Perspective on Tax Credits and the Public Good

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This part of Benjamin Riggs’s post in this space earlier this morning justifies some further thought, with an eye toward understanding how government spreads public resources to serve the public good:

Since the power to be generated would benefit everyone in New England, but the effects on quality of life, real estate values, and the rural nature of the area would be imposed mainly on the residents of Burrillville, clearly they are entitled to full compensation for the contribution they would be facilitating for the general good.

Put this idea of compensation in context of controversial legislation to give Burrillville residents a say on any tax deals that the government might enter with the energy plant.  When one hears about tax deals between government and businesses, we typically think of special abatements that spread the business’s tax burden to other taxpayers, at least for an introductory period.

Even where the tax deal is a positive amount for taxpayers, one still must ask whether it’s positive enough, and other taxpayers should arguably have a say. That is, if the theoretical cost to the locals is higher than the negotiated tax windfall (or if that windfall is somehow redirected to government, not the people), then it’s still not a good deal.

Personally, I’m a big believer that government is not appropriately our mechanism for telling our neighbors what to do with their property, which is why some local conservatives see the aforementioned legislation as a naked attempt to kill the power plant.  Presumably, though, there’s some point at which a majority of voters in Burrillville will assess any harm from the plant to be less than the benefit of accepting it.

Those of us who ponder policy for a living should come up with an innovative solution, here.  Rhode Islanders, especially, have good reason to doubt the intentions of state and local politicians when they negotiate special deals with deep-pocketed corporations, so the power to negotiate such deals should be restrained.  Perhaps the answer is to revisit the way in which we assess the value of property for tax purposes so as to incorporate the value of the plant to the entire region into its taxable property.

To be extreme for the purposes of illustration, imagine if the regional good of the energy that it could provide made the power plant worth 80% of the full value of the town’s total property.  That would mean that other taxpayers’ property would only have to generate 20% of the tax revenue the town requires, which would theoretically drop its tax rate to about one-fifth of its current level.  And if the assessment isn’t negotiated, but rather a formula founded on some underlying principle of value, the opportunity for corruption and abuse would be minimized.

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Benjamin C. Riggs: Fighting Climate Change in Burrillville

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Given the realities of economics and pollution, blocking a natural gas plant in Burrillville isn’t a very good strategy if the goal is to fight climate change.

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Burrillville Power Plant: Torn Between Empowered Taxpayers & Much-Needed Energy

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On the one hand, I support the gas-fired power plant that Invenergy is proposing to build in Burrillville, in large part, because the EPA has UNNECESSARILY shut down other large fossil fuel-powered energy generating plants, leaving New England with few reliable, reasonably priced fuel sources for making electricity. On the other, even though it might […]

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Of Gross Mischaracterizations All Over the Map

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The policies of climate change alarmism both lock in existing power structures and transfer wealth from the poorer classes of rich countries to the richer classes of poor countries.

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Journalist Itching for Some Climate Change Action in Wickford

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This Alex Kuffner article on flooding in Wickford is highly misleading — so misleading, in fact, that the online editor gave it the completely unsubstantiated (i.e., false) headline, “Tidal flooding in North Kingstown’s Wickford is result of rising seas.”  Here’s the text that one has to read carefully in order to correctly understand what the journalist is claiming:

For a glimpse of a future of higher seas, Rhode Islanders have to look no further than Wickford village during a king tide. …

These types of minor floods were once treated as nothing more than isolated events during king tides, which occur once or twice a year when the alignments of the sun, earth and moon maximize the gravitational pull on the oceans. But now climate scientists and coastal planners see so-called “nuisance flooding” as a harbinger of what’s to come as the seas continue to rise.

The article provides no indication that these king tides have become more frequent or intense, which it surely would if it were possible to make such a claim.  In other words, the message of this front-page article in the state’s major daily newspaper is: “We should all be afraid that this perfectly ordinary occurrence is an example of something that might happen more often in the future.”

This isn’t news; it’s propaganda.  The fact is that tide measurements in Newport show no increase at all over the last 20 years and a decrease so far this decade.  Maybe that’s a pause before rising tides begin again or maybe not.  Whatever the case, it would be reasonable to suggest that those reading Kuffner’s article are apt to come away with precisely the opposite conclusion from the truth, using recent numbers.

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6% and Flawed Models: Why We’re Skeptical of AGW

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A second day, a second applause-worthy editorial by the Providence Journal yesterday. They politely call out Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who

… asked [US] Attorney General Loretta Lynch whether the Justice Department had considered pursuing fraud charges against those who have, in his view, misled people about climate change. ….

This is troubling: a U.S. senator and attorney general, both sworn to uphold the Constitution, mulling legal action against American citizens and companies for the “crime” of challenging a scientific theory.

The ProJo correctly points out that

… it is vitally important that America not discard its essential values of freedom.

With Earth Day coming up this Friday, it’s important to note the two simple facts that make so many of us skeptical of the theory of anthropogenic global warming. 1.) Man only generates 6% of all greenhouse gases. 2.) The heart of the case for AGW, the climate models, are flawed (see here and here, and lots of other places).

Accordingly, the proposal by Senator Whitehouse and others to silence by prosecutorial bullying those who question AGW not only violates, as the ProJo points out, free speech, one of America’s essential values, but also comes across as someone who … well, doesn’t want to hear why he may be wrong about something he believes in. It’s fine to disregard facts and evidence that contradict your belief in something. It crosses the line to narrow-minded despotism, however, to propose the use of the considerable powers of government to punish people or companies attempting to present such facts and evidence.

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Best/Worst List Highlights Insanity of Bill That Would Jack RI’s Already High Energy Costs

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As part of its informative Best and Worst Bills of 2016, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity highlights this especially egregious bill.

Despite Rhode Island having some of the highest energy rates in the nation, a bill that would impose a new fee on carbon-based energy, resulting in even higher energy costs for most families and businesses, ranks among the worst bills yet to be voted on according to the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, which today updated its list of the BEST and WORST bills of the 2016 General Assembly session.

Most of us, including myself, will greet with champagne and hearty applause the invention/discovery of a cheap, widely available, reliable, sustainable, “green” energy source, if and when this ever happens. Meanwhile, the sole effect of taxing (let’s call it what it is) politically incorrect fuel sources will be to needlessly make it even more expensive for individuals to live in RI and businesses to operate here.

(By the way, check out how your own legislators are doing so far this session on the Center’s 2016 RI Freedom Index.)

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Whitehouse and the Literal Conspiracy to Deprive Americans of Rights

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Law professor Glenn Reynolds has an important essay in USA Today, this week, that’s relevant to RI’s former attorney general and now U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and other far-left loons who seek to implement an environmentalist inquisition and prosecute organizations that will not proclaim their unassailable faith in the doomsday wickedness of anthropomorphic climate change:

Federal law makes it a felony “for two or more persons to agree together to injure, threaten, or intimidate a person in any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the Unites States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same).”

I wonder if U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, or California Attorney General Kamala Harris, or New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman have read this federal statute. Because what they’re doing looks like a concerted scheme to restrict the First Amendment free speech rights of people they don’t agree with. They should look up 18 U.S.C. Sec. 241, I am sure they each have it somewhere in their offices.

One suspects neither the law nor the science nor the long-term fate of the planet is actually a higher priority to such corrupt politicians than their own lust for power.  And any journalist or other person who handles these affronts as if they might be legitimate should be doubted if he or she claims to be interested in preserving Americans rights.

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Nice – R.I. Trucking Assoc Moves to Invoke Fed Regs Against Toll-Funded RhodeWorks

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The Providence Business News reports that the R.I. Trucking Association is attempting to bring to bear arguably the heaviest, most terrible artillery of all against Governor Raimondo’s toll-funded “bridge” repair program: federal regulations.

In a letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation sent March 18, trucking association President and CEO Christopher J. Maxwell said the proposed bridge and overpass rebuilding program should require a National Environmental Policy Act review because it will use federal funds.

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An Obvious Solution to an Energy/Environment Problem

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Uh-oh. Alex Kuffner reports in yesterday’s Providence Journal that there’s a legal stumbling block… sort of… for the proposed energy plant in Burrillville:

A Brown University professor who helped craft a key state law on climate change is arguing that the construction of a new natural gas-fired power plant in Burrillville would make it impossible for Rhode Island to meet the law’s targets for reducing carbon emissions in coming decades.

In written testimony that is set to be filed with the state Energy Facility Siting Board on Thursday, J. Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies and sociology, says that building the 900-megawatt Clear River Energy Center conflicts with the Resilient Rhode Island Act, the 2014 law that set a non-mandatory goal of eventually reducing state greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

If this is a problem, the solution is obvious:  Kick anybody who voted for this ridiculous legislation out of office and repeal it.  To check who voted “yea” and “nay,” refer to H7904 (item 27) on this House journal and S2952 (item 8) in this Senate journal.

Truly, no word is better than “decadence” to describe the folly of legislators in an economically failing state thinking up ways to make life and business more expensive, here.

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What If This Is Really What Climate Change Is About?

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We owe a debt of gratitude to “former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer” for his honesty concerning that area in which he is most expert:

“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.

Climate is a pretense.  Of course, not every politician and activist who genuflects toward the gods of climate change wants global socialism.  Some are true believers and some invest a much smaller amount of personal showmanship in the cause for much smaller payoffs, like winning campaign contributions and votes from true believers among the public.

But here’s an imaginative exercise that I’d love folks who don’t do a double-take when people like the president of the United States proclaim that climate change is a national security issue for the military:  How would your reaction change if you came across irrefutable evidence — like the plot twist in a mid-’90s movie — that Mr. Edenhofer isn’t some wild ideologue who somehow let his mask slip, but is, in fact, correct about the motivation for pushing climate change as an issue?

I’m honestly curious.  Would you reconsider?  Would you adjust your rationale for your current views?  Of are the implications of that possibility too frightening even to consider as a possibility?

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Laws Are for the People, Not Their Betters in Government

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During yesterday’s discussion on the Rhode Island House floor of H7147, the bill’s primary sponsor, Democrat John “Jay” Edwards (Tiverton, Portsmouth) presented it as a matter of fairness.  Those poor, put-upon elected officials have to provide some degree of transparency into their finances, while local grassroots groups that (very suspiciously) oppose many of the things those politicians want to do to their towns get away with spending money to voice their opinions on local issues without having to provide the politicians’ friends with ammunition for whisper-and-intimidation campaigns.

I’ll leave it for later to go into detail about Edwards’s dishonesty during his State House performance, yesterday.  For the moment, I’ll simply note the audacity of this line of argument coming from a supporter of imprisoned former Speaker of the House Gordon Fox and move on to a national issue that gives some sense of the contempt that Americans should have when government officials chastise the People to be more transparent:

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton reports that lobbyist, Michael J. Brady, asked in a private email for a little favor of EPA General Counsel Joe Goffman, his insider friend at EPA: “Joe, would you please send this email to Gina for me? I would have sent it to her directly with a cc to you but I don’t have a private email address for her and would prefer to not use an office email address.” (Emphasis added) Brady represents a number of green energy groups that want to support EPA’s Cross-State Pollution Rule. Goffman

The casual tone of the email exchange shows “that it is a regular practice of senior officials of this EPA to use private e-mail accounts and other ‘off-book’ techniques to craft rules with ‘green’ activists with clear financial and political interests is now clear beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Chris Horner, the man who exposed former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s “Richard Windsor” email moniker.

As I said, this is a national matter, but there can be little doubt that it’s an issue at the state level, too.  For example, we’d have had no idea that George Nee — a big-time labor figure who sits on multiple government boards at the state level — used his Yahoo email account to lobby for a union-friend’s daughter to get a 38 Studios job if those emails hadn’t been part of the giant scandal of the company’s bankruptcy that lead to lawsuits and legal disclosures.

It’s increasingly clear that people in government don’t see themselves as our representatives, but as our aristocracy, with free license to seek out ways to make it impossible for us to operate without their permission.

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Teppco Closure… Government Incompetence or Corruption?

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On GoLocalProv, Russ Moore is reporting that the Teppco propane terminal in Providence is taking its 36 jobs and skipping town:

Nearly one year after being hit with a $1 million tax hike by the City of Providence, Teppco, a propane terminal located at ProvPort, has officially closed its doors. The company will cease doing business in Providence this week — a move that will cause its 36 employees to look for new jobs.

According to sources with the company and at the Port, the City’s tax increase was the major cause of the closure of the facility that has been operating since 1971. Moreover, the failure by city officials to respond and work to resolve the issues caused Teppco to lose a potential buyer that would have allowed the facility to continue to operate and retain jobs.

One doubts the fallout from this controversy is so narrowly limited.  Any business considering opening or expanding in Providence or all of Rhode Island must take into account the reality that the municipal and state governments are so poorly run and are not above changing the rules of the economic game when it suits their personal purposes.  After all, the business environment isn’t just the set of taxes and regulations that the government imposes within its jurisdiction — which are utterly obnoxious in their own right — but also tendency of officials to add more and then cut special deals only with those who play ball.

As with the Citizens Financial Group development, the message is clear that businesses should look anywhere else than Rhode Island first, unless they’re big and influential enough to have the rules bent in their favor.

But aside from all that, I’m not sure why everybody assumes that this egregious example of tax grabbing and non-communication is some kind of error.  Here’s a bit of waterfront property that the owners no longer want and that can’t be sold for its current use.  Keep an eye out for new proposals to utilize the abandoned land for something that powerful people inside Providence government want more.   After all, what are jobs, taxes, and local energy/fuel sources in comparison with things that insiders want?

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Citizens Financial Group Shows an Inevitable Outcome for RhodeMap Central Planning

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Frank Carini makes points in his ecoRI editorial, today, with which conservatives will find it difficult to disagree.

Last December, at a Grow Smart Rhode Island transit conference, Gov. Gina Raimondo talked about the importance of developing around dense, transit-accessible hubs. Less than four months later, the governor is celebrating a project that will do just the opposite.

Last week, the Citizens Financial Group announced plans to build a corporate campus on open space in Johnston, off Greenville Avenue and outside Route 295. The proposed 420,000-square-foot facility is expected to house 3,200 current employees. The campus will reportedly feature an on-site cafeteria, fitness center and walking paths.

Yes, developing Rhode Island’s extensive and intrusive state guide plan was “a waste of time” (and worse than that).  Yes, the amount of taxpayer resources that politicians have promised (and will continue to promise) to Citizens for its new Johnston compound is offensive.

The step that Carini does not appear willing to make, however, is to come to broad conclusions about the very nature of central planning.  Consolidating power in order to prevent people from doing things you don’t want them to do will mean that only people with enhanced leverage will be able to do those things.

Citizens can promise politicians a good talking point and labor unions a bunch of jobs, so manacles like the state guide plan won’t apply to the company.  Meanwhile, smaller, more-localized homeowners and companies will be limited to the restraints that the bank found too restrictive, ultimately giving the finance giant market leverage in addition to all of the exceptions and handouts.  Meanwhile, land that has no value to those who lack the political pull to get around the government plans is less expensive for entities that do have such pull.

This is what happens when planners don’t look at incentives, acknowledge their legitimacy, and seek to accommodate them in a way that works best all around, but rather seek to slip restrictive rules into place below the awareness of most of the people who will be affected.

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On Climate, It’s the Government That’s Acting Conspiratorially

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Ted Nesi’s Saturday roundup column gives Rich Davidson, the spokesman for far-left-radical Democrat U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, room to offer some spin related to the senator’s push to make a crime of disagreeing with him on climate change:

Simply denying climate change isn’t what Senator Whitehouse believes could violate federal law. Like courts found with tobacco companies, it can be a violation of the federal civil RICO statute when companies engage in an enterprise designed to mislead the public about the dangers of their products. The senator’s questions to the attorney general were to learn whether the Department of Justice is doing its due diligence to investigate whether fossil fuel special interests are leading a coordinated fraudulent effort to deceive the American people.

Two observations.  First, the entire effort, including Whitehouse’s public pronouncements and especially the hearing with the attorney general, is an excellent example of how government can make the process the punishment and use broad threats to chill speech and activity.  What company or organization wants federal law enforcement agencies rifling through its files or telling the public that it’s under investigation for potentially criminal activity?  This sort of “due diligence” is thug government.

Second, it doesn’t get nearly as much press coverage as it should — particularly when the media presents Whitehouse’s tyrannical overtures as just a bit of he-said-she-said politicking (at worst) — but in this entire controversy, it’s the government that looks like a more likely candidate for RICO investigations.  Consider, for example, the relatively minor matter of an Obama administration video promoting propaganda about how “climate change” is producing polar vortexes (i.e., how global warming makes winter colder).  When the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) requested through official channels that the video be corrected and then requested documents substantiating the refusal of that request, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) engaged in a time-and-money wasting exercise to keep its documents secret, lying about the nature of the video.

Now, one could interpret the White House’s actions as evidence that it wants to hide its efforts to deceive the public, or one could interpret them as a bid by an over-sized organization that overspends its revenue by hundreds of billions of dollars every year to drain scarce resources among its ideological opponents.  Either way, Sheldon Whitehouse comes out looking objectively worse as a representative of the people of Rhode Island.

If only there were some way the news media could provide residents with an accurate picture of their junior senator and the schemes of which he’s a part…

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Mark Levin Features Soviet-Like Whitehouse

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Rhode Island’s own Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat) led off episode 4 of Mark Levin’s new online show.  Reviewing a clip of Whitehouse presenting an obviously prepared line of questioning for President Obama’s Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, Levin draws parallels between Whitehouse’s content and presentation and the sort of government activity we used to expect from the Soviet Union.

Without any specifics — leaving much to the imagination and the insinuation — the senator and the AG discussed criminal and civil investigations of private companies that aren’t fully in line with the required climate change ideology.  Levin suggests that the entire performance isn’t meant to enlighten the senator from Rhode Island, but rather to get the message out there in the air, so to speak, that companies should start worrying about an FBI knock on the door.  “It’s as tyrannical as is possibly imaginable.”

The idea is to intimidate the public in order to prevent real debate over public policy.  In practice, the government doesn’t have to take oppressive action to the extent that people believe that oppressive action is always a possibility.  The great majority of people (including business leaders) just want to move along with their lives, and so they’ll respond to implied threats from officials.  Then, those who either won’t or can’t capitulate so easily seem like extreme cases and are easy to marginalize in an environment in which everybody else just wants the tension to go away.

This is how freedom dies, and it’s sad to see how large a role even little Rhode Island has managed to play in the process through its electoral choices.

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With H7700 RI General Assembly Goes After Your Fixtures

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Think of all the challenges you have living in Rhode Island and contemplate what might ease them some.  How far down on your list would you put the following?

  • The water flow from my shower is too strong.
  • My lamps don’t operate efficiently enough.
  • My toilet flushes with too much force.
  • My appliances don’t have an additional cost added to them for stringent testing just for Rhode Island.
  • The state Commissioner of the Office of Energy Resources is too powerless to enter businesses and test their appliances.
  • My plumber or electrician can’t be fined for installing the appliances that I choose.
  • The commissioner can’t add new efficiency standards for any product that he or she chooses without getting authorization from my representatives.

If you think these matters are important, then go ahead and support the genius legislators who have sponsored H7700.  They are:

  • Arthur Handy (Democrat, Cranston)
  • Kathleen Fogarty (Democrat, South Kingstown)
  • Jeremiah O’Grady (Democrat, Lincoln and Pawtucket)
  • Mia Ackerman (Democrat, Cumberland and Lincoln)
  • Daniel McKiernan (Democrat, Providence)
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An Optimistic Economic Story for Rhode Island

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A brief forward-looking story describing a positive vision for all Rhode Islanders.

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The Newport Shore and Demonstrable Environmentalist Untruths

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Strange as it may sound, I’m wary of proclamations by climate change alarmists for many of the same reasons I’m wary of Donald Trump.  Although it would be beyond the layperson’s capacity to investigate every claim and prove its falsity, a limited collection of exaggerations and outright untruths gives reason to suspect that a sort of sine function applies — that the ratio of truth to untruth will remain generally the same no matter how large the claim.

On the climate change front, I have in mind this AP article by Seth Borenstein, with local flavor added by Providence Journal reporter Alex Kuffner:

In Rhode Island, according to measurements taken at the tide gauge in Newport, sea levels have risen 10 inches since 1929. And the rate of increase is picking up, said Grover Fugate, executive director of the state Coastal Resources Management Council. Waters are expected to rise another foot in the next 20 years. And by 2100, the levels could be seven feet higher, according to new estimates adopted by the CRMC last month to account for the latest data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I’ve taken this particular data point up before, and the bottom line is that, whatever one can say about the Newport sea level over the past century, it simply isn’t credible to claim the “rate of increase is picking up.”  If we take Borenstein’s mention of 1993, for example, and apply it just to Newport, with the assumption that its rate of increase will continue for a century, we’d have a large increase, yes.  But if we were to start the measurement in 1998, one could just as easily claim that the sea levels will drop dramatically over one hundred years.  The latest one-fifth of the last century has been relatively stagnant, which is not a synonym for “accelerating.”

The assumption that one could find similar flaws in the global data receives some justification in the degree to which the advocates quoted in the article extend their claims.  The article provides no evidence beyond mere coincidence for the repeated insistence that rising seas are being caused by the use of fossil fuels.  Yet that insistence is not once qualified with doubt, and we’re supposed to trust this subgroup of scientists, filtering information through this medium of information, to tell the “detective story” of sea levels throughout human history?

 

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Renewable Energy and Crony Capitalism in Action

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Yeah, maybe I’ve become cynical, but when I see this article:

The Providence company that’s in the midst of building the first offshore wind farm in the United States is now working on a host of energy projects that are on land and have nothing to do with the wind.

The most immediate is a 2.6-megawatt solar farm in Foster that was recently awarded a long-term power purchase contract through a state renewable energy program. Construction on the project, which would be Deepwater’s first foray into the solar energy sector, is expected to begin in the summer of 2017.

I can’t help but think of this legislation:

Every retail electric supplier providing service under contracts executed or extended on or after January 1, 2017, shall provide a minimum percentage of kilowatt-hour sales, as determined by the commission, to end-use customers in Rhode Island from thermal energy generating sources.

The folks who run government and those most heavily invested in the renewable energy industry are pretty seamlessly integrated at this point, in Rhode Island, so this could simply be a coincidence, but whatever the case it’s an excellent example of crony capitalism (of venture socialism).  A private entity decides to enter a market, and lo’ the government decides to force people to buy its product.

Folks, this isn’t how an economy is supposed to work.  In fact, in the long run, it won’t work at all.  Rhode Island should be considered exhibit #1 for that proposition.

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Whitehouse as Anti-Science Left’s Poster Boy

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Rhode Island’s own U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat) gets a name check in Josh Gelernter’s article likening the climate change alarmists to the historically infamous persecutors of Galileo:

People tend to think that proponents of an Earth-centered solar system were nothing but intransigent religious fanatics. In fact, they included scientists of Galileo-level genius, like Ptolemy and Aristotle. When their theories were weakened and their opponents’ strengthened, they switched sides — and the “scientific consensus” changed. The intransigence belonged to the government, seated in the Vatican, which refused to accept new data because a deviation from the consensus-ante would have proved politically difficult. …

But our government — or parts of it, like Senator Whitehouse — prefer the status quo. Global warming is (literally and metaphorically) cash in the bank for many of our men in Washington, and a lot of their supporters. They want the new heliocentrists excommunicated and in prison. But remember: The lesson of Galileo’s inquisition is that truth will out.

Progressives have gone pretty far on a logical fallacy.  Essentially, they’ve promoted the notion that “the Church persecuted Galileo, and business moguls exploited workers, but we support action through government, and government is neither the Church nor a business.”  The fallacy, obviously, is to pretend that organizations in each of those three broad categories are different in a way that’s relevant to the undesirable outcome.  Put differently, they pretend such institutions can’t switch roles in the narrative, as if it’s always the prefixes and never the suffixes in “theocracy” and “oligarchy” that make a difference, as if claiming that they have invented a pure, non-prefixed government — a “cracy” or “archy.”

That’s not a sustainable delusion, but progressives have also been very busy buying off constituencies and brainwashing with reckless abandon.

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How ‘Bout Some More (Green) Chains on Our Economy?

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See, here’s the thing: If my understanding of economics were wrong, Rhode Island’s economy would be humming along right now. Three green-energy provisions in Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s proposed budget just redistribute money to companies in a politically preferred industry, forcing us all to pay for profits that the market would never provide if people were free to direct their money where they wanted it to go:

“The governor wants to be as aggressive as she can be to expand clean energy sources,” Marion Gold, commissioner of the state Office of Energy Resources, said in an interview. “The three provisions send a signal to clean energy companies that Rhode Island is a good place to invest their dollars.”

The energy proposals would:

— Extend the Renewable Energy Fund another five years beyond its current scheduled expiration in 2017. The fund, which is replenished through a surcharge on all electric ratepayers in Rhode Island that totals about $2.5 million a year, is used to support grants and loans to developers of in-state renewable energy projects.

— Expand the state’s net metering program, which allows owners of renewable energy systems to sell power to offset their total electric bill. The program would allow “virtual” net metering for off-site systems and third-party ownership of systems.

— Impose a blanket exemption for renewable energy systems from municipal property taxes, unless a community actively chooses to tax the systems.

For people in the industry, it’s profits and investment returns. For those out of it, it’s surcharges, taxes, and socialized costs.

At the House Finance hearing regarding tolls, the Republicans’ plan to redirect some money from renewable energy handouts led to the declaration that it’s one of the few growing industries in the state. That’s because it’s heavily subsidized, and only subsidized industries are able to achieve health in this state.

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A Dog Not Barking in the Cold Streetlights

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When the government finds “no brainer” deals like Providence’s streetlight grab, you can be sure somebody’s selling the benefits of wealth redistribution.

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Untampered Surface Temperatures

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In continuation of my project to clear out links I’d put aside for possible mention (and to make up for my failure to notice that a link I put up this morning was more dated than I’d thought), here’s an interesting find that is, indeed, recent:

A new study about the surface temperature record presented at the 2015 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union suggests that the 30-year trend of temperatures for the Continental United States (CONUS) since 1979 are about two thirds as strong as officially NOAA temperature trends.

The upshot is that only about one-third of the temperature sensors that NOAA uses to track global warming have not been compromised in some way over the last three decades (by being moved or being near some change of landscape that would have changed the results or some other issue requiring correction).  And that one-third of sensors produces a significantly smaller warming trend than the compromised sensors.  Notably, as a chart from Anthony Watts, one of the authors of the study, shows, the official records are much closer to the results of the compromised stations than the uncompromised ones.

Alarmists might dismiss this as the work of non-official-climate-scientists, but such insistence on credentials is one of those long-standing practices of insiders that’s coming into question.  Science isn’t supposed to work that way.  From another perspective, as Classical Values Dave puts it, “It’s frankly comical that a team of unpaid volunteer skeptics had to do the real fieldwork of actually looking at the stations.”

As politicians (including dictators) insist on ever greater infringements on the people’s rights in the name of climate change, incentive grows for the people to investigate the basis for the infringements.  My money’s on the likelihood that the evidence will come up wanting.

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UPDATED: About That Global Warming Consensus

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Obviously, a survey does not an argument make, but this is an interesting tidbit that one might expect to be getting more attention if the news media were truly on a politically neutral search for truth and compelling stories [see update for an important note]:

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

The survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.

I’ve wondered if such things as the rush to a non-binding agreement in Paris and Rhode Island Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s enthusiasm for prosecuting political opponents indicate that those who wish to use “climate change” as justification for sweeping away freedom see their window closing.  Perhaps in part because real and immediate threats are arising for contrast (such as terrorism and the rising wave of refugee invaders throughout Europe), the spell whereby environmentalists have silenced skeptics appears to be wearing off.

UPDATE (1/3/16 12:38 p.m.)

A reader points out that the first link above points to an article from 2013, which I’d missed.  Obviously, that removes the oddity of the news media’s not following the story now (although not back then).  However, the chronology actually contributes to the possibility that the alarmists have been making a push because they sense the window closing.

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Climate Change by Anecdote and Science

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Just up on the Providence Journal Web page is a new part of “a special report on Confronting Climate Change in Southern New England.”  The story is about steps that some local businesses are taking in response to recent extreme weather events, and it’s generally interesting, as a tale of local life, but the larger purpose of reporter Patrick Anderson, one suspects, is to have some anecdotal spikes with which to garland a more-political narrative, as follows:

The resilience of businesses along Rhode Island’s southern shore after Sandy mirrors the approach much of New England has taken to severe weather and the persistent, advance of the ocean — linked to climate change.

The actual business owners seem to be deciding things more as a matter of interest, investment, and risk, but (scary music) we all know that climate change is coming!  One wonders how much Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s political rhetoric inspired the story.  The odd thing is that it’s actually a simple matter to look into how much the ocean has risen in the area.  Of course, the answer “not much at all in the past two decades” would complicate the narrative.

As a fan of complicated narratives, though, I thought I’d throw in E. Calvin Beisner’s thoughts on a recent U.S. Senate hearing about climate science.  Beisner’s basic conclusions are that the science isn’t settled and that there’s reason to doubt alarmist claims, not the least because of government influence:

Christy, Curry, and Happer also testified that government funding of climate research biases subjects chosen for research (e.g., lots of focus on human causes of climate change and little on natural causes), and Steyn joined them in testifying that threats (by Rep. Raul Grijalva [D-AZ] and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse [D-RI]) to investigate and prosecute skeptical scientists under RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) law had a “chilling effect,” undermining both First Amendment freedoms of speech and press and the free inquiry essential to scientific progress.

They recommended instead that the federal government should fund competing research teams in climate just as it has done on other issues. When the two teams critique each other’s work, both improve.

Of course, then the debate would have to be covered, rather than reported as if it were over.

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Heed John Kerry and Halt Global Totalitarianism

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Spun up on the topic of climate change, Secretary of State John Kerry has been letting some problematic phrases fly out into public awareness.  Here he is talking about how binding the United States even to impossible standards for green living would essentially be pointless:

… The fact is that even if every American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, guess what – that still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world.

If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions –- remember what I just said, all the industrial emissions went down to zero emissions -– it wouldn’t be enough, not when more than 65% of the world’s carbon pollution comes from the developing world.

But this, from the same speech, is what really gives the game away:

Addressing climate change will require a fundamental change in the way that we decide to power our planet. And our aim can be nothing less than a steady transformation of a global economy.

The global ruling class wants the authority to dictate around the globe how people and businesses collect and use energy.  To help developing countries address the burden, governments in wealthy countries will confiscate money from their own people and deliver it to poorer countries.  This will help the leaders (often dictatorships of one kind or another) maintain a minimal standard of living without having to loosen economic policy or allow alternative sources of power (as through successful businesses) develop beyond their control.

Meanwhile, much of the wealth being redirected will simply go to well-connected cronies providing this alternative energy.  Because their technologies require subsidies, this switch also eliminates the energy sector of the economy as a source of wealth and power beyond the reach of government, making the rise of future Koch Bros. impossible.

This explains the repeated insistence (for decades, now) that this is the last chance to stop the end of the world.  It explains why useful idiots like Harrison Ford proclaim the risk of human extinction.  Appearing before the U.S. Senate Sub-Committee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, writer Mark Steyn explained the McCarthyism of the climate science cabal by saying the cabal gives itself license for inappropriate behavior because “it’s no longer about “meteorology”, it’s about saving the planet.”

At that level of urgency, all quaint traditions about rights go out the window.  That should not be acceptable.

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R.I. Center for Freedom & Prosperity: 2015 RI Report Card on Competitiveness Confirms Status Quo is Failing Rhode Islanders

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The grades are out, and once again the status quo fails on the 2015 RI Report Card on Competitiveness. When will the political class learn that their way is simply not working to reach their stated goals? If Rhode Island is to reform its way of conducting business, our elected officials must learn to place less trust in government-centric programs for every problem. We will never improve our state’s employment situation unless we adopted the need reforms that will allow Rhode Islanders to empower themselves to achieve their hopes and dreams. The 2015 report card decisively demonstrates the wreckage that decades of liberal policies have wrought upon our state.

The 2015 RI Report Card shows how Rhode Island’s political class continues to cater to special insiders, while depriving other Rhode Islanders of the opportunity for upward mobility, educational opportunity, and personal prosperity. In the major categories, Rhode Island was graded with two F’s, seven D’s, and one C. The two categories with F grades are Infrastructure and Health Care; the seven D’s are Business Climate, Tax Burden, Spending & Debt, Employment & Income, Energy, Public Sector labor, and Living & Retirement in Rhode Island; while Education received a C-. Among the 52 sub-categories evaluated, Rhode Island received 19 F’s, 24 D’s, 5 Cs, 3 Bs, and just one lone A.

These unacceptable grades should be a wake-up call to lawmakers that a government-centric approach is not producing the social justice and self-sufficiency that Rhode Islanders crave. By burdening the public with policies that discourage work and a productive lifestyle, the status quo is failing the people of our state. On the 2015 RI Report Card on Competitiveness, the Ocean State received “Ds” in the major categories of Jobs and Employment, and in Tax Burden. We must learn to trust in our people and remove the tax and regulatory boot of government off of their backs by advancing policies that empower the average family with choices, that reward work, and that grow the economy.

Only free market policy will transform the Ocean State by advancing policies that empower the average family with choices, that reward work, and that grow the economy. We can no longer tolerate Rhode Island falling further behind. The Center will continue to work tirelessly to promote policies like sales tax reform and school choice in order to help our fellow Rhode Islanders by unleashing their potential. We encourage you to help spread the word about the failing grades the status quo in Rhode Island received this year. You have power to change the Ocean State into a place where everyone can prosper. Thank you.

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RI Report Card: Rhode Island Government Still Failing Its People

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The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s Competitiveness Report Card for Rhode Island is less of an indication of how Rhode Islanders are doing than what insiders are doing to us.

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Government and the Right Way of Life

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Ask a progressive whether government by, for, and of the people ought to allow them to implement local policies reflecting a conservative understanding of a well-lived life and be sure to duck from the impact of the glare that you’ll receive.  Change the impetus from religious faith and the long-standing traditions on which our civilization was built, however, and they’ll be much more amenable to the notion that government should set policies in order to tell people how to live.

Two items down from a note about the lack of diversity among the race scolds at the Providence Journal and the Boston Globe, Ian Donnis’s Friday column includes this:

ProJo op-ed columnist Steven Frias recently outlined the deficits that chronically plague RIPTA. Yet mass transit advocates point to far more extravagant public subsidies for cars and the highways upon which they travel, resulting in runaway development, environmental degradation, and other adverse effects. “We know that every year we ‘invest’ $25 billion of federal taxes in auto-dominated transportation,” the late Jane Holtz Kay wrote in her 1997 book, Asphalt Nation. “Add to this the amount from state and local agencies. We have seen the direct costs and indirect ones, the incalculable sums spent in the wrong way, in the wrong place, for the wrong way of life. It is time to price them correctly — to right the imbalance toward sustainable transportation.”

We can have a conversation about what government ought to fund, but note how casually Kay passes judgment on “the wrong way of life.”  It’s not just a “less fulfilling way of life,” or “a way of life that people would eschew if they were well informed,” it’s “the wrong way of life.”  And government, Kay seems to be saying, should push people toward the right way of life, even if they don’t want it.

As for the subsidies, a recent post from Ed Driscoll comes to mind, in which he recalls a 2009 anecdote from the early years of Obama’s spending orgy:

“He came in to do his talk and opened his talk with, ‘I’m Matt Rogers I am the Special Assistant to the Secretary of Energy and I have $134 billion that I have to disperse between now and the end of December,’” Holland told the audience. “So upon hearing that I sent an email to my partners that said Matt Rogers is about to get treated like a hooker dropped into a prison exercise yard.”

One suspects that, at the end of the day, the germane consideration isn’t whether government spending supports the right or wrong way of life, but whether it benefits progressive politicians, groups, and supporters and pushes the population into a box that helps progressives maintain their power.

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