I told you so...

I hate to say it, but "I told you so." For the past year I've been warning about the high costs and even impossibilities associated with the government mandates trying to fight the fictional man-made global warming. Well now both FERC and S&P have come out and independently verified what I've been saying all along. I have pasted excerts from those two articles below:

Flawed Climate Change Policy Could Lead to “Very Expensive and Unreliable Power,” Warns FERC Chairman

Speaking to reporters following a meeting of the United States Energy Association (USEA), Joseph Kelliher, chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, warned against climate change legislation that might be good environmental policy but bad energy policy.

“I believe FERC as a rates agency has a duty to help policymakers find the right balance between environmental policy and energy policy,” Kelliher said.

Earlier this year, Kelliher abandoned his stance that environmental policy and energy policy exist in “two separate universes,” asserting that “we desperately need” to balance those policies in developing solutions.

“The fiction that they are separate universes and reserved for separate policymakers and separate discussions really has to end,” he asserted during the February 20 keynote session of the National Electricity Delivery Forum. “It is a tenable fiction in most areas, but it utterly fails, it utterly collapses when you look at climate change.”

Kelliher warned that “while the US can take a sound and acceptable path to environmental and energy policy, there is also the possibility that it will take an approach that has recklessly flawed energy policy.”

“If we were to address climate change in a way that is fundamentally unsound energy policy, we will end up with very expensive and unreliable energy supplies...”

S&P Raises Doubts on Renewable Standards

Rapid growth of renewable portfolio standards poses sobering challenges, including cost and feasibility issues that present obstacles to green advocates’ goals, according to a ratings firm’s report.

The standards on the books in 29 states and the District of Columbia direct load-serving entities to acquire a certain percentage of their power from renewable resources. This forces utilities to shift from least-cost sources toward above-market renewables in unprecedented quantities, Standard and Poor’s said in “The Race for the Green: How Renewable Portfolio Standards Could Affect U.S. Utility Credit Quality.”

In many states, the portfolio targets are significant, with more than half calling for renewables to account for 15 percent or more of a utility’s total energy supply at some future date. While some of these dates are a decade or more away, most states also have interim targets.

RPS is often discussed in “unimpeachable terms” that suggest a sizeable shift toward renewable generation can occur quickly, with little rate impact and minimal disruption to the utility sector, S&P noted.

But “while it is possible that RPS will prove to be feasible, economic and successful in every state, there is no compelling evidence that suggests this will be the case,” it said.

Utilities unable to achieve RPS requirements on the mandated schedule could be saddled with penalties. Looking at current renewables levels underscores the challenges that RPS poses for utilities, S&P pointed out. According to the Energy Information Administration, renewables accounted for about 9 percent of U.S. generation in 2006. But this figure includes conventional hydropower, which not all states consider to be “green.” If it is excluded, only about 2.4 percent of U.S. generation came from renewables.

According to S&P, to meet 2015 RPS targets, 6,000 megawatts of new renewables would have to come on-line each year. “We question whether this is attainable,” it said.

“We suspect the green marathon will be a difficult race for utilities to run,” the firm concluded.

False Environmentalists Ruin Earth Day

Ah Earth Day... I well remember the very first one, back in 1970, when my third grade class in Round Rock (Arizona) went out and planted trees around our little four-room school. But sadly the day been totally ruined for me now by all of those fake environmentalists who are hell-bent on pillaging the national treasury and our wallets for no return on our investments. All pain and no gain, to retool an old phrase that we used to quote while pumping iron in front of posters of Arnold. Now Arnold, one of my teen-year heroes, is numbered among those false environmentalists who are using Al Gore's new faith-based religion of man-made climate change to wreck the environment while they line their pockets.

These eco-Nazis chop down old redwood trees in California so they don't shade solar panels, which (in developed countries) are nothing more than expensive eco-bling. They chop up endangered raptors in California mountain passes with their windmills, that provide nothing but expensive and unreliable electricity. They convince our congress of sheep to burn our food for fuel, creating world-wide food shortages and hunger-fueled riots. They promote bio-fuels which are grown after chopping down and burning out old rain forests, the lungs of our planet. They drive hybrid cars whose battery banks are made from nickel, which comes from a mine that has made a whole section of Canada into a moon-scape. They pull up old railroad tracks and relinquish the established rights-of-way, pushing more trucks out on the highways. They pressure congress, who then pressures the department of fish and wildlife, to designate the polar bear as endangered (even though in reality it's thriving) just because they saw an animated polar bear drown in Al Gore's Hollywood production, while they ignore the real endangered species that are going extinct in far away places in Africa and Asia. They call harmless carbon dioxide gas "carbon" (deliberately evoking images of coal dust and black lung) so that they can vilify it and tax it, thereby taking more money from you and me during this period of economic instability and driving our industries to China (whose carbon footprint is five times our own, per dollar of GDP) or Indonesia (whose carbon footprint is fifteen times our own, per dollar of GDP) or India or Brazil.

These evil imposters claiming to be saviors of the Earth deny access to affordable electricity to the masses in developing nations, thereby propagating poverty, illiteracy, insecurity, deforestation, and all manner of respiratory diseases. These false gods who claim that they can control the natural cycles of the planet by turning off our electricity, and therewith our economy, have yet to acknowledge the truth revealed by simple arithmetic (using their own inflated figures) that completely shutting down all of the coal-fired electricity in America would at most reduce the global temperature by 0.07 degrees F - now that's truly all pain for no gain.

Sigh. So, while 80% of America continues to willingly (or blissfully ignorantly) sacrifice their children's future to these men who claim to be gods, but who in reality are nothing more than modern-day robber barons, I guess I'll continue to honor the original spirit of Earth Day by planting a tree, throwing my trash into bins, recycling my old newspapers and aluminum cans, turning off the lights when I leave the house, conserving water by reducing the lawn around my home, keeping our electrical system as efficient as possible, and lobbying congress to increase development funds for developing nations.

“Global warming” is not a global crisis

I just endorsed this realist declaration that came out of the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change. If you read this and agree, you can endorse it too by going to: http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/

Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change

“Global warming” is not a global crisis

We, the scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders, assembled at Times Square, New York City, participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change,

Resolving that scientific questions should be evaluated solely by the scientific method;

Affirming that global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life;

Recognising that the causes and extent of recently-observed climatic change are the subject of intense debates in the climate science community and that oft-repeated assertions of a supposed ‘consensus’ among climate experts are false;

Affirming that attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change. Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing human suffering;

Noting that warmer weather is generally less harmful to life on Earth than colder:

Hereby declare:

That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.

That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.

That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.

That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation, and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.

That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.

Now, therefore, we recommend –

That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth”.

That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.

Agreed at New York, 4 March 2008.

Our Energy, Our Future

In early June of this year, 2008, Congress is scheduled to vote on the Lieberman-Warner Climate legislation, which is projected to raise electrical power rates to $0.30/kWh – double the current rates for Californians and 5-6 times for Dixie Escalante customers – for the benefit of lowering the projected average global temperature increase by a maximum of 0.07 degrees F over the next 100 years. (Please let me know if you’d like to see the science behind those figures.) If you feel like that’s not a good investment for your hard-earned dollars, especially during this period of financial insecurity, you can make your voice be heard by joining the “Our Energy, Our Future” campaign at: https://www.ourenergy.coop/. For no charge to you and very little time, this website will send e-mails on your behalf to all of your legislators asking them to answer to us, their constituents, and explain why they think this could possibly be construed as a good idea. It’s very important that we give our elected representatives a reason to pause before they make a colossal mistake for which we’ll be paying for generations to come.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.