As the price of oil shoots through the roof because of political instability, and the inability of the Obama Administration to say yes to Canadian oil and thousands of jobs, we have to turn to other energy sources. Fortunately, there’s a cleaner and safer opportunity in natural gas right here in the United States

But some Chicken Littles in the environmental panic industry are preventing people from heating their homes and driving up the cost of electricity, while simultaneously denying needed jobs in the worst unemployment in decades. They claim to have found environmental damage in the process to retrieve the gas from shale deposits – called hydraulic fracturing, but the short answer is they’re wrong. The long answer is that they’re really fracking wrong: hydraulic fracturing is safer, cleaner, and cheaper than any of our current alternatives; and that’s just what’s scares these pseudo-scientists.

We must look at the scientific facts before making a policy decision, and the facts about shale gas, when you cut through a great deal of disinformation, are simple. First, it’s less expensive than the fossil fuel alternatives. At $66 per megawatt-hour, natural gas beats the dirtier and more dangerous coal, which costs around $90 per MWh. It even costs less than solar, wind (off and onshore), nuclear, oil and bio-diesel.

And shale gas doesn’t just save money, it saves lives. On average, fifty to sixty coal miners die every year. Every miner must wear artificial breathing apparatus to protect them in case of a disaster, disasters which happen with alarming frequency. Explosions, cave-ins and methane leaks combine to make coal mining the most dangerous job in the United States today.

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From The Washington Times:

The Environmental Protection Agency’s internal watchdog said Wednesday the Obama administration cut corners in evaluating the science it used to back up its finding that carbon is a dangerous pollutant that can be regulated under existing federal law.

The report by the EPA’s inspector general is certain to be used in court by those seeking to overturn EPA’s claim that it can write global-warming rules under existing law and doesn’t need new authority from Congress.

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Because of the overwhelmingly positive response to my initial manifesto from my fellow Liberals, I’ve decided to expand it.  In addition, it appears my first article was mistaken for satire of some kind.  I can assure readers I am quite serious.  I am a reborn Liberal and these are my solutions for fixing everything.

Global Warming

The science is settled.  Mankind is indeed killing itself, just as I knew would happen when I voted for Mondale in 1984.  Admittedly, I thought the apocalypse would result from a nuclear war back then.  I was close.  Things would indeed get really hot, but strictly from greenhouse gas emissions, not from thousands of nukes going off all at once.  According to the totally balanced summary provided by Wikipedia, carbon dioxide causes 9% – 26% of the greenhouse effect.  The way I see it, if we can wipe out just this portion of the greenhouse emissions alone, we can make a serious dent in the warming trend.

Now, follow me on this next part — every time a human being exhales, he emits carbon dioxide.

The solution is obvious — we need to mandate less exhaling.  So, five times a day, every day, at the exact same time that Muslims stop for their prayers, everyone around the world should hold their breath for a good 90 seconds or so.  If you own a corporation, you have to hold your breath twice as long.   I think even Conservatives will get on board with this because it gives lip service to that whole personal responsibility garbage they buy into.

Additionally, it appears that methane accounts for 4% – 9% of greenhouse emissions.   The solution here is so simple I’m shocked that my fellow global warming alarmists have not figured it out already.

We need less farting.

I know everyone’s primary concern is about diet, but nobody has to give up beans. The farmers shouldn’t suffer just because people need to toot less.  We can have the USDA issue “fanny corks” to every American, free of charge.  Enforcement is easy.  The TSA already has experience inspecting private areas, so Janet Napolitano can just issue a decree expanding their powers.  It will also help with job growth, because we’ll need an army of TSA employees to check fanny corks, particularly in heavily populated urban areas.

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The Washington Post has a predictable, propagandistic lead Monday editorial — “Climate change underscored: A new report leaves little room for doubt” — that merits a fisking for the prominence given such admittedly non-newsy, if wildly spun and internally inconsistent, repetitiveness (emphases added throughout):

“CLIMATE CHANGE is occurring, is very likely caused by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”

So says — in response to a request from Congress — the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, the country’s preeminent institution chartered to provide scientific advice to lawmakers.

Ah, so — the implication is clear — it is a panel of scientists; wait, not just scientists, but climate scientists, and worthy of description as ‘preeminent’. But, then, the piece continues oddly without elaboration on this hint:

In a report titled “America’s Climate Choices,” a panel of scientific and policy experts also concludes that the risks of inaction far outweigh the risks or disadvantages of action.

Well, as Hoover fellow Paul Gregory notes, prompted by similar slop from the New York Times, “Of the first eight names, only one appears to be a climate scientist. The others are engineers, lawyers, and public policy types”.

But of course, we’re used to these gents being railroad engineers (the IPCC’s chief scientist, Rajendra Pachauri) and anthropology teaching assistants (see the IPCC ‘world’s leading climate scientists’). By the next paragraph, however, surely the reader would begin wondering what is such a panel of scientists doing making these recommendations, which are in fact policy calls?

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What else can one say about this?

Governor Christie to Talk Global Climate Change with Scientists

Governor tells NJ Environmental Federation his original doubts were due to not having a “fully formed opinion.”

The Republican governor, who caused a stir when he told a town hall meeting he was unsure about the science of global warming, plans to sit down this week with a couple of climate change scientists recommended by the New Jersey Environmental Federation.

As I have noted, translated, the latter means a Castro toady and some of his pals.

Wait, lemme guess: his doubts arising from an unfully formed opinion have evaporated under further scrutiny, making this the first time further scrutiny led to siding with the global warming movement?

Er, maybe. There’s another option, and that’s that he’s seen the New Hampshire Senate fold like a cardboard suitcase on withdrawing from the RGGI regional cap-n-trade energy tax and has decided to throw in with the go-along-to-get along crowd. In his defense, and not much of one, one could say as Andrew Dice Clay once did about a famous painting I won’t mention here as it would make the gag’s crudeness too obvious: he needed the money.

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The Senate will, one presumes, finally vote either this week or next to block EPA from imposing President Obama’s ‘other way to skin the cat’ of Kyoto-style energy rationing, by using the Clean Air Act – a law that EPA’s own public filings inescapably acknowledge was never intended for such purpose. What will be at stake is little less than the rule of law itself.

Policy sanity also stands to take a beating, or else gain a new lease on life. The United States derives over 80% of its total energy from the three fossil fuels now being regulated by the Clean Air Act on the basis of EPA’s Endangerment Finding, which by design strangles our ability to use them.  Further, the Obama Administration has in effect decided that the EPA knows how to run the U. S. economy.

With über-green Germany, even nuke-happy France, appearing set to ramp up their coal use in the wake of Japan’s nuclear incident, the first rational response would be to call off EPA’s war on coal. Not to fight like mad to preserve and advance it.

But fight like mad to preserve and advance this war on coal is what the administration and its Senate enablers are doing.

And as George Mason University professor of science and public policy Thomas Lovejoy said in an astonishing admission to the Washington Post not long ago, in the context of this very Obama Power Grab:

“When Congress resists action on pressing environmental issues, regulation provides a way forward”.

Actually, no. Our Constitution – so quaint and outdated according to certain quarters though it may be (it’s still better than whatever it is we have today) – makes it quite plain that it is only when Congress decides to act that agencies have a way forward.

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If you don’t believe that Obama and his administration’s over-reach on so-called climate change costs America jobs, then how to explain even Labor bailing on Obama and the Democrats?

Unable to pay off the Environmental lobby through legislation, Obama’s EPA is looking for every opportunity to end-run Congress by enacting stringent and un-neccesary new regulations.

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration’s environmental agenda, long a target of American business, is beginning to take fire from some of the Democratic Party’s most reliable supporters: Labor unions.

And it isn’t only Labor. The American people as a whole have turned cold to the notion of climate change. Unfortunately, just as we saw with the passage of ObamaCare, this administration isn’t going to allow democracy in the form of the American people to get in the way of their kowtowing to special interest groups, be it the health care lobby, or the far-Left environmental movement in this case.

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who are worried about global warming has fallen to nearly the historic low reached in 1998, a poll released Monday showed.

This has resulted in a House panel acting today to begin to tell the EPA, no way!! Unfortunately, the battle isn’t over and we’ll need to be especially mindful of how the Senate may eventually behave.

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It may just be wishful thinking but Politico’s ‘Morning Energy’ today was dropping heavy hints they expected President Obama to use this morning’s presser to defend against any culpability of his policies in ’skyrocketing’ gas prices.

Yeah, any such connection between Obama policies and energy prices is a pretty hard case to make, what with the Obama administration having immediately upon taking office canceled oil and gas leases, placed more areas off limits for domestic exploration and production, changing the Minerals Management Service to an offshore windmill permitting agency since all we need is some offshore windmills (not one but two senior administration officials have said this, including a cabinet secretary), then not letting the Gulf spill ‘go to waste’ by seizing it to strangle our biggest domestic source of oil.

Of course, there is also that long trail of aspirational comments, well beyond vowing to cause electricity prices to ’skyrocket’, indicating this steady gas price hike is their objective, even if overseas developments are causing problems for them [helping the rise advance too quickly such that people pay attention, with these developments adding to the price hikes the admin have built in, with much more obviously undone but hopefully on the way]. As I detailed with many more admissions ten months ago in Power Grab.

Obviously, this is one of the items worrying Team Obama, along with their foreign policy fecklessness. And — in lieu of gimmickry to redirect voters’ gazes from policies that contribute to this, such as by releasing Strategic [NB: not 'Political'] Petroleum Reserve crude — Obama cheerleaders (like Politico) note he could take the opportunity to push his “Clean Energy Standard”.

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This week, National Journal asked a rather interesting question this that implied it head has been fully tucked in the sand when it comes to recognizing the long term implications of Obama’s environmental policy.

As the EPA readies itself to enforce a handful of rules limiting carbon emissions – a backdoor Cap and Trade policy known as the “Tailoring Rule,” which severely and arbitrarily limits the amount of greenhouse gas emissions many industries are now allowed to produce – the National Journal sleepily wonders what the effect these rules will have on the affected industries.

There are a few responses that take a theoretical approach to the question, but National Journal and it’s guests don’t have to go far to look for a real answer, supported by research. According to a study published recently by the National Alliance of Forest Owners, the Tailoring Rules will have a definite – and immediately felt – negative impact on the economy.

A newly released economic impact study finds that the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Prevention of Significant Deterioration and Title V Greenhouse Gas Tailoring Rule” jeopardizes over 130 renewable energy projects, between 11,000 and 26,000 green jobs, and $18 billion in capital investment across the country. The risk of reduced capacity also could prevent as many as 30 states from meeting national renewable energy targets.

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Buried beneath the avalanche of press coverage about the lame-duck Congress, I found a story about President Obama’s mid-December meeting with twenty corporate CEOs. The purpose of this Blair House get-together was to discuss how to jump-start our still-ailing economy. Among other aims, Mr. Obama reiterated his goals to increase employment, end the recession, and double U.S. exports over the next five years.

These are lofty and laudable ambitions. But it seems that Mr. Obama’s regulatory bureaucrats haven’t gotten the memo. For example, consider the counter-productive impact of their efforts on agriculture.

As any shopper knows, food prices this past year have been rising faster than the overall rate of inflation. “Fears of a global food crisis swept the world’s commodity markets as prices for staples such as corn, rice and wheat spiraled after the U.S. government warned of ‘dramatically’ lower supplies,” the Financial Times reported in early October. “There is growing concern among countries about continuing volatility and uncertainty in food markets,” said World Bank president Robert Zoellick later that month. “These concerns have been compounded by recent increases in grain prices.”

Confronting this looming food-supply crisis is the American farmer. His productivity is such that the United States is the world’s largest agricultural exporter, with $108.7 billion in farm products shipped abroad in 2010. Helping him increase the supply of agricultural products is the key to addressing both rising food prices and global shortages. His productivity is also critical to our country’s broader economic recovery.

So, you would think that the administration’s apparatchiks would be doing whatever they can to remove the regulatory impediments that farmers face. But you would be wrong. Consider several ways in which federal regulators are threatening agricultural productivity, both directly and indirectly.

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A video is circulating online that imagines what modifications the infamous California Air Resources Board (CARB) would make to Santa and his traditional reindeer-drawn sleigh if they had the ability to regulate Christmas, with hilarious results:

CARB and the far-fetched ideas they frequently propose are a frequent target of scorn, but they really make it easy.  When it comes to unintentional humor, CARB is the gift that keeps on giving.

Included in CARB’s re-fit of Santa’s sleigh:

•     Changing the sleigh into a bobsled – much more aerodynamic.

•     Ditching the gifts in the back; they’re really cutting into the sleigh’s “miles per hoofbeat.”

•     Red might be Santa’s traditional color, but according to CARB darker colors attract too much heat.  Pale pink is just like red…almost.

•     To reduce horse- (or in this case reindeer-) power, at least four of the Dasher and Prancer crowd would find themselves unemployed come Christmas.

•     Rudolph is allowed to stay on the team, but only if he swaps his glowing red nose for an energy efficient light blub.

•     Santa should really skip the cookies and milk so he can shed a few pounds.

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This week the EPA celebrates its 40th birthday. In honor of the occasion, they’ve launched a dedicated website called EPA@40, and it’s head, Lisa Jackson, will take off on a week-long party circuit designed to “highlight the impact of [the EPA's] efforts to clean up the air Americans breathe and the water they drink and the communities they live in” as well as her agency’s crusade to attend to “the unfinished business of the environmental movement.”

What started as a way to help the government respond to environmental disasters and spread conservation awareness, however, has metastasized into a bloated, over-reaching disaster of it’s own, championing extensive governmental intervention, curbing freedoms and, most recently, costing hard-working Americans their jobs, all in the name of preserving the environment.

In the midst of an economic downturn, the EPA will once again retool it’s famous, founding Clean Air Act, rewriting the historical legislation to suit Obama’s own bureaucratic needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020. Sounds fantastic, right? Well, it’ll have a devastating effect on the private sector:

Achieving that level of reduction in greenhouse gases won’t be easy or cheap. This immense new burden on the private sector comes at precisely the wrong time for an economy still struggling to create new jobs and reduce near double-digit unemployment…The cost estimates are indeed staggering, according to an econometric study by the Manufacturers Alliance that projects more than 7.3 million lost jobs by 2020. The hardest-hit states include Texas, which would lose 1.7 million jobs, and Louisiana, with 938,000 positions lost. Others include California (846,000), Illinois (396,000) and Pennsylvania (351,000). Total losses would reduce the nation’s gross domestic product by $1.7 trillion, according to the Manufacturers Alliance.”

Of course, these new standards wouldn’t just affect isolated industries or particular states.

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Environmental Protection Agency officials Wednesday provided power companies and states with new guidance on EPA’s plans to regulate greenhouse gases.

A D.C. lobbyist for two major power companies told Bloomberg News that “the energy and manufacturing sectors will essentially be in a construction moratorium” as a consequence.

Here we are, with 15 million Americans unemployed and millions more underemployed, and the EPA is moving blindly ahead with new regulations that will increase dramatically the energy costs of U.S. industries, reducing their competitiveness and profitability, and making it less likely they will hire.

EPA’s action amounts to rewriting the Clean Air Act to suit its own bureaucratic and ideological objectives. At a time when the Obama administration should be focused on job creation and the nation’s economic recovery, promulgating stringent new environmental rules should be its last priority.

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As some may recall, the filibuster-proof Senate did not move on cap-and-trade. In the past four years of Senate control, they did not try to ratify the US-signed, never unsigned Kyoto Protocol. Even after the filibuster-proof majority was lost by just a vote, the Senate failed to lift a finger to consider cap-n-trade. There just weren’t enough Democrats willing to buy in, or risk their jobs on this folly.

As my colleague Myron Ebell put it in Politico:

“The American people figured out that cap-and-trade was code for higher energy prices and reacted with righteous fury when House Members [passed the bill before going] home after the vote for the Fourth of July recess. After hearing the outcry, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to postpone Senate debate on cap-and-trade and instead take up health care reform, which enjoyed much more public support.”

Funny ’cause it’s true.

So, naturally, over the weekend the Washington Post op-ed pages spilled forth the ritual line: It’s those mean Republicans wot done it. And boy are they blowing it.

So goes today’s argle bargle from Team Soros, acting out in response to the election and seeing their incremental progress toward energy rationing about to be swept aside. Now, after failing in a Left-wing cram-down, they wag their fingers and lecture us that the global warming agenda really should be a conservative priority but, hey, if we’re willing to cede the ground to them they’re more than happy to take credit! Don’t know what you’re missing! Although this will continue for two years, it is already tiresome.

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July 20, 2010, Wall Street Journal “White House on Perpetual Tour to Boost Stimulus”

“President Barack Obama and top officials are stepping up the pace of their travel to promote the economic stimulus package to skeptical voters—particularly in states with close mid-term election contests in the fall. The White House has announced a total of 172 trips outside Washington, D.C., in which administration officials have discussed the stimulus package and its economic impact in the year and a half since the package was signed.”

July 20, 2010, The White House. Office of the Press Secretary “President Obama Expands Greenhouse Gas Reduction Target for Federal Operations”

Washington, DC – President Obama announced today that the Federal Government will reduce greenhouse gas pollution from indirect sources, such as employee travel and commuting, by 13% by 2020….

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E&E Daily reports that, speaking before a lobbying group gathered to promote more ethanol-style boondoggles (but for windmills), “Sen. John Kerry is predicting widespread support from electric utilities, chemical companies and Big Oil as he enters his seventh month of closed-door negotiations on a comprehensive energy and climate bill that still hasn’t made its way into public view.”

Along the way Kerry says some very silly things as putative lead author of this, the Senate’s cap-and-trade bill now being styled as an “energy” bill on the heels of a memo by pollster Stanley Greenberg that the public weren’t buying “cap-and-trade” or “global warming”. As quoted by E&E:

“Ironically, we’ve been working very closely with some of these oil companies in the last months,” Kerry said, referring to BP, ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell PLC. “And I want to tell you they’ve acted in good faith and they’ve worked hard with us to try to find a way to get us to a solution that meets all of our needs. And I believe, when we roll out a bill, and we will very, very soon, we’re going to have a unique coalition.”

Actually, Baptist and Bootlegger coalitions are not remotely unique, as Kerry presumably knows full well. But this whole setup has been telegraphed for some time, and I detail the whole scam, just in time, here.

The truth is that Kerry’s partner in drafting this bill, BP, lost the plot some years ago in its zeal to pretend it was “Beyond Petroleum” (check its balance sheet to see the reality). Working closely with none other than Enron, BP focused on getting the Kyoto treaty and cap-and-trade schemes with subsidies for their otherwise failing wind and solar boondoggles. Along the way BP chased out their most talented people by telling them the future lay elsewhere.

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is facing renewed criticism this week with scientists charging that the government arm inaccurately labeled ethanol a “renewable fuel” last February.

According to reports, at the same time that it revised its renewable fuel standards, the EPA also re-ran numbers relating to corn-based ethanol’s lifecycle emissions, and determined that ethanol was responsible for substantially less greenhouse-gas emissions than gasoline, thus allowing it to be redesignated as “renewable.”  But, scientists argue, the underlying data remained the same, and demonstrated that ethanol was not a “green” energy source.  Nonetheless, they charge, the EPA presented the data in a way that allowed for ethanol to be categorized in a different manner.  That, critics say, raises questions about the agency’s independence and pursuit of its mission, as opposed to execution of a political agenda.

According to Jeremy Martin, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Clean Vehicles Program, EPA’s decision to focus on anticipated biofuel emissions as of 2022 “distorts the picture of today’s biofuels.”  By 2022, the theory goes, corn crop yields will have increased and biorefining technology will be more efficient and green than it is today.  But for now, according to Joe Fargione, a scientist with the Nature Conservancy, “in the near term, natural-gas-powered, dry-milled corn ethanol production results in an increase of greenhouse gas emissions of 12 to 33 percent compared to gasoline.”  Worse yet, EPA’s analysis recognizes this.  However, ethanol has been redesignated, despite such indicators that it does not meet the renewable fuels criteria.

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This week (March 3, 2010) was the deadline Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA) set for Mark Crisson, President and CEO of the American Public Power Association (APPA), to explain why APPA is urging Senators to support Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s Congressional Review Act resolution to veto the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. The Senate may vote on the Murkowski resolution as soon as next week.

Now, aside from the merits of the issue, which I’ll get into in a moment, Waxman and Markey’s behavior is out of line. Waxman and Markey (W/M) are Members of the House of Representatives. What business is it of theirs if the APPA lobbies Senators about a bill pending in the Senate? Senators can conduct their own inquiries without any assistance from W/M. And why didn’t W/M copy Sen. Murkowski or at least Senate Energy Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) on their Feb. 25 letter to Mr. Crisson? Failure to “cc” any of the principals in the Senate flouts one of the most basic rules of legislative courtesy.

Besides being busybodies, Waxman and Markey are bullies.

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During his campaign for Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli committed himself to acting with an aggressive conservative agenda. He promised voters that he would the office to aggressively fight governmental overregulation and interference wherever he could find it.

In other words, he pledged to use the office of Attorney General for good, rather than evil. After just over one month in office, he’s off to one hell of a start.

Last week, AG Cuccinelli boldly petitioned the EPA to convene a proceeding to reexamine their “Endangerment Finding” which claims that human activity has increased atmospheric greenhouse gases to a point that people’s lives are at risk. As such, they claim, the federal government must impose new caps on emissions and other climate protection policies in the energy sector.

Cuccinelli believes, rightly, that regulations based on the findings of the EPA in this sketchy case would be both legally questionable and detrimental to Virginia’s economy. (Much of the research that the EPA has based these findings upon has come from the questionable climate-gate materials). Accordingly, the AG also has petitioned a federal appeals court to review the EPA’s findings.

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So the Washington Post reports that bin Laden is still furious about the U.S. causing global warming.

Al Jazeera, which originally broke the communiqué story, did so with a headline drawn from the Tiger Beat school of style: “Obama deplores climate change”.  AJ writes, “In an audio tape obtained by Al Jazeera, bin Laden criticised George Bush, the former US president, for rejecting the Kyoto pact and condemned global corporations.”

Oh, dear. We’re still on that kick again, one I think even the Post has dropped.

In 2002 Obama similarly parroted the Western media rant fashionable at the time that we “refuse[d] to sign the Kyoto agreement “, four years after Clinton signed it. Even the New York Times issued a correction, in November 2006.

Indeed the Post notes that “Bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warning in past messages, but the latest tape was his first dedicated to the topic.” OK. So he’s losing it. At least he didn’t invoke Haiti.

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