Bam’s ‘clean energy’ gambit
Shikha Dalmia
New York Post
3/2/2011
President Obama hasn’t abandoned his jobs-killing global-warming agenda, just wrapped it in the rhetoric of “clean energy.” And that may be enough to get Republicans to sign on.
That “clean energy” is code for “anti-warming” is obvious, given that even Environmental Protection Agency numbers show that virtually all emissions have dropped dramatically in recent decades — except for greenhouse gases.
To cut those, Obama’s budget aims to hike Department of Energy spending by 12 percent from 2010 levels. He proposes $8 billion more for various clean-energy programs — on top of the $30 billion “invested” via the 2009 stimulus. Even that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
To pay for it all, Obama would stick it to Big Oil. He wants to eliminate $43 billion in oil-tax breaks over 10 years. That would be fine if he were aiming for a “level” energy market, with the government playing no favorites; in fact, he’s just looking to divert the subsidies to his favorites.
Despite his talk of promoting nuclear power, the president’s budget cuts support for it by 0.6 percent from 2010 levels. The big winners are — surprise! — solar (88 percent rise), biomass and biorefinery (57 percent), geothermal (136 percent) and wind (61 percent)…
…Pumping money into pie-in-the sky energy projects has been a perennial presidential project since Jimmy Carter. But Obama has a new wrinkle: The White House believes that past pushes for alternative fuels failed (despite subsidies) because they did nothing to ensure a market for the new products. So Obama has decreed that he wants 80 percent of America’s energy to come from clean sources by 2035…
…Global warming is a dying cause because the costs of the favored “fixes” for the problem vastly outweigh the supposed benefits — and China and India aren’t going to stop industrializing, and stay poor, simply to please Western elites. Republicans should wake up and not let Obama use the guise of clean energy to keep the anti-warming crusade alive.
Read the complete article at the NYPost.
Read also, George Soros Handicapping American Energy, at American Thinker
…Billionaire investor George Soros is urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to craft the “strongest” rules possible requiring oil companies to disclose payments to foreign governments and urging against an exemption that Exxon and other companies are seeking.
The SEC is crafting rules to implement a provision — Section 1504 — in last year’s Wall Street reform law that forces oil and mining companies to provide the regulators specific information about payments connected to projects in foreign countries…
A suite of energy companies, in comments to the regulators, say they favor disclosure but warn that prescriptive rules would be burdensome and place them at a competitive disadvantage compared to certain state-backed oil companies from countries such as Russia and China…
In practice this is what would happen: American companies would not be able to reach deals to drill in foreign nations — where much of the world’s last undeveloped reserves are probably located. Not only would it be against the law to meet the overseas competition’s terms, but Soros would probably unleash his bevy of think tanks, 527 groups, human rights and monitoring groups to investigate American oil companies to ensure they have their hands tied. Meanwhile, competitors based in countries such as Russia and China that would not be subject to the same scrutiny. Nor do those countries — or others, such as Saudi Arabia — have an active and free press that would be more than eager to take leads and information from Soros’s groups and turn them into exposes. These exposes, in America anyway, would then be grist for politicians to hold Congressional hearings and excoriate American energy executives for the cameras and the viewing public…
