Saturday, December 4, 2010

Another Eco-Scam Being Thrown Under the Bus?

You might not have noticed, but the successor of the Copenhagen Global Warming conference is happening right now in Cancun, Mexico.  Smart of the organizers to hold it in Cancun, to avoid the sudden appearance of blizzards during their meeting, though, if Al Gore makes an appearance, anything can happen.  Why no coverage?  Why no triumphal attendance by our Glorious President who said,"this is the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal"?

The Copenhagen summit, well covered by RTP&GG in this and other posts, was supposed to be the Global Warmingists' moist, hot, wet dream, where the wealth re-distributions craved by 1st World Socialists and 3rd World Dictators would be finally set in motion, to supposedly finance everyone's reduction of fossil fuel use, and would be signed by the planet's new savior, Jesus I mean, Barack Obama and implemented by the leaders of the world.  It ended in a shambles for reasons covered elsewhere on RTP&GG, and was the 2nd big failure by our One True Messiah after he was elected, and is certainly one of his biggest humiliations (an enterprising RTP&GGer could make a good article titled "The Humiliations of our Dear Leader").  What was supposed to be eco-socialists' crowning achievement actually was the point where the Global Warming movement nosedived into general discredit.  Now, no one is paying any attention to what those scammers are saying or doing in Cancun.  The MSM is avoiding it because it will remind everyone of one of Obama's first big failures, and the humiliation of one of their sacred shibboleths.

But, I'm not here to talk about Cancun.  I'm here to talk about how a tightening budget environment, and the new vigilance being shown on the Federal budget (by Tea Partiers, forced on politicians) is about to kick another huge eco-scam into the dustbin of history.  Ethanol (aka grain alcohol or everclear) now makes up 15% of the gas we put in our cars, by Federal decree, not by any economic value obtained.  It has been a major boon to corn farmers in the Midwest and around the world, who saw the price they got for corn skyrocket once ethanol was made mandatory.  Ethanol was supposed to be a boon to the planet, as it was a 'renewable resource' because of course, we can keep growing corn (the question of how much petroleum product is now used in fertilizer by agribusiness will not be pursued here).  And of course it was pitched that highly processing corn and burning alcohol was somehow being green.  As usual with eco-scams, the technology can't stand on its own feet on the economic merits: according to the Congressional Budget Office, taxpayers pay $1.78 for every gallon of ethanol
A report in mid-July by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said the subsidy is something of a boondoggle in part because a gallon of ethanol delivers two-thirds the energy content of a gallon of gas.

"Because 1.48 gallons of ethanol are required to provide as much energy as a gallon of gasoline, the 45 cent credit for each gallon of ethanol is equivalent to paying blenders 67 cents for each gallon of gasoline that ethanol displaces," it said.

In all, taxpayers pay $1.78 for every gallon when fuel is made from corn, CBO said.

These taxes are paid both in the direct purchase and in Federal taxes.   That's a lot of money being paid to make you feel warm and fuzzy about doing good things for the environment.  But how green is it?  Even its green attractiveness is finally being called into question, says a professor involved in a study by Stanford University: 


Prof. JACOBSON: Ozone that's formed is formed from the emissions of either ethanol vehicles or gasoline vehicles. And there - or have been technologies that have been introduced that have reduced the amount of ozone significantly. For example, the catalytic converter reduced the ozone. And there are other technologies that potentially could be used to reduce ozone further.

In fact, in this study we assumed there are going to be technological improvements. Just to put in perspective, gasoline vehicles in the United States kill about 10,000 people prematurely each year. Now, if we convert to ethanol, what I found was that this might increase slightly by about 200 deaths per year.

So it's not a large increase over gasoline. But the key is it's not an improvement over gasoline as has been suggested. The key is whether we can do a lot better than gasoline. And there are technologies out there that could eliminate all these deaths, particularly, battery electric vehicles where the electricity is provided by renewable energy such as wind and solar power. And also hydrogen fuel cell vehicles where the hydrogen is produced by wind and solar power and also hydroelectric geothermal power.
That study is not totally convincing to me I suppose.  His conclusions, that electrical powered cars are cleaner where the electricity is provided by renewable wind and solar power is utter bullshit, as there is no place in the United States where the majority or even a significant minority of power is provided by wind or solar power.  This casts doubt onto the believe-ability of the rest of the study, regardless of what prestigious academic institution produced it.  But, assuming he knows what he's talking about, your $1.78/gal in taxes for ethanol is going towards the great green good of killing 200 more people per year than regular gasoline.  I hope you feel good about that.  I wonder if the professor is including the starvation deaths from the increased food prices the ethanol project has produced.  Odd that he didn't mention a true green power: hydroelectric dams.  What's up with these agendas dudes?

Well, I'm wandering...Let's get back on track:
The Goreacle Himself, the snakeoil saleman to the world, has now made a shocking, if not surprising admission:
"One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president" in 2000.
Imagine, pushing a major change in our gasoline industry primarily to win votes through pork.  Tell me it ain't so, Al!  Next thing you say, is the whole global warming movement is a scam too!  Shocking, but not surprising.  Notice he said "made that mistake".  The mistake was pushing ethanol.  When Al Gore admits it's a mistake, you know the end is near.  [a small aside: credit Tennesseans for knowing a scam when the hear one: if Al Gore had been able to win in his home state in 2000, he would have been president.]  This particular pork project shoved pork to farmers, so probably a mostly Republican group of recipients.  So, of course the bottom will fall out of support for this as the Coastal libs will have no real (ie voter) reason to support it (from Hot Air):
Has the federal government’s appetite for ethanol ended? A bipartisan group of Senators signed a letter today calling for an end to subsidies and tariffs designed to protect and enhance domestic production of ethanol, which has been until recently the darling of the alternative-energy movement. In a sign of how far ethanol subsidies have fallen from favor, the letter addressed to both Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell has the signatures of such liberal luminaries as Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, and the newly-elected Chris Coons
When you've lost Barbara Boxer, you've lost the liberal base. Farmers cry, "goodbye sweet pork-laden scam, goodbye."

8 comments:

  1. Not an "eco-scam". Environmental groups have been campaigning against corn ethanol for years.

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  2. I looked on the Sierra Club's website and they are skeptical of corn-ethanol fuel. Taking the Sierra club as representing other major env groups, then these groups don't support using corn as fuel. But it is an eco-scam because it is being sold and mandated under the guise of saving the environment. The environmental movement has been taken over by radical communist. http://robinsontalkingpoints.blogspot.com/2009/05/environmentalism-as-vehicle-to-carry.html
    Loo at the leaders of the environmental movement that are in positions of power or influence.

    I remember seeing on the History channel a show about biofuels. It stated that to make 1 gallon of biofuel it takes between 0.9 or 1.2 gallons of traditional fuel.

    I disagree with Bud-D in that he is taking this current victory as representing a much broader victory that will change the course that the nation is currently on. The EPA will enact a cap and trade system by command as opposed to enacting it legislatively. The EPA still determines what cars we drive and the gov still determines the price of gas by artifically restricting our supply of oil. Electric cars are on the rise even though they are junk. And the budget is not tightening. Look at the deficit commission to see that it is a rip off and actually increases government spending and locks in a larger government as measured by its level of spending to GDP. States are about to go bust. http://www.cnbc.com/id/40517158
    "Mr. Rohatyn warned that while municipal bankruptcies were rare, they appeared increasingly possible. And the imbalances are so large in some places that the federal government will probably have to step in at some point, he said, even if that seems unlikely in the current political climate."
    So all of these problems/scams and the current road that the Nation and the world is on, have not magically gone away with the Republicans winning the house. The entire global economy is a scam and a magic show as it most of everything that our leaders are doing. Our leaders have sold us into slavery and destroyed our freedoms, or more accurately we have. Facts really don't matter anymore. Global warming and people like Al Gore are one of the biggest scams perpetrated against mankind and the scientific community. How many people know this? Not a lot.

    And professor Jacobson's study, how many more people would die as a result of doing away with gasoline vehicles without a viable alternative to them?

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  3. I don't and didn't deny that environmental groups are bailing on ethanol. In fact, I kind of implied that in the article. But, don't MAKE me go back and pull quotes from Al Gore and others when they were pushing this scam in the 80's and 90's.

    Jeff, it's a trend. 1st Global Warming frozen. Now ethanol subsided. It's not gonna happen all at once. We've got to keep the pressure on. No, it's not a guaranteed success. It will be a hard fight and we may fail. But, we've got things going our way at the moment.

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  4. I remember reading articles stating how that ethanol fuels can be bad for car engines.

    The recent developments in the ethanol issue are a good thing. The whole point that I was trying to make was that saving the planet or the EM is just one of many smokescreens or a way to disguise agendas that are unrelated to environmental issues: bigger governments, global redistribution of wealth, and a new world government as Gore and others have stated. These agendas are still being pursued under other disguises and still including the EM: the EPA will just enact the very same agendas without having to go through legislation. And global warming is now being called global climate change or climate disruption.

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  5. Climate disruption!?! That sounds terrible!! Is it worse?!?!

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  6. The term global warming does not describe the magnitude of the situation nor does it encompass all of the effects that man is having on the climate. "The White House wants the public to start using the term "global climate disruption" in place of "global warming" -- fearing the latter term oversimplifies the problem and makes it sound less dangerous than it really is." Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/09/16/white-house-global-warming-global-climate-disruption/#ixzz17YueRALR

    In the 70's global cooling was the big fear: "As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades."
    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html

    So basically they keep changing their story every time the climate changes. I wonder how the climate on Earth has changed in the past and how the climates on other planets have changed without man?

    Also from Rush Limbaugh's website: "Our official climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama at Huntsville is in Cancun, in Mexico. There's a global warming, United Nations conference going on there, and he is sending in dispatch reports to me every day. I got two notes from him today. He says it's the fourth record low in a row in Cancun this morning, 50 degrees. Ft. Lauderdale broke a 136-year-old record for cold last night or the night before. There is a freeze warning for south Florida because of crops. A bunch of beans were lost, have been lost because of cold weather.

    And Lord Monckton[the guy who stated that the people pushing climate legislation are pursuing a global government] is over in Cancun, and Dr. Spencer has talked to Lord Monckton. Lord Monckton is a big time realist, "denier." There is no man-made global warming. There might not be any global warming, period. He has seen, Lord Monckton has seen the draft version of the final agreement to come out of this summit, and Obama is selling us out.

    Obama, the US delegation, has agreed to as much as a 1.5%-of-GDP transfer of wealth every year to the United Nations. This, of course, is above and beyond the dues that we pay -- and this has always been the objective: Fleece the United States. This is just the starting number: 1.5%. This is all being done behind closed doors. Lord Monckton says, "The wording of the agreement is in bureaucratese. There are such terms as 'capacity building' by the UN, which means forming more bureaucracies. Mere mortals reading it don't see anything alarming.' Lord Monckton does. 'Where all the money will go to help climate change is not explicitly spelled out,' so it doesn't have to go to climate change. We're just gonna fork over 1.5% of our GDP, and we don't have the money! So it's starting.'"

    I read parts of a book called "Atmospheric Justice" whose basic premise was that wealth needs to be redistributed to combat global warming in the name of "fairness". When you hear that word, you had better watch out for cylinder shaped objects coming from behind.

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  7. Nothing happening in Cancun will come to anything, even if the Democrats still controlled Congress it wouldn't.

    I agree though: 1st: New Ice Age in the '70's, 2nd: Acid Rain in the '80's, 3rd: Global Warming in the 90's and 00's. They're fishing around for their next scare.

    Each time there's only one solution: cut back on energy use! Somehow, energy use keeps going up, and the scare passes.

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  8. I guess the new twist in the '90's and '00's is the wealth redistribution thing. They didn't think of that in the '70's or '80's.

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