A brief forward-looking story describing a positive vision for all Rhode Islanders.
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?
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.
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.
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.
When the government finds “no brainer” deals like Providence’s streetlight grab, you can be sure somebody’s selling the benefits of wealth redistribution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.