A look from the left

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The far left giddy and feeling the leg tingle concerning a portion of the budget dealing with energy. The Center For American Progress, in a post entitled “Energy Budget Is Sunlight After Eight Years of Darkness” says:

Energy Budget Is Sunlight After Eight Years of Darkness

By Daniel J. Weiss | February 26, 2009

President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2010 budget builds on the $91 billion of clean energy investments in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to continue investing in clean energy programs to create jobs, increasing national security, and reducing global warming. The new budget would also increase supplies of domestic oil and gas while eliminating some tax loopholes for big oil companies. (A big lie. Why don't they tell you the entire story? What will this plan do to the prices you pay at the grocery? The gas station? At the mall? For clothes? For everything you need for basic survival?)

The most significant energy proposal in this budget is the inclusion of revenue in 2012 from the auction of all greenhouse gas emission allowances to major polluters under a cap-and-trade system. The budget assumes that this program will raise $646 billion between 2012 and 2019. Some of these funds would create jobs via a $120 billion investment in clean energy technologies over the same period. The auction revenue would pay for a "global warming tax cut" for working families with $526 billion. It would fund Making Work Pay, which provides a refundable income-tax credit for low-income working families. Any remaining funds would go to other families and businesses to offset higher energy prices. (In other words, The Center For American Progress believes that adding huge additional costs onto the already high cost of producing goods, services and energy will “create jobs” to offset those lost apparently. And the money collected will be redistributed to make things fair.)

The cap-and-trade revenue in the budget demonstrates that President Obama heeds warnings from scientists that we must adopt a greenhouse gas reduction program now to stave off the worst economic and security impacts of global warming. Inaction would harm our economy, security, and environment. As he promised during the campaign, Obama’s budget advocates a program that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent by 2080.

Congress must work with the administration to promptly adopt a program to significantly slash greenhouse gas pollution. This would reduce the threat of fiercer storms, longer droughts, deeper floods, more smog, and new tropical diseases that scientists predict will occur without action. Global warming threatens our security as well: Warmer temperatures could lead to increased international instability due to drought, famine, and coastal flooding. This is why defense experts have called global warming a “threat multiplier.”

The budget also proposes tackling another long neglected problem—our inadequate, inefficient electricity transmission system. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes $17 billion for new transmission and smart meters to increase the reliability and efficiency of electricity transmission and use. The budget builds on this investment with funds for research and development of smart grid and electricity storage technologies. Congress must reform the transmission planning, siting, and funding processes to ensure that these funds are well spent.

Another area covered in the budget is a plan to develop a more effective nuclear waste disposal process. The transportation and disposal of high-level nuclear waste remains a major environmental threat. The proposed Yucca Mountain storage facility poses a real risk of truck accidents or railroad derailments that could cause catastrophic nuclear waste spills en route. Yucca is also too small to store waste produced in the future.

An essential part of the Obama energy budget is to end tax breaks and recover lost royalties from big oil companies. The big five oil companies—BP, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—made profits totaling $666 billion during the eight years of the Bush administration. Much of this money came from middle-class households that were forced to pay record prices for gasoline. The budget would raise $32 billion over 10 years by closing these loopholes. (Get ready for huge spikes in gas prices, food prices and everything else that is delivered to market and uses any type of fuel to produce. But your financial hardship means nothing to these leftist bastards.)

The proposed budget would also ensure a continued supply of domestic oil and gas from leases held by big oil companies, partially by including a new fee “on non-producing leases in the Gulf of Mexico.” This should spur oil companies to either develop or return leases. (Total bull****, the propaganda and spin are running in overtime with these folks.)

President Obama’s proposed energy budget is a ray of sunshine after an eight-year blackout. Congress must now make this clean energy future a reality. (They are determined to push this lie down your throat and the cost be damned.)

Daniel J. Weiss is a Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progess.

link to far left site.

As so-called members of the “reality based community”, you have to wonder if they’ve ever bothered taking off the rose colored glasses and glanced around the real world. No they are sitting around singing kumbaya.

Alan Wood inAustralia ask:

“CAN the Senate save Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong from their global warming folly? It can, and it might, if it rejects the Government’s attempts to prematurely lock Australia into a flawed carbon trading scheme. Ask yourself, do you believe that the worst global recession since the Depression, with job losses accelerating, is the time for Australia to introduce a carbon trading scheme that will squeeze growth, jobs and investment? Business certainly doesn’t.”

Is there anyone in the Congress who can do the same for Barack Obama? Probably not, hell no. Do they understand that the carbon trading schemes in place around the world are literally melting down? Again, probably not they are “true believers”.

Jobs, what about jobs? Take a look right here at home and you can learn from the impact of the draconian regulations and resultant costs imposed on industry by such schemes and what that means. California, as usual, provides the case study: link

California regulators Thursday adopted the world’s first mandatory measures to control highly potent greenhouse gases emitted by the computer manufacturing industry. “The financial impact is going to be severe,” Gus Ballis, a spokesman for chip maker NEC Electronics America Inc., a subsidiary of NEC Electronics Corp. in Japan, told the board. Ballis warned, “We’re potentially on the chopping block — whether they are going to keep us or pull our production back to Japan.”

Take a look around elsewhere:

The painful loss of 1850 jobs at Pacific Brands in NSW, Victoria and Queensland is more than a byproduct of the global recession. The main reason for shifting to China, chief executive Sue Morphet said on Wednesday, is that manufacturing in Australia “is no longer a competitive advantage” to the company. The Prime Minister owes it to businesses large and small, as well as to Labor’s core constituency, workers, to re-evaluate the impact on employment of his emissions trading scheme, especially in mining, where Australia has such a strong comparative advantage.

Biofuels? Fail:

The German biofuels industry is facing bankruptcy according to their industry association, despite millions of state-sponsored subsidies in recent years. “It is five to twelve, but few politicians understand,” said the chairman of the Association of German Biofuel Industry (VDB), Kurt Stoffel. “The biodiesel market for trucks has come to a complete halt,” said Stoffel.

Reality dawning?

Britain said on Thursday it backed the building of new coal plants and would make a decision soon on whether these must have expensive, climate-friendly technologies fitted called carbon capture and storage (CCS). “We will need new fossil fuel plants including coal if we are going to maintain diversity in energy mix and energy security….”,

Yet here we are getting ready to implement a scheme that is already seen to be worsening the economic conditions around the world (and being abandoned by those reeling the losses). Unsurprisingly our implementation would most likely occur just as we are beginning to see an end to the recession.

This administration certainly seems to be aware of the cost of such legislation but still plans on pursuing it:

Steven Chu, President Barack Obama’s new Secretary of Energy, told The New York Times earlier this month that reaching agreement on emissions trading legislation would be difficult in the present recession because any scheme to regulate greenhouse gas emissions would probably cause energy prices to rise and drive manufacturing jobs to countries where energy was cheaper.

Yet, with blinders fully in place, and giddy at the prospect of sticking it to evil corporations while redistributing their ill-gotten gains, the left applauds a plan which will cripple our economy for decades to come.

If ever there were budget proposals poised to send us into darkness, it is this plan put forward by the Obama administration.