U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, from Rhode Island, isn’t backing off his suggestion that government should investigate his political opposition.
As Halloween approaches, fear not the masks and movies; fear the quiet promises whispered in press releases and incanted with mystical words like “equity,” “sustainability,” and “diversity.” The Cult of Big Government is working night in and night out to raise from the dark abyss of dangerous philosophies a demon to possess all of society and sap the human will. Look south of Salem, to Rhode Island, where the scheme is well advanced.
In a society so comfortable that it has become discomfited by the wisdom of its ancestors, our popular myths mislead us now. The demon will not arrive with a flash of lightning and the smell of sulfur. It has changed the masks of racial bigotry and overt greed in which it has been spotted in the past. Its minions have no need of the ritualistic dances of the legislature. No virgin need be sacrificed (though virginity itself may be). Surviving until dawn will not save the victims.
Rather, the secular clerics of the soulless cult have chosen three points in the lives of unsuspecting national villagers on which to build their citadels, disguised as places of public service, and when the triangle is fully drawn between them, all hope will be lost.
Oh, horror of horrors!
The trend is expected to continue this winter, putting even more money in people’s pocketbooks and smoothing over price spikes caused by inadequate natural gas pipeline capacity in New England, officials say. The latest Maine survey put the average heating oil price at close to $2 per gallon, about 50 cents lower than the same time a year ago.
A combination of lower energy prices and a forecast for a warmer winter will mean savings of 18 percent for propane users and 25 percent for heating oil users over last winter, according to the Energy Information Administration.
What’s so bad about that, you ask? Well, according to the article “officials” are “worried” that people will take their eyes off the renewable-energy, climate-change ball and use their savings for things like building their businesses and supporting their families. If they get too comfortable, they might even start to question their votes for politicians who peddle big government in the name of saving the world.
Bottom line: If the first thought of “officials” upon hearing that the people whom they rule will have an easier time making through the winter is that those people will be less amenable to following the officials’ commands, then the people aren’t really their first concern. The headline and lede of the article should have been: “Rhode Islanders to Save Money on Energy: Government Worries About Loss of Power.”
“Health equity zones” are the latest euphemism hiding an ultimate end of our liberties and control over our own lives.
When a U.S. Senator is treating political opponents as comparable to Scarface, it’s a safe bet that some special interest has something to gain.
Last week, it turned out that $200,000 of the $64-100 million total that the Republican Policy Group proposed to reprioritize for road and bridge infrastructure might not be available from a Woonsocket museum. For those without a calculator near at hand, that’s between 0.2% and 0.3% of the whole proposal, which means it’s pretty much dispensable.
The correction, however, presents a lesson on the degree to which our system is tilted toward ever-greater government spending. Even taking actual news media bias out of the equation, a systemic bias exists. Each cut or restraint has people paid (usually by us) to advocate for their positions, and they have all sorts of direct information not readily available to the public. That means:
One of the more stunning pieces of information in the Republicans’ proposal is also relatively small, although more than double the museum line item. Using numbers directly from the state Office of Energy Resources, it turns out that the surcharge that the state imposes on energy consumers to fund public support for renewable energy special interests costs taxpayers $526,000 indirectly through the cost of state government, including public higher education. That’s on top, obviously, of whatever we pay total for our own energy usage, which is probably much more.
With its being accurate, the incentive for Rhode Island insiders is to ignore that little fact, not to defend it, to keep it out of the public consciousness as much as possible. No green-industry lobbyists will come forward to tell Rhode Islanders what they’re getting for their half-million dollars. Bringing news media bias back into the equation, PolitiFact will not likely be analyzing the shocking number and finding it “True.”
So, the beat goes on. People who take our money do so quietly (and lie when they’re caught), while those who seek to stop the theft are constantly in the spotlight for any for any small error.
The surplus of oil continues around the world, giving businesses and private entities that use natural gas more bang for their buck. Surplus means lower gas prices for National Grid natural gas customers, and analysts predict that the declining prices will continue into winter.
The Rhode Island-based firm said that Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission may approve a proposed cut of 9.6% starting November 1st this year. Apart from the global surplus of oil, there are two reasons for lower gas prices in the region: Firstly, a foreseeable drop in the cost of natural gas in the near future and secondly, a decrease in the surcharge used to offset the cost of gas National Grid purchased in the previous year to what the customers were billed this year.
“We know the winter season can pose an extra challenge when it comes to energy costs, so we’re very happy to be able to pass on the savings created with the availability of lower cost natural gas,” said Timothy F. Horan, the president of National Grid in Rhode Island. “Domestic natural gas is essential to providing the mix of energy sources that is essential to our region’s future growth and prosperity.”
The anticipated drop of prices this year, however, doesn’t mean that supply constrains are over for the energy giant. The fact remains that the Northeastern region is served by only one pipeline that is nearly always running close to capacity. In times of extreme cold seasons, supplies for natural gas can skyrocket mainly because Rhode Island’s power plants are all powered by natural gas.
In order to counter the possibility of an oil shortage in the future, some engineering companies are now creating pumps for renewable power generation. Some, on the other hand, are mixing green energy with crude oil to lessen their dependability on traditional power sources. According to Sulzer, a long-time associate of IBBC-member Unaoil, countries around the world have committed to significantly increase their share of electricity that can be generated via green sources by 2020.
As for the National Grid, the company is eyeing an expansion of the current pipeline capacity, support more renewable energy sources, and increase energy efficiency among its customers.
Patrick Jones is a budding writer, fitness enthusiast and stock investor. His interest in the financial market led him to invest 70% of his 10-year savings in the stock market. He regularly checks and writes about the latest business and finance news.
For the “perverse incentives of environmental regulations” file, we learn that Russia and Ukraine may have been increasing their polluting activities so that they could abate the problem and sell the carbon offset credits to other countries to help them meet their anti-pollution goals:
According to a study released in the journal Nature Climate Change, plants in Russia “increased waste gas generation to unprecedented levels once they could generate credits from producing more waste gas,” resulting in an increase in emissions as large as 600 million tons of carbon dioxide—roughly half the amount the EU’s ETS intends to reduce from 2013 to 2030.
As Glenn Reynolds suggests, “It’s like the whole thing is just one big scam.” Environmentalism is just about perfect, from the progressive point of view. It provides an excuse to grab power for the government; it creates channels for corruption to make friends and allies filthy rich (and launder money back to politicians); and it all comes wrapped in the motivational package of a pseudo religion.
And here’s a bonus lesson on Iran:
The UN seemingly left it up to national governments to oversee these projects, and now it has a full-blown crisis on its hands.
Although contested, there have been reports that, under the deal promoted by President Obama, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will send unqualified inspectors to keep an eye on Iran’s nuclear program and may rely on Iran, itself, to participate in the inspections. Budding internationalism and the push for a global government that is not democratic, but is bureaucratic, come with the gigantic, existential question over whether we can or should trust such a system.
Aaron Renn makes the point that urban planners should give some thought to the type of area that a particular city should be, given its unique geography, history, and competitive advantages, rather than prioritizing their vision of the ideal city:
Where Ashland Ave. BRT fails is not in its attempt to improve transit service or to accommodate those who choose not to have cars. Rather, the problem is that it is rooted in a vision, propounded mostly by coastal urbanites, that believes car use should be deliberately discouraged and minimized – ideally eliminated entirely – in the city. Thus the project is not just about making transit better, but also about actively making things worse for drivers. That might work in New York, San Francisco, or Boston, where the car is more dubious, but in Chicago this philosophy would erode one of the greatest competitive advantages the city enjoys. In Chicago, the car free strategy only works along the north lakefront and downtown, not the Ashland Ave corridor or most of the rest of the city.
The no-car philosophy as the norm, not just an option, would undermine one of the greatest strategic advantages of Chicago. Why would you want to do that? Particularly when it would also make family life in the city more difficult for many. There is where urbanists need to start putting on their strategic thinking hat. Otherwise they may end up undermining the very places they seek to improve.
Renn seems to think this is a Midwest versus Coast dynamic, but Rhode Islanders should put on their strategic thinking hats, too. One of the great advantages of the whole state is the ability to move around. On a whim, when a business associate was staying in Providence, we zipped down to a restaurant near First Beach in Newport for breakfast. Sports leagues regularly direct my family around the state. Based on my experiences and positive things that are generally said about Rhode Island, progressives’ war on cars — like just about every progressive policy — would only hurt Rhode Islanders.
This point has a much broader application. With RhodeMap and every other central-planning project undertaken by the state government, the fatal flaw is the conceit that planners can and should figure out what the state needs and push it in that direction. The people of Rhode Island have a much better sense of the attractions and advantages of their state than any small group of planners, and they aren’t going to give over their information at public meetings, even if the planners could correctly interpret what they were saying, because only a narrow subset of Rhode Islanders ever knows about such meetings, let alone bothering to attend.
The solution is freedom, with money as the measurement of what people are doing. With freedom and capitalism, businesses can identify opportunities at a very small, local level, and the people will tend to get more of what they want, and in an improved way.
It’s difficult to say which is more astonishing: President Obama’s willingness to skip Congress and adjust the crown that he imagines himself to wear or the news media’s lack of interest in calling him on it.
That’s from a general point of view; from a pragmatic point of view, neither is very astonishing, considering that they both see themselves as left-wing activists. The president wouldn’t attempt such things as creating new energy law without bothering with our elected legislature if he didn’t expect the news media to cover for him, and the news media wouldn’t ignore it if the partisans and ideologues who compose it didn’t support the Democrat party or disagreed the policy.
But any American with even a passing education in civics should read the following and ask, “Umm, where does he get the authority to do that?”
Touting the plan at a White House ceremony, Obama described his unprecedented carbon dioxide limits as the biggest step ever taken by the United States on climate change. On that point, at least, his opponents agreed. They denounced his proposal as egregious federal overreach that would send power prices surging, and vowed lawsuits and legislation to try to stop it.
The federal overreach isn’t even half of the problem. Even if the federal government had the Constitutional authority to impose such a policy on the states, how in the world does the president, acting unilaterally through a regulatory agency, have the authority to make “the biggest step ever taken by the United States on climate change”? This ought to be the stuff of impeachment and revolution, because it means we simply do not have a federalist, Constitutional, representative democracy.
We still get to elect the president… for now and discounting the realities of media bias, voter fraud, and immigration policy designed to counteract the American electorate… but this is not how our system is supposed to operate.
One suspects, frankly, that the move (indeed, the entire climate change hysteria) is primarily intended as a ruse to eliminate the rights of the people to control their own government and, therefore, their own lives. As Betsy McCaughey notes in The American Spectator, the amount of actual improvement in climate change results (even assuming the questionable models are correct) is minuscule.
If the American people don’t wake up and see through this very soon, we deserve the next step in this takeover of our country.
Senator Whitehouse’s notion of expanding the application of RICO suits might point the weapon in the wrong direction.
I’m with Kevin Williamson on this stunning Washington Post op-ed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. It’s dispiriting to read the very wealthy senator from Rhode Island crossing well into the range of McCarthyism, if not fascism. I mean, look at this:
To be clear: I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it’s all smoke and no fire. But there’s an awful lot of smoke.
The suggestion is clear. Laying the background for the tobacco industry part of the comparison, Whitehouse writes, “Thankfully, the government had a playbook, too.” And “finally, through the discovery process, government lawyers were able to peel back the layers of deceit and denial and see what the tobacco companies really knew all along about cigarettes.” That’s what the senator wants to attempt to do to organizations that express skepticism about climate change alarmism.
To what couldn’t this principle apply? Maybe same-sex marriage advocates have studies showing that children do just as well without their own moms and dads. Start a Congressional investigation! Or maybe the gun industry is conspiring to hide evidence that eliminating the Second Amendment would make Americans safer. Or maybe Grover Norquist has buried a report proving that high taxes are good for the economy and freedom. Or (and here’s the goldmine) internal memos among Republican groups might prove a big-dollar conspiracy to fool the American people into believing that the Democrats have become a party of ultra-wealthy radicals who have no interest in helping average Americans prosper and who lack the competence to achieve that goal, even if they believed in it.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. We’ll never know if we don’t start investigating every conservative organization.
This is not a difficult one. Even people (including journalists) who agree with all of the senator’s political positions should be able to see that. Whitehouse is way off the deep end, here, and he ought to be called on it. (But he won’t be.)
Environmental regulation and “sustainable development” may not cause income inequality, but they sure do correlate well with it.
News media leaps from evidence of a changing climate to a human cause to a global socialist solution have politicized science and sowed distrust among the people.
The more I read about this “Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank” being proposed by Governor Gina Raimondo and General Treasurer Seth Magaziner, the worse the idea sounds:
As they envision it, $22 million or so in state tax dollars, left-over federal stimulus dollars and bond proceeds would be funneled to the cities and towns for energy-cutting projects, such as these, through the renamed Rhode Island Clean Water Finance Agency, created in 1990 to provide loans for improvements to sewage and drinking water systems.
So, this will be new municipal debt without, it seems, voter approval.
… the legislation would also salt away an unspecified amount of state money away in “one or more” loan-loss reserve funds to encourage private banks to lend money to private homeowners and businesses for similar kinds of energy-saving building upgrades. The legislation does not say how much.
So, the public would absorb the risk for projects financed by private companies for private entities and individuals.
When asked why National Grid was among those backing legislation that could cut into its revenues by reducing energy use, company vice president Michael Ryan said the answer lies in an earlier “decoupling” law guaranteeing National Grid a “bump” in its rates if usage drops, as a result of energy-efficiency efforts.
So, it won’t actually save Rhode Island money on energy; it’ll simply shift the burden from government agencies and private entities that are able to get the loans onto those who are not.
The answer from treasury staff to many of those questions [about limits to the funds and processes for claiming losses] was this: the “operational details” are not spelled out in the latest, 80-page version of the bill. According to Rogers, details such as these — along with the mechanism for repayment of the loans — would be spelled out, at a future date in “rules and regulations.”
So, the make-or-break details will be out of legislators’ hands.
Robert Boisselle, the lobbyist for the Associated Builders and Contractors of Rhode Island, was among those raising red flags about references in the legislation to “Project Labor Agreements.” Boisselle said such agreements (“illegal in 22 states”) effectively bar non-union shops — with 80 percent of the state’s laborers — from bidding.
So, the prices will be driven up in order to make sure that the money goes directly to union members (and thus filtered back into advocacy and donations for Democrats).
If the whole thing seems risky and even fishy, keep looking, a reader tells me via email. In an op-ed supporting the bank, Magaziner cites the Connecticut Green Bank as a model. Look into the Connecticut Green Bank, and you find this:
[Coalition for Green Capital (CGC)] leaders Reed Hundt, and Ken Berlin were involved with the establishment of Connecticut’s green bank from start to finish and remain closely involved with the banks operations.
Internet searches for former FCC Chairman Hundt, now an investment advisor, turn up a lot of overlap with Magaziner’s father, Ira. More notably, his name turns up in campaign finance reports, with $2,000 in donations to the RI Democratic State Committee in October and $1,000 to Gina Raimondo, last June.
On the other hand, some of us might not need to do that level of digging. It’s enough to know that we have the worst roads and bridges in the country and the people in charge of the state government want a state “infrastructure” bank that helps governments pay to replace their windows.
Politics is a game of persuasion… if we’re putting it nicely. “Deception” would probably be more accurate.
But even within that jaded paradigm, I have to marvel at how uninformative state General Treasurer Seth Magaziner’s op-ed in yesterday’s Providence Journal is. Even putting aside questions about the green theology, the op-ed doesn’t really explain what the treasurer wants to do.
We’ve got a name change of the RI Clean Water Finance Agency, and we’ve got a couple of green-industry ideas, but shouldn’t the treasurer of the state focus on explaining what the bank would mean, functionally, and how much it would cost? Presumably, an op-ed is meant to be the policy folks’ medium for explaining their proposal to the broader public. If the treasurer of the state is offering mainly assertions about the wonders of his idea, who’s going to translate the nuts and bolts for the masses?
Our civic culture is really much-deteriorated around here.
For those who have remained hesitant to jump into the great green tug-of-war over climate change, the reason may be the whiff of fraud that permeates it all. Although most scientists are, as the saying goes, hard-working and honest folks, there is bound to be some bad apples amid the bunch.
It’s tough not to think the bad rap might be somewhat deserved when the stories roll in like another snowstorm over New England: from the fuel-guzzling private planes and helicopters used to get the super-rich to a Davos, Switzerland, so they can talk about saving the environment, to the Oregon governor stepping down amid accusations that his significant other used her connections to win contracts for a green-energy consultancy for which she worked, to mounting suspicion that temperature data is simply being adjusted to make it say what environmentalists need it to say.
The schemes and scams just seem to be everywhere, and one needn’t turn over too many rocks to find them.
So, I was poking around on ecoRI and came across this article by Tim Faulkner:
Left out of the talking points that support expanding pipelines in New England are the efforts by energy companies to deliver that natural gas to Canada for export overseas.
Documents show that developers are already moving forward with this concept. Last October, Pieridae Energy filed a federal application to send domestic natural gas from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia, where it would be converted to liquefied natural gas (LNG) and exported. According to Peiridae, a company in Germany has already agreed to buy the exported LNG.
I’m no expert on this topic, but it seems to me that Faulkner uses a whole bunch of plural nouns when he appears to be talking about one company that may have a single prospect with another company. It’s clear, moreover, that the concern of the activists quoted later in the article is not that the export business will pull increased supplies of natural gas out from under the New England consumer, but that it will encourage continued development of the natural gas industry in America, which would soften demand for very expensive renewable energy.
According to the application at the link, Pieridae is requesting a two-decade window during which it can explore these options, which would start either on the date of the first sale or seven years after its request is approved. As the article makes clear, environmental activists have already applied to prolong the application process. In other words, this is pretty long-term planning.
But what’s the concern? The company won’t sell gas overseas unless it is more profitable to do so. In other words, unless people in these other countries are willing to pay so much that the profit margin is better if Pieridae chooses to ship the gas additional hundreds of miles, then liquefy it, then ship it, and then unliquefy it, rather than simply direct it to energy plants and consumers closer-by on the pipeline. And then there are other possibilities, like the flow being reversed to ship the natural gas from Canada or elsewhere to domestic consumers. What’s scary in this mix… other than the very existence of a fossil fuel industry?
Then we turn to another article, by the ecoRI News staff:
A common algae commercially grown to make fish food holds promise as a source for both biodiesel and jet fuel, according to a new study published in the journal Energy & Fuels.
Why, in contrast to the pipeline story, is this not scary? Similar to ethanol’s effects on food prices, wouldn’t increasing the demand for this algae increase its price, thus driving up the cost of farm-grown fish, thus pricing out lower-income consumers and making the depletion of wild fish stock that much more attractive?
There’s a wave of specifics to consider before worrying about such a thing, but it doesn’t strike me as much less plausible than the dark insinuations made in the pipeline case.
Providence Journal environmental reporter Alex Kuffner suggests that National Grid expects to make a profit on its renewable energy and give ratepayers a credit. We rate that False.
Datechguy has some worthwhile reminders and thoughts as we all deal with the snow, closing with this one:
We were told just a couple of days ago NYC could get up to three feet of snow. If our computer models aren’t good enough to be accurate 3 days out, what makes anybody think the Global warming models predicting disaster 1-50 years out are worth going broke over?
That last part is the key. Assenting to climate change alarmism isn’t just agreeing that it’s a concern that we ought to consider when we make decisions; it’s agreeing to give up our freedoms and whittle away our economy (as we’re finding in Rhode Island).
Think of the snow storm that we’ve just passed through. At the height of the blizzard-prediction panic, would you have traded your children’s and grandchildren’s ability to find gainful employment in order to try to prevent the snow, based on the forecasts being made?
Rhode Island may not be a state that comes to mind when one thinks about clashes between environmentalism and coal. It should, however, be first in one’s mind when it comes to the problems of big government and pandering politicians. Applied to energy policy, those problems make the state a veritable case study in the perils of green politics.
Take, for example, Democrat John Edwards, who represents two suburban waterfront towns in the lower chamber of the state’s legislature.
Thanks to John Loughlin for having me on his special-edition, day-after-Christmas WPRO radio show, this morning. Between a late night of wrapping, a baby coming down with a cold, and older children who began trying to sneak downstairs at 2:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve, the past few nights have been light on sleep, so my mind was not prepared to continue making a subtle point on energy policy at the same time that it occurred to me that a tuxedo-wearing doll sitting on the host’s microphone looked a bit like Cool Keith, the producer.
Apart from that one lost train of thought, though, and with a huge assist from well-informed callers, the hour and a half passed enjoyably and brought us to three core points about the cost of energy in New England:
To address a couple of loose ends, I didn’t have the information ready at hand when one caller asked, but according to the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s Competitiveness Report Card, Rhode Island’s cost of energy is generally in line with its neighbors in New England. It depends what how the comparison is made whether we’re toward the front or the back in the region, but New England tends to be toward the back of the nationwide pack when it comes to energy. As I told the caller, the area simply needs a greater supply of energy.
I also didn’t manage to put the final touch on a point about the relative costs of different energy sources. The interest groups ultimately don’t mind driving up the cost of energy, because the higher traditional sources become, the less outrageous “green” “renewable” energy seems. But that isn’t the whole story. It may one day become preferable for a business to put in solar panels and wind turbines, versus gas or other energy sources, but it may also become economically preferable for the business just to locate elsewhere — in or out of the United States.
A lot of these sorts of conversations about policy in Rhode Island come back to that option.
Rep. Edwards does the politician’s trick of talking all around the fact that a critic is telling the truth.
When the energy market forces National Grid to increase its rates, politicians condemn the company, but expensive energy is a problem to which they’ve happily contributed.
Believe it or not, this Josh Lederman Associated Press article made it to the front page, above the fold, of today’s Providence Journal, and it’s difficult to think of a better example of the fact that “news” on environment-related issues is less a means of informing the public about current events than it is a vessel for the propaganda produced by activists and Democrat partisans. One need go no farther than the headline and lede that the Projo pins on the story:
U.S., China unveil new emissions targets
Ambitious antipollution goals seen as global breakthrough, but GOP-led Congress sure to mount opposition
Even using the word “targets” is debatable, here. Sure President Obama is committing his country (after he’s gone) to cut emissions by more than a quarter by 2025 (from 2005 levels), which is a modification of his previous pledge of a 17% decrease by 2020. That’s either a reckless declaration of disastrous policy or political illusion-making, plucking numbers out of thin air while pushing back the date a few years.
It’s on the Chinese side, though, that “targets” seems truly inapplicable:
Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose country’s emissions are still growing as it builds new coal plants, didn’t commit to cut emissions by a specific amount. Rather, he set a target for China’s emissions to peak by 2030, or earlier if possible.
In other words, Chinese officials have given some lip service to the notion of stopping their country’s increase in emissions in sixteen years, if it works out that way.
Moving on to the lede, note the passive voice of the first clause. By whom are these goals “seen as a global breakthrough”? Well, by the Democrats and environmental activists (between whom Lederman doesn’t make much distinction). The passive voice makes it seem as if either broad public consensus or some objective authority has assessed the lip service as a “breakthrough.”
As for the GOP dig, the lede is actually the first of three lamentations of opposition that the article provides before allowing any Republicans to speak for themselves. Finally, almost at the very end of the article (no longer on the front page, of course), we get this:
“This unrealistic plan, that the president would dump on his successor, would ensure higher utility rates and far fewer jobs,” said incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
Here’s a significant differentiation between news and propaganda: For the former, concerns about the agreement would appear within the first few paragraphs, and the lede would have read, “Democrats, activists hail ‘breakthrough,’ Republicans warn of costs and job losses.”
As it is, it’s difficult not to conclude that your jobs and your families’ wellbeing aren’t very important to mainstream journalists, and that they don’t think you can be trusted with straight reportage.
A view of “representative democracy” that casts representation as a mild form of dictatorship will destroy a society, whether we’re talking about Obama or an environmental protest in Somerset.
Here’s geologist Patrick Barosh:
The fact is, climate and sea level are always changing. This is a fundamental tenet of the science of geology. The national recognition of climate change in the last dozen years is akin to discovering that the sun rises in the east; proposals to stop it amount to requiring the sun to rise in the west.
Barosh notes that a rising sea level was hardly new to the industrial era and, indeed, appears now to be happening at the same rate. The world is not a constant; it moves. In that spirit, he offers policy suggestions more in line with what one would expect from people who truly are concerned with the climate’s effect on humanity, rather than trying to use an environmental religion to increase their own political power:
Although climate changes are natural and cannot be stopped, we need to take measures to mitigate the damage, using the past sea-level rise rates and hurricanes as guides for the future. The movement of beaches and erosion of coastal bluffs should be fully recognized. This is a political, not a scientific, problem. The need is to better enforce coastal zoning to resist shoreline development with subsidized insurance, moving infrastructure inland rather than rebuilding it, discouraging sea walls and armored shores that cause more problems, and limiting rebuilding of destroyed shore buildings.
It’s almost difficult to believe this article was reprinted in the Providence Journal:
The electrical system’s duress was a direct result of the polar vortex, the cold air mass that settled over the nation. But it exposed a more fundamental problem. There is a growing fragility in the U.S. electricity system, experts warn, the result of the shutdown of coal-fired plants, reductions in nuclear power, constraints on natural-gas pipelines and a shift to more expensive renewable energy. The result is likely to be future price shocks. And they may not be temporary. …
The problems confronting the electricity system are the result of a wide range of forces: new federal regulations on toxic emissions, rules on greenhouse gases, state mandates for renewable power, technical problems at nuclear power plants and unpredictable price trends for natural gas.
We’re dealing, here, with the predictable effects of regulation. Another passage provides a good illustration of government’s inability to predict the reactions of the private sector to its tape:
The federal government appears to have underestimated the impact as well. An Environmental Protection Agency analysis in 2011 had asserted that new regulations would cause few coal plant retirements. The forecast on coal plants turned out wrong almost immediately.
One suspects this factor wasn’t considered to be a very important a part of the regulatory decision-making process. After all, models show dramatic climate effects happening a century from now; why should it matter whether the government can predict economic factors a year or two out?
I wonder, too, whether there isn’t another factor, which one sees in progressive, big-government thinking more broadly: a simple inability to understand that people will change economic behavior. Energy companies — or any other companies — aren’t typically in business out of an innate drive to provide the services that they provide.
Business is a way of making money and supporting families. If the government makes it easier to do so by some other means, people will find those other means. And when the entire economy leans on what they used to do, everybody suffers.
These effects aren’t simple dollars and cents. They’re lost opportunities and damaged lives.
The evisceration of the Atlantic salmon is not a tale of free-market self destruction, but of society’s evolving needs and priorities, which are highly contingent on wealth.
Looking into Rhode Island’s ranking as one of the nation’s top climate changers over the past 40 years shows that tempering alarm might not be unreasonable.