently funded through the American Recovery Reinvestment Act and the Fiscal Year 2010 Agriculture Appropriations Act, to give schools the resources they need to upgrade their kitchens to allow for on-site meal preparation, and $2.5 million has already been received by Michigan schools.(emphasis added)

And, of course Rachel Ray knows better than you about these sort of things:


Via Big Hollywood:

Those who are happiest when lodged firmly between parent and child to wield their toxic influence, trap our kids in these awful leftist hotbeds that used to be known as public schools, strip them of their Bibles and dodgeballs, ply them with sex education, condoms and Heather Has Two Mommies — and now they want to take away the last measure of pleasure left: wolfing down pizza burgers and sporking apart mock chicken legs.

In other news, Chefs now qualify as celebrities.

Remember when  Rachel Ray was a Dunkin’ Donuts spokesperson:


Be sure to read the interesting story regarding this screen grab

The Long Shadow Of The Progressives: Maurice Strong To Obama

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All government, of course, is against liberty.

H. L. Mencken

Fellow Resistance member, and all around good guy, Mike at the Classic Liberal has been all over Maurice Strong over the past few days.

Who is Maurice Strong you ask? Via Mike at the Classic Liberal:

But any understanding of the real efforts that job entails should begin with a look at the long and murky career of Maurice Strong, the man who may have had the most to do with what the U.N. has become today, and still sparks controversy even after he claims to have cut his ties to the world organization.

From Oil for Food to the latest scandals involving U.N. funding in North Korea, Maurice Strong appears as a shadowy and often critically important figure.

Strong, now 77, is best known as the godfather of the environmental movement, who served from 1973-1975 as the founding director of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi. UNEP is now a globe-girdling organization with a yearly budget of $136 million, which claims to act as the world’s environmental conscience. Strong consolidated his eco-credentials as the organizer of the U.N.’s 1992 environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, which in turn paved the way for the controversial 1997 Kyoto Treaty on controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

Strong is a big proponent of global governance and is working hard to archive this goal primarily through the environmentalism movement:

The World Commission on Environment and Development was created in 1983 – popularly known as the Brundtland Commission after the chair, Gro Harlem Brundtland (at the time Prime Minister of Norway and former vice president of the World Socialist Party). Maurice Strong who was a vice president of the World Wildlife Fund until 1981, was appointed to the Brundtland Commission, which published its report “Our Common Future” in 1987. It recommended the creation of a universal declaration on environmental protection and sustainable development in the form of a new charter.

In 1989 Maurice Strong began preparations for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (“The Earth Summit”). The IUCN had a major role in organizing the conference. [Ref.5]. Strong Stated: “It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle-class … involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and ‘convenience’ foods, ownership of motor-, numerous electric household appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning … expansive suburban housing … are not sustainable.” In the months leading up to the 1992 Rio conference, Strong (a Canadian who maintains his primary residence in the United States), made various statements against the middle class of the industrialized world. He declared that “the United States is clearly the greatest risk” to the world’s ecological health. This was so, he said, because, “In effect, the United States is committing environmental aggression against the rest of the world.” (emphasis added)

Maurice Strong has been working in the shadows from the mid 1970′s to bring us the radical environmentalist movement so beloved today by our liberals in the United States.

You can hear Maurice Strong’s words echo when you read the Obama energy page at White House.gov:

  • Increasing, for the first time in more than a decade, the fuel economy standards for Model Year 2011 for cars and trucks so they will get better mileage, saving drivers money and spurring companies to develop more innovative products.
  • The President issued a memorandum to the Department of Energy to implement more aggressive efficiency standards for common household appliances, like dishwashers and refrigerators. Through this step, over the next three decades, we’ll save twice the amount of energy produced by all the coal-fired power plants in America in any given year.
  • Supporting the first steps of a legally-binding treaty to reduce mercury emissions worldwide.
  • On Earth Day 2009, the President unveiled a program to develop the renewable energy projects on the waters of our Outer Continental Shelf that produce electricity from wind, wave, and ocean currents. These regulations will enable, for the first time ever, the nation to tap into our ocean’s vast sustainable resources to generate clean energy in an environmentally sound and safe manner.

Uncanny…

The Detroit Free Press Wants Its Hope And Change And It Wants It Now!

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Detroit’s even more liberal paper published a bizarre editorial (even by the Freep standards) calling for passage of the flawed Kerry-Liberman “Energy”  bill in the Senate because doing something is better than what we have today. Via the aforementioned Freep:

Flawed energy bill beats current policies

Congress should tune out the naysayers and skeptics who suggest the timing is all wrong for an energy bill that includes controls on global warming emissions. Continued dithering will do more harm than almost any change in policy could.

Senate action on the Kerry-Lieberman bill, which was introduced this week to meet up with a bill that the House has already passed, would end the uncertainty that is delaying decisions in some cases and prompting rash actions in others. The bill attempts both to cut down on global warming gases and to limit the country’s dependence on oil, and, with some quickly inserted new safety provisions, even includes offshore drilling in U.S. waters. (emphasis added)

Global warming is so 2008. Besides if it isn’t warming in my back yard, you can’t say the entire planet is warming.

And the Free Press dutifully pushes on with the the official  DNC scripted talking points.

In other respects, the American Power Act is a sort of feeding frenzy for energy interests, with chum for the nuclear power industry, farmers, natural gas producers, spurious clean-coal development and alternative energy boosters. It is hardly a well-orchestrated policy, although Americans probably would rebel at anything that smacked of more detailed planning.

Americans, at least as Congress perceives the country, also are allergic to anything that threatens access to cheap energy. Hence the costs will be routed through subsidies, research grants and tax credits. This disguises the economic impact without giving consumers the price signals that might actually help them modify behavior – but it apparently is the best that can be hoped for.

I have a hard time believing that the proceeding two paragraphs were actually published in an American news paper. Compare the Detroit Free Press editorial to this op-ed in Pravda (yes, that Pravda).

That brings us to Cap and Trade. Never in the history of humanity has a more idiotic plan been put forward and sold with bigger lies. Energy is the key stone to any and every economy, be it man power, animal power, wood or coal or nuclear. How else does one power industry that makes human life better (unless of course its making the bombs that end that human life, but that’s a different topic). Never in history, with the exception of the Japanese self imposed isolation in the 1600s, did a government actively force its people away from economic activity and industry.

Even the Soviets never created such idiocy.

Even the writers at Pravda get it.

And with Editorials like this, it is no wonder the Detroit Free Press can’t publish a paper every day of the week.

Friday Night Links: The ’68 Mustang Edition

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Some great reading you need to check out:

Jersey Girl Needs Our Help! Anna Little for Congress (R)

The dog ate Holder’s homework

A Justice McNamara Dispatch: Let me be the first to say it.

GM to partner with Hawaiian utility to deliver a technology that is dead in the water to power cars that aren’t economically feasible

Goldman Sachs in the White House

*VIDEO* Andrew Klavan Explains The Financial Crisis

The State of Europe

2nd Friday Night Out Mesa, AZ. No Christians Allowed!

Chris Christie is bringing Teh Awesome to a town near you

Going ‘Green’ Without Thinking Things Through

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Hey, look what you can buy via the Detroit News. But it will be worth it, you know, to save the entire planet. Right?

Via Spiegel International:

The grid operators are required by law to give priority to these “clean” forms of energy when feeding electricity into the grid. The only problem is that the sun and the wind are very unpredictable. The fluctuations complicate their work. “The job has become much more stressful,” says Kleinekort. “The grids are reaching maximum load more and more often.”

And this is only the beginning. In the coming years, the German government plans a massive expansion in renewable energy and expects it to make up 30 percent of total power production by 2020. Giant wind power projects are in the works for the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. At the same time, the Mediterranean countries intend to utilize the massive potential of solar energy with the Desertec project in the deserts of North Africa.

Wind power from the north and solar energy from the south: If this fantastic vision becomes reality, the fragile balance could be thrown completely out of kilter. “The grid is prepared for anything, just not the requirements posed by renewable energy sources,” says Klaus Töpfer, the former head of the United Nations Environment Program and today a representative of Desertec.

When all this great ‘free power’ starts coming on line, it will unbalance the power grid.

Of course going green with solar panels will cut down on pollution, right?

Via the WaPo:

In China, a country buckling with the breakneck pace of its industrial growth, such stories of environmental pollution are not uncommon. But the Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Co., here in the central plains of Henan Province near the Yellow River, stands out for one reason: It’s a green energy company, producing polysilicon destined for solar energy panels sold around the world. But the byproduct of polysilicon production — silicon tetrachloride — is a highly toxic substance that poses environmental hazards.

“The land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in the place. . . . It is like dynamite — it is poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it,” said Ren Bingyan, a professor at the School of Material Sciences at Hebei Industrial University. (emphasis added)

Toxic chemicals to manufacture solar panels that will create havoc on the power grid.

The green energy movement is not all its cracked up to be.

The Long Shadow Of The Progressives: Obama, Teddy Roosevelt & Living Wage

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Progressives have been pushing for a living wage, social justice and a “whatever you think it says is o.k. with me” interpretation of the constitution for 100 years.

Obama (February 13th, 2008):

Since the Earned Income Tax Credit lifts nearly 5 million Americans out of poverty each year, I’ll double the number of workers who receive it and triple the benefit for minimum wage workers.  And I won’t wait another ten years to raise the minimum wage – I’ll guarantee that it keeps pace with inflation every single year so that it’s not just a minimum wage, but a living wage. Because that’s the change that working Americans need.

Teddy Roosevelt (August 6th, 1912):

As a people we cannot afford to let any group of citizens or any individual citizen live or labor under conditions which are injurious to the common welfare. Industry, therefore, must submit to such public regulation as will make it a means of life and health, not of death or inefficiency. We must protect the crushable elements at the base of our present industrial structure.

We stand for a living wage. Wages are subnormal if they fail to provide a living for those who devote their time and energy to industrial occupations. The monetary equivalent of a living wage varies according to local conditions, but must include enough to secure the elements of a normal standard of living–a standard high enough to make morality possible, to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit a reasonable saving for old age.

Here is audio of Teddy Roosevelt:

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By the way, did you catch the part about our Constitution and Judges?

The people themselves must be the ultimate makers of their own Constitution, and where their agents differ in their interpretations of the Constitution the people themselves should be given the chance, after full and deliberate judgment, authoritatively to settle what interpretation it is that their representatives shall thereafter adopt as binding.

We do not question the general honesty of the courts. But in applying to present-day social conditions the general prohibitions that were intended originally as safeguards to the citizen against the arbitrary power of government in the hands of caste and privilege, these prohibitions have been turned by the courts from safeguards against political and social privilege into barriers against political and social justice and advancement.

Rush Limbaugh Video: ” Now, wait a second. They’re confusing me with Bill Clinton”

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Via Page 6:

When President Obama was asked if he would play a round of golf with his talk-radio nemesis Rush Limbaugh, the response, relayed by a top Democrat, was: “Limbaugh can play with himself.”

Via Rush Limbaugh:

“Now, wait a second.  They’re confusing me with Bill Clinton.”  A little Joycelyn Elders lingo there.  They’re confusing me with Clinton

And The Video:

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