It's Good to be King; President Obama's Massive Fossil Fuel Motorcade and Your Carbon Footprint

Write On Nevada, the blog from NPRI (whose office is just over the fence from the UPS facility at which the President spoke), has video of the 22-car fossil-fuel motorcade the President used to exit the event.



The President's speech was a shorter (thankfully!) version of the State of the Union that can be summed up in a few words: green energy, Bush tax cuts, Warren Buffett's secretary.

Mostly it was about "green" energy. And bashing his opponents, of course. There are so many contradictions in the President’s words and actions, even apart from the massive carbon footprint required to deliver this speech, it’s hard to keep up with them. But the bottom line is he’s throwing away taxpayer money on green dreams while simultaneously reducing our ability to keep the lights on and the economy humming. As fast as his administration is reducing our supply of energy, if the economy were where it should be we might be in trouble.

The President claimed in the SOTU and on Thursday that he wants everyone to play by the same rules. But he’s willing to change the rules, providing corporate welfare to favored companies and favored industries, regardless of the amount of taxpayer money flushed down the drain.

Most people know about the Solyndra debacle. Less well-known is Ener1. And, as the NPRI video mentions, locally a solar panel facility in North Las Vegas that received $5.9 million in stimulus money announced this week it was laying off 200 workers.

The President also claimed in the SOTU and on Thursday that he supports an “all-in, all-of-the-above” energy strategy. But the regulatory policies his administration is pursuing belie that. “All” doesn’t mean “all” and the most cost-effective sources are not included.

Last week, in a sop to radical environmentalists, he killed the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring millions of barrels of oil from Canada to American refineries. Not to mention tens of thousands of jobs to people who need them. As gas prices continue to rise he cut off a potential source of huge amounts of safe and affordable energy.

First Energy announced recently it was closing 6 coal-fired power plants and taking nearly 3,000 MW of energy off the grid because it was more cost-effective to shut those plants down than to comply with upcoming EPA regulations. Don't forget the three planned for Nevada, providing about 3,500 MW, that will never be built. It'll take hundreds of square miles of solar panels to make up for those losses. At a time when our energy needs are increasing we are reducing our ability to fill them. Once again we repeat, are you ready for the day the lights go out?

There is also a growing skepticism in the scientific community about the necessity of such a radical shift in our energy policy. First, many of the “scientists” who have pushed global warming have acted in very un- and anti-scientific ways. They have refused to share data, manipulated results and bullied those who have the temerity to question conclusions or even to suggest the requirements of the scientific method have some relevance to this area of study.

This morning, a group of scientists penned a heretical op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled No Need to Panic About Global Warming.

Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

But that doesn’t suit the agenda of left-leaning politicians and bureaucrats who want to be able to control everything and everyone. Nor does the hands-off approach fit the view of leftists who believe that nothing good or beneficial or innovative has ever, or can ever, come without massive direct involvement and control by government. For them, global warming or climate change or whatever the current term is is simply a convenient vehicle to inject more government control over those of us who don’t know what’s good for us.

So we will continue to have the absurd displays like the one on Thursday, in which someone with a carbon footprint large enough to cover a small city lectures the rest of us about the need to shrink our size-8's. All the while taking our tax money to dole out to his cronies. And trying to convince us that all of this is for our own good.