A study by the Congressional Research Service claimed that America’s supply of recoverable natural gas, oil, and coal is the largest on the planet. Furthermore, we have the ability to tap into an estimated 165 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Even with the current rate of consumption, our supply of oil is enough to fuel the country for at least the next 75 years. Even if we currently lack the infrastructure, the potential exists. And with the injection of revenue and capital investments from a nation as rich as ours, industry technology and innovation would increase likely lowering prices on extraction and production.

The powers that be, however, have a different view of these potentials. It is not a misunderstanding or differing arithmetic. Rather, it is ideologically and politically motivated. Democrats continuously marginalize America’s potential for domestic energy production. Their law makers, with the help of Obama’s pen and rhetoric, have declared war on energy. They chose to tax “Big Oil”, limit oil production and exploration, revoke leases for inland production and financially backbreaking businesses to drill on federally owned land. Democrats decry record profits made by the oil industries as evil and mislead the country to believe they are only leveling the playing field between consumer and producer. In actuality, the Earth-Democrats are engineering a sinister plan for blowback. A person who possesses even an elementary understanding of macroeconomics would know these added costs will simply be passed on to the consumer. Since the days of horse and carriage are long gone, and Americans still rely on oil and gas to commute and move produce across a country roughly the size of Europe, the market will survive out of necessity. That is until taxes on gas and mileage go up. The word is sabotage.

Ironically, these designs being crafted by Democrats and their power-circles are not being done to push American consumption and production inwards in the form of a tariff. It is all in the effort to force Americans into a product — unproven and unrealistic electric-hybrid cars — they do not want and will not buy when left to their own desires. By using American tax payers as pawns to wreck the oil industry, the Democrats will be able to create a new Green-unionized labor workforce that will carry us into a glorious second, Green-Industrial Revolution. Presumably, these noble workers will be able to construct energy efficient castles in the sky out of wind and solar power and subsidies.

The world, let alone America, can ill afford to become economically weaker which will certainly come to pass should these liberal visions be carried out. It is true America has a robust appetite for oil. We manage to consume 25 percent of the world’s oil production, while making up only 5 percent of the world’s total population. However, add the fact that American manufacturing produces over 25 percent of the world’s output, and we are far from the gluttonous consumer-only sloths the liberals constantly promote. Contrary to that strongly held belief, America still produces and presides over a potent and ever expanding manufacturing market. In fact, we have the most productive workers on the planet, the strongest economy, the most powerful military, and also manage to be the most scientifically advanced country in the world. In America each worker produces over $180,000 annually in manufactured goods. Our American workforce and productivity continues to tick upwards despite losing over 7 million jobs since 1970.

If Democrats are left to their desires, America will soon resemble Spain. Its government forced green jobs onto the economy and the result was for every one green job created, the private sector lost two.  Spain’s green industry caused energy prices to skyrocket and businesses found it too expensive to produce. The added costs were passed to the consumer and the economy naturally contracted. The result is an unemployment rate at 20 percent and political paralysis.

Spain was once deemed the leader in green jobs. Now they are the leader of unemployment in the EU. Reality must trump ideology. The fate of America depends on it.

When Dwayne Whitney started his trucking business decades ago he had only one truck. Today he has eighteen and 20 employees. But that’s about to change.

“The State of California says my trucks are killing people,” says Whitney. “What do you say to that?”

In a few years, new air quality regulations approved by the California Air Resources Board will render Whitney’s entire fleet illegal.

“New CARB rules are putting me out of business,” he says.

CARB claims that diesel particulates, a type of pollution emitted from buses and trucks, contributes to 2,000 premature deaths in California each year. But UCLA epidemiologist Dr. James Enstrom says the number should be closer to zero.

In 2005 Enstrom authored an extensive study that found no relationship between diesel particulates and premature deaths. He says his study, as well as other evidence that agrees with it, have been ignored by an agency bent on passing ever more stringent regulations regardless of their effect on California’s economy.

Enstrom blew the whistle on CARB for, among other things, failing to publicize that the lead author of the study that was used to justify the new regulations falsified his education history (he purchased his PhD from an online diploma mill).

But UCLA didn’t come to Enstrom’s defense. In fact, officials informed him that, after 34 years at the university, he was out of a job.

“The environmental regulation machine in powerful in California,” says Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which is defending Enstrom in the fight to keep his job. “When Dr. Enstrom went up against that machine he was retaliated against.”

A hearing that begins on April 4 will determine whether Dr. Enstrom keeps his job, and the final decision rests with UCLA Chancellor Gene Block.

Says Kissel, “If Dr. Enstrom loses his job because he exercised his academic freedom, then it’s a message to other researchers that you’d better not rock the boat because you might be next.”

Approximately 9 minutes.

“The Green Regulation Machine” is written and produced by Ted Balaker. Field Producer: Paul Detrick; Camera: Alex Manning, Hawk Jensen, Josh Swain, Austin Bragg.

Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions of this and all our videos and subscribe to Reason.tv’s YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new content is posted.

In fact — as I learned regarding Enron’s and BP’s pet projects, “carbon cap-and-trade” and related ‘green jobs’ schemes all designed to make uneconomic investments in windmills etc. pay off — sometimes the entire enterprise is Paul’s idea.

So it is that we see with deep pocketed gents now scrambling to protect their bets on uneconomic investments and rent-seeking schemes, by supporting the campaign to defeat Proposition 23 in California. Prop 23 would delay California’s climatically meaningless but economically suicidal state-level adoption of Kyoto agenda, called AB 32. Oddly, there is no condemnation of these bags of money being thrown at killing a ballot initiative, despite the opprobrium heaped upon those few who have dared venture in to help the “Yes” campaign.

This is a shame, for the question Cui bono? is so readily answered simply by scanning the growing list of those digging deep to make sure the ‘green’ gravy train of wealth transfers isn’t derailed (regardless of the fairly obvious economic consequences if they are successful, which in a rational world would be of great interest to a watchdog press).

Things are heating up in Cali, as we see with a Forbes blog post about some lefty billionaires — that would be the ‘good’ kind of billionaires to the uninitiated — picking up on this more detailed Grist item from last week. Both offer some insight about who stands to gain if the political class defeats the electorate’s uprising in the form of Prop 23.

That is to say, we see whose beaks just might have been wetted by AB 32, bizarrely hailed as a ‘world’s first’ greenhouse gas and ‘green economy’ law notwithstanding the train wrecks of similar plans piling up around us where the scheme has already belly-flopped. It should come as no surprise that these examples hail from throughout Europe’s more profligate basket cases like Spain, Ireland and Portugal.

From the Grist piece:

“Over the past few days, the No forces have collected $5 million from venture capitalists, New York financiers, renewable energy companies, and other deep-pocketed backers, according to California Secretary of State records….

Of course, Texas oil companies Tesoro and Valero and the billionaire Koch brothers, who earlier contributed $1 million to the Yes effort, could drop $10 million on the campaign tomorrow. But there appears to be a fundraising enthusiasm gap between the campaigns during the home stretch sprint to Election Day.

Take a look at the growing roster of No partisans willing to put their money where their mouths are — not to mention their self-interest.

Ann Doerr, the wife of leading Silicon Valley capitalist John Doerr, gave $1 million to the No campaign on Thursday while her husband contributed $500,000 (in addition to the half million dollars he previously donated). Thomas Steyer, founder of the Farallon Capital Management hedge fund and co-chair of the No on 23 effort, put another $2.5 million into the campaign. San Francisco venture capitalist Paul Klingenstein contributed $100,000.

On the other coast, New York hedge fund manager Julian Robertson of Tiger Management kicked in half a million dollars on Thursday.

Renewable energy companies stepped to the plate as well. The U.S. division of Spanish wind giant Iberdrola Renewables gave $25,000; Santa Monica-based Solar Reserve, a developer of solar power plants, pitched in $50,000; and Google executive Jonathan Rosenberg contributed $10,000.

The Consumers Union, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, and Working Assets also gave a collective $100,000 over the past week.”

The fear-mongering about what could happen is de rigueur in such contexts, but also note these latter parties cited, who remind us that this fashionable spin on central planning is coincidentally catnip to statists and ideologues. Also see, for example, the venture-cap guy Steyer whose website touts his “Core Investment Strategies“, one of which is “Value Investments“, which according to him means “securities …which are expected to appreciate in value due to a catalyzing event or a change in circumstances, including regulatory or legislative change, changing business models, …”.

All of which screams out that he’s probably, like the other deep pockets rushing to the rescue, putting his money where his money already is (yes, I’ve screenshot it). Someone might ask him if he’s ever had $5 million pay off like he’s hoping this $5 million will.

And now greenie trade press outlet Climate Wire reports that those seeking to keep the voters from taking this mismanaged issue from the political class have a 2-to-1 funding advantage. Oddly, this is precisely the opposite of the long-running story line employed to demonize citizen activism.

Regardless, these late-hour outbursts of panic that California’s newest stab at central planning might get scuttled does put a little more perspective on the cries that monied interests oppose it.

What they don’t want to discuss is that the “Yes on 23 campaign” has every appearance of having originated as a grassroots effort to delay a scheme that is proving a disaster everywhere it is tried. Which, of course, is why no one opposing Prop 23 is telling you to look at the successes elsewhere; but instead sputtering ‘world’s first’-type fibs.

So, as the opponents of Prop 23 have been shrilly claiming in lieu of substantive argument, people who might have money at stake support it, so you know it must be sinister. Peter, meet Paul, and goose, meet gander.

Such unseemly whimpering is about as credible as the greens’ phony “hacked emails!” outrage, over what was from all appearances a whistleblower releasing “ClimateGate” email evidence of dirty green tricks. These are the same crowd whose slimy green tactics include stealing my trash on a weekly basis and working with, e.g., the Guardian to dishonestly cobble together unrelated, out-of-context (unlike ClimateGate) excerpts from emails to paint a false picture. (“Greens involved in journalism process!”; sadly, the Guardian never called me for their “story” about, well, me, so I must confess I wasn’t involved).

Specifically, E&E notes how:

“the Washington Post reported yesterday that [Bracewell & Giuliani's Jeff Holmstead] and another former EPA official, Roger Martella, ‘helped craft the original amendment Murkowski planned to offer on the floor last fall.’…

Environmentalists pounced on the reports as evidence that coal and oil interests are behind Murkowski’s efforts. ‘We now have proof that lobbyists for Big Oil, dirty coal and other special interests are directly involved in recent attempts to bail out big polluters and gut the Clean Air Act,’ said a Sierra Club press release. ‘What’s more, these big polluter lobbyists are the same former Bush administration officials who completely disregarded the Clean Air Act and even disobeyed the Supreme Court for years.’

Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, said, ‘It’s pretty clear who’s supporting and behind Murkowski. It’s clearly the coal cabal and others who would try to block EPA from taking action.’”

Ahem. Yes, it’s pretty clear who’s behind what. Shall we set up shop outside the Environment and Public Works’ Majority offices to see who’s working on things, kids? To discover the horror that your team goes to the unconscionable lengths of asking outside experts for their expertise?

So, on top of raising again that uncomfortable little Enron thing, allow me refresh the greens’ memories about how terrible it is that industry be involved in the process:

United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) is a “Baptists and bootleggers” coalition of pressure groups like NRDC with mostly rent-seeking industry. like Duke Energy, Exelon and other energy players who’ve crafted a scheme for windfalls at your expense as their price for pushing Gang Green’s agenda.

Together, USCAP companies seek a pact with the governing class and ideologues to secure their own future and was even credited with providing the “blueprint” for the Waxman-Markey House cap-and-trade bill.

This according to that right-wing rag the Los Angeles Times in the article titled “Industry leaders join Obama on emissions limits: Companies want to help shape global warming legislation in Congress, figuring the right plan could help profits. Their support could be key to pushing it through”.

The paper acknowledged how USCAP companies helped to push this enormous energy tax hike past the finish line in the House, singling out Duke Energy and Alcoa for “marshaling votes on Capitol Hill, working behind the scenes with committee negotiators and providing what House leaders call a blueprint for compromise.” In his victory lap, bill co-author Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts cited this cynical profiteering-slash-toadying, calling their support “indispensable.”

E&E News failed to mention such matters. It does seem, however, that Big Green is very upset about the practice by its Big Business wing to be a key player in the Greens’ effort to impose the biggest tax increase in American history, and that we should renew our efforts to tell the public about this.

President Barack Obama declared Friday a “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough” had been reached among the U.S., China and three other countries on a global effort to curb climate change but said much work was still be needed to reach a legally binding treaty.

“It is going to be very hard, and it’s going to take some time,” he said near the conclusion of a 193-nation global warming summit. “We have come a long way, but we have much further to go.”

The president said there was a “fundamental deadlock in perspectives” between big, industrially developed countries like the United States and poorer, though sometimes large, developing nations. Still he said this week’s efforts “will help us begin to meet our responsibilities to leave our children and grandchildren a cleaner planet.”

The deal as described by Obama reflects some progress helping poor nations cope with climate change and getting China to disclose its actions to address the warming problem.

But it falls far short of committing any nation to pollution reductions beyond a general acknowledgment that the effort should contain global temperatures along the lines agreed to at a conference of the leading economic nations last July.

Read the whole article here.

No doubt the media will spin this as some important development and chalk up a point in Obama’s column. Make no mistake, however, this is a disaster for Big Green, Inc. Copenhagen had been planned to usher in legally-binding emission caps. An epic fail. A very Merry Christmas to all!

Now, Brand has written a new book, called Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, in which he takes on these environmental shibboleths in a more concerted fashion.  On American Public Radio’s Marketplace program yesterday, host Kai Ryssdal discussed the new book with Brand.  Asked what prompted him to write the book, Brand said that,

“My fellow environmentalists have been wrong about a couple of issues and were getting in the way of important things we should be doing, both with biotechnology and with nuclear technology, and in terms of how we think about cities, and in terms of how I know we’re going to think about geoengineering–that is, direct intervention in the climate.”

 

Ryssdal contrasted Brand’s earlier support for the back to the land movement with his current belief that big cities are better for the environment.

“Not only big cities, but big slums … that’s how [poor people in the developing world] are getting out of poverty.  They’re emptying out a lot of the subsistence farms that have been tough on the landscape all over the world, moving into towns for opportunity, building jobs for each other.  They’re also moving up what’s called the energy ladder, toward more and better grid electricity.  By and large the cities are probably the greenest thing that humans do.”

On his support for biotech crops, Brand said,

“Already, the crops we have now, the herbicide-tolerant and the insect-resistant crops … [are] getting what amounts to higher yields. You can raise more food on less land, and all of that is good for ecology in general and the climate particularly.”

Challenged that critics call them Frankenfoods, Brand replied,

“The idea there was that Dr. Frankenstein was doing something against nature, and that somehow the genetically engineered food crops are against nature.  And as a biologist, I’m just baffled by that line of argument because agriculture has been in that sense against nature for 10,000 years. That we’re finally able to do more precise tuning of the crops is a huge gain, not a loss.”

So naturally, when I see an email touting a “tribunal”, in Spanish though it may have been, I look closer. Courtesy of a translating software and a little cleanup work, here’s today’s missive from Friends of the Earth International. When reading it, recall how the International Criminal Court was hailed by academics and even our then-president as an environmental treaty. Recall how we are poised to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty which despite its name purports to regulate land-based sources such as transport and electricity generation, just like Kyoto except that it has its own court, one that has already shown its willingness to go rogue and set its jurisdiction ad hoc.

Then recall the poem commonly attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller, and wonder if you, too, might be the sort of criminal our woolly green friends are on the lookout for, even if you don’t yet know it. But don’t worry, past threats on the lives of “skeptic” scientists aside, it’s only “moral punishment” they seek to mete out. What that means, to be determined later:

NOTICE TO THE PRESS
Friends of the Earth International
October 14, 2009
First International Court of Justice Climate

Cochabamba, Bolivia, 14 October 2009 – With the aim of identifying and morally punish[ing] those who violate the environment, this 13 and 14, held the First International Audience Climate Justice in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and it is intended that the UN continue that work.

This initiative comes to the search for compromises and solutions world governments have not been able to achieve against Change Climate.

The initiative seeks to influence institutions like the Organization of the UN to step in the formation of courts  consider the crimes related to climate change, plus explore options for preserving the environment.

The court has received reports of at least ten people and nations indigenous descent, peasant movements and fishermen, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Brazil and Bolivia to be argued in hearings and reviewed by a panel of recognized social and environmental activists, including ecologist Richard Navarro, representing Friends of the Earth International.

“Rich countries must dramatically reduce their OWN greenhouse gas emissions already. That is the first step towards climate justice. Besides climatic and ecological debt must be recognized and paid. False solutions such as agrofuels are [NB: not?] acceptable,” according to Irene CENSAT Velez de Agua Viva (Friends of the Earth Colombia) and co-Coordinate of the Climate Justice Program of Friends of the Earth International.

The First International Climate Justice Court is also the result of an initiative to make Bolivian President Evo Morales, last September in a United Nations conference, in which proposed the establishment of a tribunal against the change climate, as permanent investigative body to governments and companies that pollute the environment.

The government of Evo Morales has shown a strong stance in defense of environment and Mother Earth and their negotiating positions United Nations on climate change have been very constructive, according to Friends of the Earth International.