More Fraud From Obama's Energy Department

More Fraud From Obama's Energy Department

Is this the best use of our tax dollars?

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is probing a $730 million conditional loan commitment to Severstal, a Russian company operating mainly in the steel and mining industry. Writing to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the California Congressman questioned whether Severstal North America, a subsidiary of the powerhouse Russian manufacturer, should benefit from public financing to improve and expand facilities in Dearborn, Michigan.

The North American division of the company has struggled to penetrate the U.S. steel market, and it sold three of its U.S. mills in March. Consequently, Severstal North America received a conditional loan approval from the U.S. Energy Department in July to help retool and expand its factory in Dearborn.

Severstal is owned and controlled by Alexei Mordashov, who is worth $18.5 billion and is one of the wealthiest people in the world, according to Forbes magazine. In Issa’s letter, he asked Secretary Chu why taxpayer money is needed when "announcements made by Severstal during the loan consideration process indicated that the company had ample means to carry out the project."

Issa contended that the company already had plans to expand production "with apparently no need for federal financing." In fact, Severstal had already sold plants in Ohio, Maryland, and West Virginia, as part of a plan to shift operations to its Michigan facilities. "Given the immense wealth and power of Severstal’s CEO and the fact that the corporation had already made significant investments in the project, it is surprising that DOE would choose Severstal for a loan meant to spark new businesses and technologies within the automotive industry," Issa wrote.

Alexander Cockburn makes quite a bit of sense

Alexander Cockburn makes quite a bit of sense

Cockburn may be a dedicated socialist and a bit phobic about the hazards of nuclear power, but he sure sees through the hypocrisy of establishment Warmist academics and the massive fraud promulgated to scare people into a disastrous transfer of power from We the People to nameless faceless bureaucrats.



HT: John Ray at Greenie Watch

Understanding Science

Understanding Science

Physical laws are described by mathematical relationships. Newton's laws of orbital mechanics apply well to objects at planetary distances, even galactic distances, but now that we can resolve intergalactic distances, the math no longer works. Physics has responded by pretending that there is a force, they call it "dark matter" that adds the necessary gravitational force needed to make their equations work. Then they noticed, as their power to resolve details became better, that their math was out of whack again, so they invented "dark energy," which is a magic force that acts opposite to gravity.

Now that the physics establishment has made it look like they know what is happening, they are acting exactly the same way the climate group acts. The establishment has their orthodoxy, and grad students and academic staff either parrots the party line or they starve. Just try to get a position or a grant if you have ever written a paper that says that string theory is unsupported by experiment or observation and that thought, even though it is entirely true, will garner a failing grade.

Science is entirely political, with the older established deans and heads of labs sticking to party lines. The students in the field that are gathering the data know that they had better find data that supports their professor's well established viewpoint. That's the way it has always been, that's the way it is, and so it goes.

Climate science is only the most visible of the sciences where interest groups have tried to leverage their position of authority into massive political power. Here are the facts - temperatures are well within normal range, CO2 is higher today that the last few centuries, but low by long term standards - it has been many times higher than it is now, and the flora and fauna flourished. We can detect more global weather now, and as we can see finer detail we enter a situation where we have no historical comparison. The question is no longer about warming, since that stopped in 1998, it is about increased weather variability. There is a debate about that, with one side saying "Yes, now give us more money and power" and the other side saying "well now, we can resolve these things on a finer scale that ever before, so we do not know if the weather is getting more erratic, so let us pursue further research before we continue to pretend that we know these answers."

Treasury Admits Cost of Cap & Tax will cost 1% of GDP

Treasury Admits Cost of Cap & Tax will cost 1% of GDP

The Treasury Department has been forced to admit that the cost of Cap & Tax will cost 1% of GDP. In respomse to a FOIA request, Treasury submitted a redacted report on the costs. While the dollar amount was redacted, on page three of the .pdf file there is the admission "Exonomic costs will likely be on the order of 1% of GDP, making them equal in scale to all environmental regulations."

Brazil, Soros, Get Billions

Brazil, Soros, Get Billions

Sharp eyed news fans might have noticed that the Obama administration today gave Petrobras, the Brazil petroleum company and the worlds eleventh highest valued company, a commitment for two billion dollars to drill in deep water offshore from that country's coast. Even sharper eyes might have noticed that George Soros owns about one billion dollars of stock in Petrobras. Even more curious eyes would have noticed that, just days before Obama invested in the company, Soros announced that he had reduced his stake in Petrobras. But financially savvy readers might note that this was a move from common shares to preferred shares, which pay dividends. Thus George Soros upped the ante by putting himself in the revenue stream mere days before his good buddy Obama paved the way for much higher earnings.

I suppose it would be out of line for me to wonder why Obama would reverse course on his disdain for petroleum and support drilling, when he claims to want to stop using petroleum altogether. I guess that only wild eyed conservative wackos will draw any conclusions about possible collusion between the Obama administration and their benefactor, the principal funder of moveon.org. I must be stupid and evil to see any connection between these events. Not the first time, not the last.

Energy Follies

Energy Follies

There is a lot of loose talk going around on alternative energy, with advocates saying we can produce all the energy we need with wind and solar. From what I understand, there is not enough power potential for all our energy needs to be supplied that way, unless nuclear is included. Even with a solar cell so efficient that has not been invented yet, we would need to completely cover Arizona and half of New Mexico with solar cells or mirrors to come close to our electrical needs that are currently covered with coal. That does nothing for the energy requirements of future electric cars.

Wind and solar-electric power suffers from being unreliable. Conventional power plants would need to remain online to cover the periods of little wind. Entire seasons suffer from far less wind than others. Also sufficient wind exists only is a few locations. We will need a new technology of power transmission, and an entire new electric transmission grid, to properly power the entire country from the few sites with large wind resources.

Two big problems remain, and they are concerned with the balancing of energy needs and environmental concerns. One is - If we cover the desert southwest with solar production, what happens to the little creatures of the desert? What about our pristine areas? Monument Valley anyone? Water plants do damage to the fish populations. What about the Salmon lobby? What about little fishies we don't even know about yet? And some eminent scientists have postulated that if we install enough wind farms to make a real dent in our power needs, the power, which will be extracted from the wind, might very well make a substantial change to surface winds, affecting weather or (gasp!) climate.

The second problem is that advocates of Wind, Water, and Solar power generation schemes forget that all three are truly Solar power. Climate on planet earth has always tended to change. If we do this stuff and the amount of insolation goes down, where will we be then?

Clearly, with unlimited power within any old molecule in the universe, we must include some form of nuclear power in any intelligent discussion of solving our energy needs while cutting down emissions. We don't need to wait for quantum energy generation to become available, or fusion. We have useful and proven nuclear fission technologies available right now. What we need is the political will to allow them. In the meantime, anyone who claims to believe that carbon dioxide is causing us problems but is against nuclear power is either not serious, or has a hidden agenda.

EPA Buries Its Own AGW Study

EPA Buries Its Own AGW Study

The Environmental Protection Agency not only buried the study and warned its researchers not to communicate with the media, they did it for explicitly political reasons.

Bio-Diesel Makers Idled

Bio-Diesel Makers Idled

As users are discovering, Bio-Diesel fuel is no ecological panacea. Bio-Diesel makers are sitting idle for lack of buyers for their product. But there is a deeper problem with burning our food - economics.

Bio-Diesel can never be cheaper than mineral sources of energy - period. Government subsidies or mandates will be required to make crops a competitive energy source, which just means that they hide the cost or force us to pay it anyway. When any good is sold at a price that is cheaper than the cost to create it, there will be shortages. Best example is water. How can we have water shortages? Take South Florida. They have an average rainfall of about three inches per month (it takes much less than one inch to sustain life and agriculture) yet they still have shortages. If water was priced at what it cost to produce, people would use less of it, but more important, capitalists would build the infrastructure to make more potable water available, before it flows out to the sea. Now favors go out to favored constituents like the Sugar farmers, and tax money is spent on other things. If water were priced close to what is cost, sugar would not be an economical crop there, which would release enough water to double the residential population, and we would have a side order of a clean Everglades. But that is the logical route, not the political one.

The depth of the greed and mendacity of our governing class is beyond full understanding by normal people. The lies and fraud go so deep into government operations that the mind recoils at the thought. Can all politicians be criminals? We reject grokking the fullness of that truth, so we reelect the crooks for term after term.

More Eco-Fraud from Congress

More Eco-Fraud from Congress

The greatest flaw in congressional actions is their lack of regard to the immutable Law of Unintended Consequences, especially when it comes to Obamanomics. They do one thing and it always has far reaching effects as their largess percolates into the greater world beyond their cloistered existence. A fine example is contained within the recently passed War Funding Bill. Its stated purpose is to remove less efficient, older cars from the road in favor of more efficient models. Help the poor and all that. But it will do far more than that.

It provides a cash payment of $3.500 to $4,500 for these older cars, when traded in for a new vehicle. Sounds good, right? But what will it actually achieve? It seems to me that many people with older cars can not afford new cars in the first place. Even a Kia will set you back at least ten thousand dollars, so the buyer will be several thousand dollars short of any new car. But with many people able to do so, many of these plder cars will be traded in and disappear from the market. For people who need to buy these older, less efficient cars for their basic transportation needs, the market will have to recognize these artificial trade-in values and lower supply by raising the price of these used cars. Many of these so-called transportation cars today sell for less than one thousand dollars, with quite a few going for two to three. These prices will all rise.

So who will be hurt? Clearly, like most of what congress does, the most vulnerable among us will suffer the most. We live in such a rich country that even most people living at the poverty line own automobiles. The old pickup died, so another one is needed, but instead of being able to pick one up for $750, it will now cost more like $2,000. Our government just committed to spend a cool billion dollars to accomplish this. Nice Change, for those with a little less Hope than the rest of us.

AGW, Again

Freeman Dyson Taken On AGW Hysteria

In recent news, the war against AGW hysteria found another major ally in Freeman Dyson. Dyson, a towering figure in physics, has taken on Hansen and Gore at the root of their argument, which is the so-called "consensus" that the science is "settled," which gives them the excuse they need to avoid any and all debate on the merits of their theory. Dyson goes right to the heart of that avoidance, and ridicules even the mention of the word "consensus" along with the word "science." His contention is that there is not even an AGW theory, given that there can be no theory if there can be no experiment designed to test it.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360 we can read Dyson's answers, which are so much more satisfying than the way he was portrayed in the New York Times Magazine article that made this issue arise to public consciousness. And his own words are persuasive. He admits that he is no expert in climatology, but is an expert in the scientific method. So he says, most persuasively:

Dyson: I think the difference between me and most of the experts is that I think I have a much wider view of the whole subject. I was involved in climate studies seriously about 30 years ago. That’s how I got interested. There was an outfit called the Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge. I visited Oak Ridge many times, and worked with those people, and I thought they were excellent. And the beauty of it was that it was multi-disciplinary. There were experts not just on hydrodynamics of the atmosphere, which of course is important, but also experts on vegetation, on soil, on trees, and so it was sort of half biological and half physics. And I felt that was a very good balance.

And there you got a very strong feeling for how uncertain the whole business is, that the five reservoirs of carbon all are in close contact — the atmosphere, the upper level of the ocean, the land vegetation, the topsoil, and the fossil fuels. They are all about equal in size. They all interact with each other strongly. So you can’t understand any of them unless you understand all of them. Essentially that was the conclusion. It’s a problem of very complicated ecology, and to isolate the atmosphere and the ocean just as a hydrodynamics problem makes no sense.

Thirty years ago, there was a sort of a political split between the Oak Ridge community, which included biology, and people who were doing these fluid dynamics models, which don’t include biology. They got the lion’s share of money and attention. And since then, this group of pure modeling experts has become dominant.

I got out of the field then. I didn’t like the way it was going. It left me with a bad taste.

Syukuro Manabe, right here in Princeton, was the first person who did climate models with enhanced carbon dioxide and they were excellent models. And he used to say very firmly that these models are very good tools for understanding climate, but they are not good tools for predicting climate. I think that’s absolutely right. They are models, but they don’t pretend to be the real world. They are purely fluid dynamics. You can learn a lot from them, but you cannot learn what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

And then this about the basis of the whole kerfluffle - the computer models at the core of every true believer's soul.

I mean it’s a fact that they don’t know how to model it. And the question is, how does it happen that they end up believing their models? But I have seen that happen in many fields. You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being real. It is also true that the whole livelihood of all these people depends on people being scared. Really, just psychologically, it would be very difficult for them to come out and say, “Don’t worry, there isn’t a problem.” It’s sort of natural, since their whole life depends on it being a problem. I don’t say that they’re dishonest. But I think it’s just a normal human reaction. It’s true of the military also. They always magnify the threat. Not because they are dishonest; they really believe that there is a threat and it is their job to take care of it. I think it’s the same as the climate community, that they do in a way have a tremendous vested interest in the problem being taken more seriously than it is.

Lots more stuff where that came from. But even as he shoots down the basis upon which governments around the world are being pressured to act, what is never mentioned is the most interesting to me. The one funny thing about this debate is that the two sides both avoid the real issue. It is not about what bad people did to ruin the climate, and it is not about economic or health outcomes from this or that type of climate change. No, the real debate, the one that Hansen et al refuse to have, is how do we get the idea that humans can, by coordinated action, affect climate, and cause global temperatures to decline. Especially knowing that the real danger to humanity is posed by ice rather than tropical heat, the silence on this crucial issue is astounding.

One side says that we have spoiled our nest and must be punished. The other side says that there is nothing to see here, so move on. But the center of this is humanity taking control of global climate. Never mind that we have enough trouble making tiny changes to weather on a local scale, now let us embark on a grand experiment to alter a planet's climate. Not based on data or experience, but on fervor bordering on religious belief.

Before we go off half-cocked, is it not reasonable to get our facts straight before we make any substantial investment? I know this is heresy to the Hansen/Gore axis, but we really do not have enough data to make any of the prescribed moves to change this thing that, for all we know, may not even be broken. Or it may be but what we do might be the exact wrong thing. Alternatively, if the worst scenarios are about to unfold, there is absolutely no chance that humanity will be willing to invest more than a token amount in the prescribed changes to worldwide human behavior.

The Economics of Capping Carbon

The Economics of Capping Carbon

A great article ny Peter Huber about the actual economics of carbon dioxide emissions. He writes:

We don’t control the global supply of carbon.

Ten countries ruled by nasty people control 80 percent of the planet’s oil reserves—about 1 trillion barrels, currently worth about $40 trillion. If $40 trillion worth of gold were located where most of the oil is, one could only scoff at any suggestion that we might somehow persuade the nasty people to leave the wealth buried. They can lift most of their oil at a cost well under $10 a barrel. They will drill. They will pump. And they will find buyers. Oil is all they’ve got.

Poor countries all around the planet are sitting on a second, even bigger source of carbon—almost a trillion tons of cheap, easily accessible coal. They also control most of the planet’s third great carbon reservoir—the rain forests and soil. They will keep squeezing the carbon out of cheap coal, and cheap forest, and cheap soil, because that’s all they’ve got. Unless they can find something even cheaper. But they won’t—not any time in the foreseeable future.

We no longer control the demand for carbon, either. The 5 billion poor—the other 80 percent—are already the main problem, not us. Collectively, they emit 20 percent more greenhouse gas than we do. We burn a lot more carbon individually, but they have a lot more children. Their fecundity has eclipsed our gluttony, and the gap is now widening fast. China, not the United States, is now the planet’s largest emitter. Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and others are in hot pursuit. And these countries have all made it clear that they aren’t interested in spending what money they have on low-carb diets. It is idle to argue, as some have done, that global warming can be solved—decades hence—at a cost of 1 to 2 percent of the global economy. Eighty percent of the global population hasn’t signed on to pay more than 0 percent.

Accepting this last, self-evident fact, the Kyoto Protocol divides the world into two groups. The roughly 1.2 billion citizens of industrialized countries are expected to reduce their emissions. The other 5 billion—including both China and India, each of which is about as populous as the entire Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—aren’t. These numbers alone guarantee that humanity isn’t going to reduce global emissions at any point in the foreseeable future—unless it does it the old-fashioned way, by getting poorer. But the current recession won’t last forever, and the long-term trend is clear. Their populations and per-capita emissions are rising far faster than ours could fall under any remotely plausible carbon-reduction scheme.

Read the whole thing. The article goes on, filling in the details, the costs and the alternatives. It's a priceless resource into the subject matter. The last bit tells the story:

If we’re truly worried about carbon, we must instead approach it as if the emissions originated in an annual eruption of Mount Krakatoa. Don’t try to persuade the volcano to sign a treaty promising to stop. Focus instead on what might be done to protect and promote the planet’s carbon sinks—the systems that suck carbon back out of the air and bury it. Green plants currently pump 15 to 20 times as much carbon out of the atmosphere as humanity releases into it—that’s the pump that put all that carbon underground in the first place, millions of years ago. At present, almost all of that plant-captured carbon is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by animal consumers. North America, however, is currently sinking almost two-thirds of its carbon emissions back into prairies and forests that were originally leveled in the 1800s but are now recovering. For the next 50 years or so, we should focus on promoting better land use and reforestation worldwide. Beyond that, weather and the oceans naturally sink about one-fifth of total fossil-fuel emissions. We should also investigate large-scale options for accelerating the process of ocean sequestration.

Carbon zealots despise carbon-sinking schemes because, they insist, nobody can be sure that the sunk carbon will stay sunk. Yet everything they propose hinges on the assumption that carbon already sunk by nature in what are now hugely valuable deposits of oil and coal can be kept sunk by treaty and imaginary cheaper-than-carbon alternatives. This, yet again, gets things backward. We certainly know how to improve agriculture to protect soil, and how to grow new trees, and how to maintain existing forests, and we can almost certainly learn how to mummify carbon and bury it back in the earth or the depths of the oceans, in ways that neither man nor nature will disturb. It’s keeping nature’s black gold sequestered from humanity that’s impossible.

If we do need to do something serious about carbon, the sequestration of carbon after it’s burned is the one approach that accepts the growth of carbon emissions as an inescapable fact of the twenty-first century. And it’s the one approach that the rest of the world can embrace, too, here and now, because it begins with improving land use, which can lead directly and quickly to greater prosperity. If, on the other hand, we persist in building green bridges to nowhere, we will make things worse, not better. Good intentions aren’t enough. Turned into ineffectual action, they can cost the earth and accelerate its ruin at the same time.

This article avoids stating the obvious - but argumentative - fact that the Greens do not favor carbon remediation schemes precisely because their aim is not to reduce carbon, but rather to diminish the wealth held by the developed world - it is an anti-huiman movement after all. Instead Huber gives us chapter and verse, dollars and cents, to explain why wind and solar can't do enough, and nuclear can't do it fast enough, to satisfy the Green demands. It does show, however, how the Greens killed nuclear as a viable option, and shows a rational way forward. So the next time a fool like New York City's Mayor Bloomberg suggests constructing windmills in Manhattan, you will know exactly how foolish a statement that is, and why.

Geithner Attacks America

Geithner Attacks America

It didn't take long for the tax cheat Treasury Sectretary to attack the very core of our domestic energy industry. Evidently they are very bad for America, since we might have a problem with the climate some day, and it is possible that they may have provided some of the stuff that could possible have caused it. So what do we do? Destroy them. But maybe this is not baby Geithner's fault. After all, his boss is not interested in appointing his staff, since it is so unimportant. This is getting serious.

Global Warming Advocates Making it Up Again

What with ten years with no warming, and a couple of years of cooling, the current apparent climate is providing nothing to help move the government to increase grants and Universities to expand their departments, so the AGW parasites have started to make things up. First they pretended that a mass of ice in Antarctica was missing, but they were forced to take it back. Now we have this in today's news

Antarctic glaciers are melting faster across a much wider area than previously thought, scientists said Wednesday — a development that could lead to an unprecedented rise in sea levels.

A report by thousands of scientists for the 2007-2008 International Polar Year concluded that the western part of the continent is warming up, not just the Antarctic Peninsula.

Sounds bad, right? But this report does not pass the smell test. their major finding is

The biggest west Antarctic glacier, the Pine Island Glacier, is moving 40 percent faster than it was in the 1970s, discharging water and ice more rapidly into the ocean, Summerhayes said. The Smith Glacier, also in west Antarctica, is moving 83 percent faster than it did in 1992, he said.

But where do they get those "1970s" and "1992" numbers when the GPS technology to measure this has only recently been deployed? But even liars such as these have some respect for the truth, so they say things like

"There's some people who fear that this is the first signs of an incipient collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet," Summerhayes said.

The "first signs" of "incipient." That's redundant, and therefore meaningless. They admit that temperatures in Antarctica average 50 degrees below zero, so global warming could not be the cause of whatever it is that is happening there. Then they like to say things like this:

Antarctica's average annual temperature has increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.56 degrees Celsius) since 1957, but is still 50 degrees Fahrenheit (45.6 degrees Celsius) below zero, according to a recent study by Eric Steig of the University of Washington.

and this:

Summerhayes said sea levels will rise faster than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group set up by the United Nations.

But he never mentions that global sea levels have risen by exactly zero so far, and the 1990 IPCC report models had sea levels rising by quite a bit by now, and that hasn't happened either.

So they go down to the South Pole every year, spending money doled out to them for previous gloomy scenarios, and they find more doom and gloom to report. The glaciers are moving faster, they say, but they have no idea why. They figure that it must be due to lower snowfall, since temperature is not really down enough to make any difference. We are expected to merely read the headlines, and pray that the geniuses in congress will bail us out of this terrible catastrophe in the making.

In other words, business as usual in the ECO global warming fraud.

A Little Bit of Climate Fact

A Little Bit of Climate Fact

In the rush to lock in budgets and restrictions on human activities before the fraud is obvious to all, Greenies meet and discuss their cherry picked "facts" about global climate. In an essay by Dutch journalist Karel Beckman called 'Confessions of a Climate Doubter' that has been published in the 'European Energy Review' the following facts are discussed:

The Prime Minister of the Pacific Island of Tuvalu calls global warming a ‘slow and insidious form of terrorism against us’, but you would not know from going to a COP conference that sea levels at Tuvalu have not risen for at least 35 years. You would not know that according to the Swedish sea level specialist Nils-Axel Mörner, there is no long-term trend in global sea level whatsoever, or that according to generally accepted research, there has been no accelerated rise in sea levels as a result of global warming. You would not know that the number of droughts has decreased rather than increased in the world over the past century. You would not know that coastlines are not shrinking; that Antarctic ice is not melting; that some glaciers are melting but others are advancing; that the number and strength of hurricanes has not increased; that polar bears are not being threatened; that sub- Saharan Africa has been subject to droughts for many centuries and it is hard to find any trends in the occurrence of droughts there; that more people die because of cold winters than of hot summers; that climate is not a factor in the spread of malaria; etcetera, etcetera. Indeed, you would not know that on December 11, 2008, the one but last day of the Poznan conference, the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee put out a report announcing that ‘more than 650 international scientists dissent over man-made global warming claims’, including some highly respected scientists from prestigious institutions. Those are the inconvenient truths that the climate change advocates prefer to ignore.

Zero Base thinkers do not ignore inconvenient facts. They consider the evidence as it becomes available, and they change their beliefs when new facts make former "truth" to be incorrect. There are far too few zero base thinkers in the world of climate hysteria.

Eco-fraud on Forests

Eco-fraud on Forests

Today's WaPo has an article on how the poor defenseless forests in The Amazon basin are being burned down by marauding farmers who want the land to selfishly produce food and shelter for the undeserving people of Brazil. Very sad story, all about how mere human hunger is allowed to destroy beautiful forests and drive innocent Beetle species into extinction. Nice.

But, just a few days ago the NYT reported on an amazing fact - that for each acre of forest destroyed worldwide, thirty acres of previously cleared land returns to the forest state. It seems that advances in agriculture and demographic changes are reducing pressure on forests everywhere.

Mere facts will not deter the Eco-fraudsters, however, probably due to the fact that theirs is a political movement, concerned chiefly with the attainment of power. Fooling their constituency, through placement of articles such as these, is merely the means to that power.