Prometheus » Blog Archive » Waxman Markey Confuses Political Camps

With the environmental community split, the Republicans must be enjoying a good bit of satisfaction, despite the movement of the W-M bill out of committee. Going forward, the bill will require ever more compromises, and it is hard to see these actions winning more supporters to the bill from the environmental community.

Waxman Markey may well have taken its first steps toward a protracted death spiral, taking with it any semblance of consensus and coordination of the environmental community about what to do on climate change.

Waxman-Markey Clothier for the Emperor: A Climate Parable (response to RealClimate) — MasterResource

“Hear ye, hear ye, the Emperor is parading by with his new wardrobe of ideas to save the world from global warming—a wardrobe painstakingly crafted for him by the tailor shop of Waxman-Markey—and which all of you will soon have to adopt. All hail the Emperor!”

“But he has nothing on!” cried a small, but persistent voice. “His expensive ideas do nothing to change the climate!”

“Hush, little boy.” “Quiet!” “Shhhh.” “Shut up!” “That kid doesn’t see the whole picture!”

NC Media Watch: How we know a green job from just a job.

Wind turbines are considered green, but where does the job count begin and end. Since wind turbines towers are made of steel, do we count the steal producers as green jobs, even thought the steal making process ejected huge amounts of the CO2 into the environment. What about the concrete in the base of the turban platform? Are the cement makers green jobs, because they produce cement used on green projects? Does the crane operator that erects the wind turbine tower a green job. But, the next week he may be raising the smoke stack on a coal fired power plant. When do we start and stop counting when the crane operator is a green job and when he is not? The counting of green jobs is very subjective, and not very transparent. Do we need a green dictionary?

NC Media Watch, David Deming: Death of a Civilization

Our forefathers built a technological civilization based on energy provided by carbon-based fossil fuels. Without the inexpensive and reliable energy provided by coal, oil, and gas, our civilization would quickly collapse. The prophets of global warming now want us to do precisely that.

Like the prophet Mhlakaza, Al Gore promises that if we stop using carbon-based energy, new energy technologies will magically appear. The laws of physics and chemistry will be repealed by political will power. We will achieve prosperity by destroying the very means by which prosperity is created.

While Western Civilization sits confused, crippled with self-doubt and guilt, the Chinese are rapidly building an energy-intensive technological civilization. They have 2,000 coal-fired power plants, and are currently constructing new ones at the rate of one a week. In China, more people believe in free-market economics than in the US. Our Asian friends are about to be nominated by history as the new torchbearers of human progress.