The Effect of Wind and Solar on Electricity Costs

I just received an email from the CO2 Coalition with a very revealing plot of the cost of electricity in many European countries versus the wind and solar capacity per capita for that country.  This plot is courtesy of Ken Gregory, the director of Friends of Science and a member of the CO2 Coalition.  I have had endless debates in the past trying to explain to intelligent people why the spot market cost for electricity generated by wind and solar is vastly lower than the real cost of electricity when these means of generation are added to the electric grid.  The costs of back-up dependable electricity generators, the additional transmission line costs, and the cost of additional control devices on the grid are simply beyond the comprehension of many "green" energy advocates.  The plot below makes it very clear that there are such effects that very much raise the cost of wind and solar electricity generation above the claim that it is nearly free!

This plot shows a very strong correlation of electricity cost to the extent of solar and wind generation on the electric grids of the countries of Europe.  This high degree of correlation certainly requires an effort to find an explanation that is not based on the reasons I offered above, if you are an advocate of "green" energy.  Understanding the basis for our energy costs is fundamental to a rational establishment of national energy policy.  That policy has a strong effect on the cost of living, the health of an economy, and the personal pursuit of happiness.

Bringing Britain's Energy Woes to America?

Bringing Britain’s woes to America?
 
Will Biden-AOC energy policies do to Americans what UK climate obsession is doing to Brits?
 
Paul Driessen
 
Virginia enacted a Clean Economy Act; other states have implemented similar laws. AOC demands a national Green New Deal; President Biden is imposing one via executive decree. The United Kingdom is determined to reach Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions; the European Union is pursuing a Green Deal.
 
All these policies send energy prices rocketing upward, eliminating jobs and killing people. Instead of reducing emissions, they simply move them overseas, where they combine with massive air and water pollution, habitat destruction and wildlife decimation – as China and other countries burn more coal, oil and gas every year, to improve their people’s living standards ... and to mine and process raw materials for the wind turbines, solar panels and battery modules they manufacture for climate-obsessed nations.
 
The net result: Progress toward global Net Zero is zero – worse than zero – and all the lost jobs, rising poverty, reduced living standards and policy-driven deaths are for nothing.
 
President Biden wants hydrocarbon-free electricity generation by 2035, and elimination of all fossil fuel extraction and use by 2050. That means no gasoline or diesel vehicles; no natural gas to power factories or heat, warm water and cook in homes, hospitals and businesses; no petrochemical feedstocks for fertilizers, plastics, pharmaceuticals and thousands of other essential, everyday products.
 
All US energy will be provided by wind, solar and battery power – millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and billions of battery modules, sprawling across continental United States and along its coasts. Petrochemicals will come from crops planted on millions of acres of former wildlife habitat.
 
To drive this extreme agenda, Team Biden has canceled pipelines, leases and permits; pressured banks to stop lending money for drilling; and issued scores of regulations that delay and drive up costs for fossil fuel projects – while making it easy for industrial-scale wind and solar installations to get permits. Prices for energy, transportation, food, services and used cars predictably shot up. Inflation and consumer prices reached 40-year highs.
 
Henry Hub natural gas prices doubled from $2.61 per mcf (thousand cubic feet or million BTUs) in November 2020 to $5.51 in October 2021, before falling to $4.75 in January 2022, as skyrocketing global prices spurred drilling, fracking and production on US state and private lands. Regular gasoline averaged $2.17 a gallon nationwide in 2020 – but hit $3.39/gal ($4.38 in California) in the same timeframe.
 
As Americans fret and fume over the needlessly high prices – and wonder what the future might hold – they can look to the UK and EU (a) to count their blessings for comparatively low prices today and (b) to ponder how continued climate-centric policies could impact American livelihoods and living standards.
 
Britain and continental Europe have already embraced a wind-and-solar future, closed coal and nuclear power plants, and banned fracking for the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas beneath their feet, while North Sea production keeps falling. They have reaped the whirlwind from those callously inept policies.
 
(It is illuminating and ironic that Russian organizations finance many US, UK and EU anti-fracking disinformation campaigns, funneling funds through a Bermuda law firm, a shell company and the Sea Change Foundation to the Sierra Club, Climate Action Network and other groups.)
 
Britain and Europe’s vaunted wind turbines have been generating electricity at a dismal 14% of “nameplate capacity” – providing power three hours a day, one day a week, four days a month, in short spurts, at completely unpredictable times. Their wintertime solar power has been equally sporadic and unpredictable. No modern society can function on such energy.
 
The huge gaps have been plugged with gas- and coal-fired generation, with much of the gas coming from Russia and the USA. But Asia also wants the gas, and Russia is playing Ukraine/Nord Stream 2 pipeline politics with its gas, tightening supplies as demand soars. UK and EU home and business gas and electricity prices are in the stratosphere – five to ten times the Biden Era prices Americans are paying.
 
Luckily for families and businesses, Britain’s Office of Gas & Electric Markets (Ofgem) regulates how much utility companies can charge. But that often means keeping household, hospital, school and business energy prices well below the utilities’ actual costs – with predictable results.
 
Experts say the average annual household bill of £1,277 ($1,755) could surge to £1,865 ($2,530) when the current price cap is raised in April 2022 – for homes and apartments that are much smaller than US counterparts, in a climate with much less extreme summer and winter temperatures than in much of the United States. Annual bills could exceed £2,000 ($2,715) or much more at Ofgem’s August review.
 
National Energy Action says this could put more than 6 million UK households (nearly one-fourth of all households) in “fuel poverty” – unable to afford proper heat, and often having to choose between heating or eating, even when cold indoor temperatures put their health and lives at risk.
 
For families that want budgetary certainty, the average 12-month fixed deal for a typical household now costs almost £2,500 ($3,430). But the UK’s second-biggest energy supplier’s most recent fixed-rate offer is almost £4,200 ($5,750)! That’s because natural gas and electricity generation costs are expected to keep rising – and because utilities must pay wind turbine operators “constraint payments” to turn turbines off whenever they generate more power than the grid needs and can absorb!
 
The month-ahead natural gas price at the Dutch TTF hub (a European benchmark for trading gas) recently hit €93.3 ($107) per megawatt-hour. That’s $31 an mcf – more than six times the January 2022 Henry Hub price. Just a month earlier, the European day-ahead gas price reached $61 per mcf!
 
No wonder 30 UK energy suppliers went bankrupt by the end of 2021 – leaving families and businesses scrambling to find new suppliers, at skyrocketing prices for heating and cooking. When utilities cannot charge customers anywhere near operating costs, they go belly-up.
 
No wonder two-thirds of UK renters struggle to pay their energy bills, and 400,000 more UK households were in danger of losing their gas and electricity provider before last Christmas. People are “genuinely terrified” about rising energy costs. Excess winter energy-poverty death tolls are likely to set new records.
 
Health and living standards in Britain and Europe will likely get far worse. In addition to insane energy costs, wages and environmental regulation costs are much higher than in Asia. Ceramic, steel, aluminum, automotive and other energy-intensive companies and industries are becoming uncompetitive. Manufacturing, jobs, energy use and greenhouse gas emissions are just moving to Asia.
 
Climate and energy politics, combined with fierce global demand, make it unlikely that Europe’s energy prices will go down. And while the EU recently voted to define natural gas and nuclear power as “sustainable,” acquiring affordable gas and building new nuclear plants will take years and be battled every step of the way. Rolling blackouts could become as common as in California.
 
British politicians “rail at energy costs” and argue about trimming them at the margins, says journalist Madeline Grant, perhaps by reducing the 5% VAT on energy or the 25% green-social subsidy levies on electricity bills. But they “dare not question the green policies” that cause energy price increases, end up taking no action, and then slap hefty new “pollution taxes” on gas and diesel vehicles.
 
Britain and Europe need to drill and frack their vast shale deposits. Having shut down their older nuclear plants, they must start building small modular reactors. The rest of the developed world needs to take similar actions – and not only because China, India and the rest of the developing world are not about to give up fossil fuels and rely on unreliable wind and solar power, but to save jobs and lives.
 
Otherwise, Britain’s Christmas just past will be its, Europe’s and America’s Christmas future, forever. Scrooge learned from Marley. Will Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, AOC and their lot learn from reality?
 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues. 

Charles' Comment:  There seems to be no end to the destruction of lives and society that radical environmentalists and the believers in the false catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis work with so much dedication to accomplish!

Europe, Where Mineral Rights Belong to the State, Cannot Frack

In most of Europe, the mineral property rights and sub-surface property rights of land belong to the state, not the landowner.  Consequently, the landowner is only hurt if minerals or oil or natural gas are extracted from his property.  This makes it politically impractical to extract minerals or oil or gas from most of the land. 

Consequently, the hydraulic fracturing now common in the United States is not helping the Europeans at all to free themselves from a heavy dependence on Russian natural gas.  Because of fracking, made possible by mineral rights ownership being commonly in the hands of the landowner in the U.S., the United States passed Russia in the production of both oil and natural gas last year.  But Europe remains in a state of dependence on Russian natural gas.  The most dependent countries are those of Eastern Europe such as the Baltic countries, Ukraine, and Poland, which Russia pressured in 2006, 2009, and 2015 with reductions or interruptions in their natural gas supply.

The Pre-Conditions for Religious Freedom Unmet by Islam

Religious freedom is a result of the individual right to freedom of conscience and thought.  Religious freedom is a subset of these broader freedoms.  Since religion usually calls on individuals to join with other individuals in activities including joint worship, it is also a result of freedom of association.  Religion commonly calls on people to act in prescribed ways, which they are allowed to do because individuals have a broad freedom of action, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the freedom to assemble, and the freedom to contribute one's time, effort, and wealth to a religious cause.

Note that freedom of religion exists in the context of broad individual rights.  These individual rights enable individuals to survive and flourish in life while preventing others from threatening them with violence and force.  Every individual has equal, sovereign individual rights based on his nature as a rational being who must use his mind and take action to sustain and maintain his life.  Man institutes government for the sole, legitimate function of protecting his and everyone else' individual rights, as properly stated in our Declaration of Independence.  When a highly limited government well-instituted, as by our Constitution, provides this protection, a very robust and choice-rich private sector results in which individuals can revel in their full individual complexity and differentiation, while cooperating for their mutual benefit with others for purposes of their choosing.  Thus men commonly live creative and productive lives in harmony and prosperity.

This understanding of the nature of man and his individual rights was unknown until the Enlightenment developed in Europe.  It mostly developed in England, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands.  These were generally Christian countries.  Christianity, as practiced for at least 1000 years prior to this, had been deeply entwined with government, actively invoking the force of governments to force the people of each country to believe in the religion, or at least to pretend to believe in it and to be constrained in their actions by its tenets.  Christianity during this period was guilty of many terrible acts of evil.  But, Christianity had a key individual at its root, Jesus Christ, who had not advocated the use of force to impose his religious ideas.  He had pointedly refused to interfere with the rule of Rome, admittedly maybe only because that would have been a pretty futile effort at the time.  The fact that Jesus Christ had not preached that Christians take control of government and use it to force people to practice his religious ideas made it feasible to reform Christianity after the Enlightenment to a sufficient degree that religious freedom became broadly possible to extend to the various forms of religions in the Enlightened countries.  The people who were brought up in this tradition came to believe that all religions should be granted freedom of religion.

Unfortunately, few people have a clear understanding of the conditions which must exist for it to be possible to have a broad freedom of religion without undermining the many individual rights that make freedom of religion possible.  It simply is not possible to offer freedom of religion to a religion which embraces the use of force to spread the religion and to subjugate those people who refuse to adopt it.

Islam became known to man through Mohammed in 610 AD in the Arabic peninsula.  The land was very primitive with many contending tribes, some of which were polytheistic and some of which were Jewish.  When Mohammed had few followers, he formed alliances of convenience with Jewish tribes and often proclaimed his desire for peace with at least some other tribal groups.  However, as he became more and more powerful, he became much more ready to use force to suppress any peoples who did not join him as followers and believe in his teachings.  He taught that Islam required Jihad, which generally was implemented by using force to conquer other people.  He developed Islam as an integrated set of religious and political beliefs in which Islam was established by the state through the Sharia Law.  Government was to advance Islam, to suppress non-believers often to the point of killing them, to collect tribute from those who submitted but did not believe, and to conquer new lands and people.  It was also to punish any Muslim who became a non-believer with death.  Basically, the integrated religion and tyrannical government model is not compatible with individual rights.

It will not be possible to extend religious freedom to Islam until and unless it reforms itself to eliminate its political component that uses force to limit greatly many individual rights.  The integrated rights of the individual cannot be in conflict with one another.  Whenever someone proposes a conflict of rights, that person has failed to correctly identify the rights of the individual.  It is very common that people do this and then they commonly say that rights bring with them responsibilities.  Meeting those responsibilities is supposed to reduce the friction, nay the conflict, of one person's rights with those of others.  Those responsibilities commonly include obligations of service to others and out and out self-sacrifice.  This is all nonsense.  Properly identified individual rights allow men to live in harmony, not conflict.

Because those who practice Islam are required to emulate Mohammed, they are essentially required to emulate his use of force to spread and maintain its integrated religious and political system.  Some may choose to emulate his earlier stage of operations when his forces were weak and he was less aggressive.  Others will follow his later actions when his forces were strong and quite ruthless in their conquering sweep across the Arabic peninsula.  People most often acquire their religious and political beliefs from their family and the society into which they are born.  They come to see their realistic choices as limited by their culture and will mostly allow their developed beliefs to vary but little from those common in their culture.  The Muslim cultures strongly discourage a wide range of beliefs within Islam itself in given areas.  Some more substantial variations do exist among Muslims as a whole, such as those between the Sunnis and the Shiites, who often have very nasty wars with each other.  We should realize that some Muslims do try hard to be decent people despite the limitations of Islam.  While we must work and fight to maintain an Enlightenment culture that honors and preserves individual rights, we do not want to be at war with all Muslims.

It is not an abberation when an Islamist uses force to advance Islam, however.  It cannot truthfully be said that the use of force means someone is not practicing Islam.  I understand this representation to be an attempt to discredit such Islamists and to limit the number of followers of Islam with which we have to contend in violent confrontations.  However, this is an attempt to deny the truth.  Islam is not so easily reformed to separate the control of government and the use of force from the religion as was the case with Christianity.  Mohammed was not Jesus Christ.  The brutal Arabic peninsula of 610 AD was not the somewhat civilized Roman Empire of Jesus' time.  The reformation of Islam may well take hundreds of years, given that the easier case of Christianity took hundreds of years.  Violence in the name of Islam may well continue for that entire time.  That violence may be extreme or radical in our Western Civilization context, but it is manifestly not extreme or radical in the context of Islam. 

There are many non-violent Islamists and many who are nice people when we interact with them on a personal basis.  We need not be at war with everyone who believes in Islam.  But, many of the personally peaceful Muslims do believe it is their religious duty to support and contribute to those who use violence to advance their religion.  Many believe that when it becomes possible for them to make Sharia Law the law of the land, they should do so.  This would trample individual rights and with the loss of those rights, a complete loss of freedom of conscience and its subset freedom of religion will result.  Understanding what is at stake in refusing to have our own society taken over by Islam is necessary if we are to maintain our precious individual rights.

It is vital that we also understand that the use of force is a true emulation of Mohammed's acts by present day Islamists and not an abberation despite Obama's and other Progressives' adamant claims that it is.  We must not lose focus on the fact that Islam is an integrated system of religion and government, not just another religion.  Islam is not compatible with individual rights and in its present common forms does not meet the conditions of a belief system that qualifies for religious freedom.  The present common effort to grant it religious freedom undermines religious freedom, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and self-ownership.  Islam is unfortunately a very tyrannical religious and political system.

European Energy Silliness: Wood is Top Renewable Fuel

Despite the huge investments in wind and solar renewable energy in Europe, the top form of renewable energy is wood biomass.  About half of Europe's much hyped effort to advance renewable forms of energy has wound up in wood fuel according to the 6 - 12 April issue of the Economist.  Even in Germany, 38% of non-fossil fuel consumption is wood.  In Poland and Finland, 80% of the renewable energy is from wood.

Wood, unlike wind and solar, is at least reliable.  The EU effort to get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 is impossible based on wind and solar.  Wood makes this possible.

Coal-fired power plants have been under pressure due to the production of carbon dioxide, which according to fable will cause catastrophic man-made global warming.  So, the power companies with coal-fired power plants like wood because they can easily modify a coal-fired power plant to mix in 10% wood pellets.  In Great Britain, power plants are given a huge subsidy to use wood and this is causing a number of coal-fired power plants to convert to wood use.

So much wood is being used for fuel that Europe is importing considerable wood.  In 2012, Europe used 13 million tonnes or 13 billion kilograms.  A tonne is a metric ton or 2204.6 pounds.  Europe is expected to use 25 to 30 million tonnes of wood pellets in 2020.  In 2010, wood pellet imports increased by 50%.  Global trade in wood pellets is expected to shoot up from about 10 to 12 million tonnes now to about 60 million tonnes by 2020.  Much of this wood comes from western Canada and the southern U.S.

Consequently, prices for wood are rising rapidly.  Wood pellet prices rose from $116 a tonne in August 2010 to $129 a tonne in December 2012.  Prices of hardwood from western Canada rose by 60% since the end of 2011.  These wood price increases have contributed to the closing of about 20 large saw mills making particle board in Europe over the last five years.  The higher prices are creating difficult times for pulp and paper companies, as well as furniture makers.

Burning wood pellets in coal-fired power plants makes no sense at all.  It was early on claimed that burning wood was carbon neutral, since as the trees grew, they removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  There are many problems with this.  If you use hardwood pellets from western Canada, the output of CO2 from coal-fired plants using 10% wood pellets occurs now and it may take 100 years of new trees growing in western Canada to remove as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as is being emitted now.  In addition, making the wood pellets uses considerable energy and transporting them from North America to Europe uses still more.  It has been calculated that with the British subsidy of 45 Pounds per MWH of electricity, switching from gas to wood saves one tonne of CO2 emission at a cost of 225 pounds.  That is very expensive for an idea based on a failed hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming and a bad accounting of the total carbon dioxide emissions due to using wood pellet as fuel.

There are other considerations.  Land not used to grow trees can be used for other purposes that have value.  Taxpayers have to pay the subsidy money.  Consumers pay higher electricity costs, as well as higher particle board, paper, cardboard, board, and furniture costs.  They are forced to do this on the basis of a false hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming and concern for fossil fuel supplies in the face of the huge supplies of coal and natural gas now made available by hydraulic fracturing technology.

European socialism can sure cause Europeans to pursue and enforce some very silly ideas.

A British Plea that America Honor Its Constitution and Not Take the European Path

Daniel Hannan, a British politician and author of A New Road to Serfdom, made this perceptive plea that America treasure the wisdom and the freedoms offered us by our Constitution and reject the European way so favored by Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their comrades in socialism.  It would be great if every American listened to this short talk.

Howard Rich: Kicking the Can Right Off the Cliff

Howard Rich wrote an editorial at the Investor's Business Daily which rather long-windedly bemoans the spendthrift ways of politicians.  Most of us can appreciate his reasons for being upset, but we are fully capable of doing our own moaning and trashing about in pain.  But buried deep into his piece was this nice summary of some very foreboding financial figures:

According to a January 2009 paper from the National Center for Policy Analysis, the average European Union nation needs to place more than four times its current gross domestic product in the bank (earning interest) just to fund current obligations. In fact, the NCPA report found that by 2020, the average EU nation will have to raise its tax rate from 40% to 55% of the national income just to cover existing benefits.

In Japan — which has the world's highest percentage of debt to GDP — fiscal policy is "out of control," according to Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff, who predicted the 2008 U.S. bank failures. According to the latest estimates from the International Monetary Fund, total Japanese borrowings will soar to 204.3% of the nation's economic output in 2011.

Meanwhile in America, total public debt will exceed GDP for the first time since the World War II era, part of a massive borrowing spree that has seen the nation more than double its debt over the last six years. "The U.S. is in a state of paralysis in its fiscal policy," Rogoff said last month. "When they start tightening monetary policy even a little bit, it's going to send shock waves through the system."

In addition to this brewing global and national crisis, U.S. states and municipalities are facing similar ticking time bombs. A March 2010 Northwestern University report discovered that the total unfunded liability of state government pension funds was $3.2 trillion — or more than $2.2 trillion higher than government officials estimated.

Note that last paragraph:  Government officials are claiming that state government pension fund liabilities are only 31% of what they really are.  To be that wrong, they have to be lying to the taxpayers.  That cannot be a mistake.  Of course, by now, one has to be really, really obtuse not to have come to understand that most of our politicians and bureaucrats have made it a standard practice to lie to us all of the time.  Clinton seemed to raise the commitment  to the lie to a new standard, but Obama has readily surpassed him in his commitment to lying.  Given the pitiful state of the planned economies and socialist states of Europe that Obama so much wants to transform the United States of America into, well .... you really must lie.  There is no truthful way to make those European Big Brother states palatable.

Some Objectivists tend to think that discussing mere matters of the amount of debt is not very important because it is not a matter rich in ethical content.  I disagree.  The Preamble of the Constitution noted our responsibility to our Posterity which was to be recognized by the very limited government of the Constitution. George Washington also reminded Americans that they had no right to saddle their posterity with debt.  He was very right and very wise.  Passing the debts of our governments today on to our children and our grandchildren is a heinous thing to do.  We have essentially been doing just this since the Social Security Act was passed in 1935.   The Medicare program has raised this practice to new heights.  Then came Medicaid, ObamaCare, and bailouts in TARP and now forever into the future with the Financial Industry Bailout and Consumer Spying Act which is said to likely be passed by Congress later today, and incredible subsidies to alternative energy firms who environmentalists will never allow to build any power plants.  There is no fun in spending money you actually have to earn, so the national governments prefer usually to just run the printing presses as long as need be.  Of course this drives down the value of everything the private sector does as productive work, but hardly anyone ever noticed as long as they were bribed with some goodies.  But, the number of necessary goodies kept escalating and now there is not more room for further escalating them.  The ever more meager productive private sector is now just too small in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. to support the Leviathan governments with all their redistributed goodies.

Speaking of which, Glenn Beck's 26 May 2010 show dwelt on the same Big Brother watching over the peasants bank accounts, credit card transactions, and ATM transactions that I discussed in the early morning hours of the 26th.

Rahn - The Rise of the Job and Savings Killers

On 14 April, Richard W. Rahn, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the Chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth, published a commentary in The Washington Times entitled The Rise of the Job and Savings Killers.  This is a very good and hard-hitting perspective on the effort of the Obama administration to destroy the savers and job-creators of America.  Rahn says:

Responsible people are fearful. Those who save for the future increasingly understand that they are the targets of the predatory class. They see the United States and most other governments running record deficits, and most implicitly understand that this will not come to a good end. Greece and California are already serving as the canaries in the coal mine.

The Federal Reserve is holding short-term interest rates below the rate of inflation, so those who have interest-bearing savings accounts or certificates of deposit are seeing their savings erode, while at the same time, the Obama administration and Congress are increasing tax rates on interest, dividends and capital gains. Governments are expropriating (stealing) people's savings.

The U.S. and most other governments of the world are issuing debt at such a rapid rate and at such high levels, with no real plans to reverse such behavior, that it is almost a certainty they will not pay back what they owe. How will they avoid paying back the money? Well, there is always the old, tried-and-true way of inflation, whereby the central bank (the Federal Reserve in the United States) prints so much money as to erode the value of the money — so the government ends up paying (in real value) only cents on each dollar it borrowed.

 His other main points are:

• General inflation is very unpopular in the U.S. and cost Jimmy Carter a second term.
• The European way is often to target bankers and rich people as "greedy" and simply drop the interest rate promised on government bonds or delay their maturity date to rob those investors of their contractually agreed return on their investment.  Full bond payments are made to "politically correct" groups such as labor unions.  "Obama's rhetoric attacking "greedy" bankers and insurance companies" suggests he will do the same here.
• The government has not taken more than 15% of gross savings in any recession in the past 30 years, with an average quarterly taking in that time of about 2%, until this recession, in which it is taking more than 37% of gross savings with its super low Federal Reserve interest rates, so savers are paid less than the inflation rate and getting negative returns on savings.
• Savings produce new factories, buy equipment, fund R&D, and create new jobs.
• Many savers are astute and consume more and save less when the return on savings is negative or low.
• Obama is about to raise the maximum federal tax on interest, annuities, royalties, and more by 24%, thereby forcing less investment and savings.
• Obama is about to raise the maximum federal tax rate on dividends by an obscene 189%, raising it from 15% to 43.4%, thereby forcing a large reduction in investment.
• Obama is raising the maximum rate on capital gains by 59%, thereby forcing a destructive reduction in investment.
• Many state governments plan to follow his lead with similar higher tax rates.
• As the government's induced inflation rises, many people will be pushed into higher tax brackets, though their standard of living will be decreased, and they will be taxed more heavily, sometimes at rates greater than 100%!
• The political class in Washington and Europe "is engaged in the most massive act of wealth destruction since World War II."

As I have said many times, the Democrats are the party of Mass Destruction, not of beneficial change.  On the issue of will Obama target bankers and the rich on their investments, in further ways than those already written into the ObamaCare law and the plan to end the George W. Bush tax cuts, we must remember how he stole the money that GM and Chrysler owed to their creditors.  We also have to remember how much he admires European socialists and how badly he wants to Europeanize the United States of America.

Reducing Air Pollution Increases Temperatures

According to a study performed at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, clearer skies due to lowered man-made pollution cause the temperature to rise. This would be a case in which man's activities affect the climate of at least densely populated areas or those generating much pollution. As Europe and the United States and Canada have generally cleaned their skies of much of the air pollution common a few decades ago, countries such as Russia, China, and India have increased their air pollution. I do not know the net effect upon the global climate, but there is probably some effect caused by man. In the longer view, the cooling effect of air pollution in the earlier stages of the industrialization of Europe and the United States was a man-made effect which has now been largely undone. Later developing industrial nations such as Russia, China, and India are now the main polluters and coolers, but will likely do more to clean up their air pollution as they develop further.

The Dutch study collected data from 342 weather stations at airports across Europe measuring the fog, mist, and haze back to 1976. The report in the journal Nature Geoscience says that the number of days with visibility of less than 2 kilometers have fallen from 20 days per year to 10 days per year in the last 30 years. As a result, less sunlight is reflected back into space from the top of such fog, mist, and haze layers and more reaches the ground, to provide more warming at the surface of the earth.

The heat island effect of major cities is very well-known and is in fact a problem for accurate earth surface land temperature histories, which many say is not adequately corrected for in the measurements of the general warming trend since the end of the Little Ice Age and the advent of industrialization with the burgeoning growth of population centers that resulted. Man clearly does have some effect on at least the local climate in these high population centers. Indeed, even small towns appear to have small local effects.

It is also clear that such activities as plowing fields for farming and cutting down forests have an effect upon the climate. Of course, man has been doing these things for a very long time, so they have little effect on the climate any more in terms of changing it, except when the level of such activities changes greatly in a given locale. But compared to an earth with no human activity, the climate has been somewhat changed by the presence of man. I have no yearning to remove man and his effects in order to return the planet to its natural, no-human climate condition. There is no reason to value this at all and every reason to value an earth which supports the flourishing of man, thanks to man's use of his ability to reason for the purpose of improving his environment for his benefit.

But, while I deny that the effects of man's activities are more important than natural forces affecting the climate and I deny that his activities are causing a climate catastrophe, I do not deny that man has some effect upon the earth's climate. If man does cause some warming, I have no problem with that. In fact, wise men will generally acknowledge that some warming is a generally good thing. There is good reason upon examining the historical record of man to conclude that man tended to flourish better in warmer periods and to suffer more in cooler periods. More power to man if his activities are actually causing a bit of warming, which makes man a bit more comfortable.

Japan and Europe are Tanking

An article in today's Washington Times by David M. Dickson points out that Japan's GDP diminished at an annual rate of 12.7% in the 4th quarter of 2008! This is partly because Japan's economy is highly dependent upon exports, as is Germany's. Germany's GDP shrank by the annual rate of 8.1% in the fourth quarter. In comparison, the U.S. GDP shrank at an annual rate of 3.8%. Of course, the actual declines are 0.25 times the annual rate for these 4th quarter results and it is really more legitimate to give the actual reduction for the quarter, but this is rarely done. So, I will continue to use the annual rates for the quarter as the article does here.

In comparison, the 15-nation euro-zone had a GDP decrease in the 4th quarter of 5.9%, which was also the rate of decrease in Great Britain. The decline in France was about 4.5%, while that in Italy was a shade less than 7%. These last two declines were read from a graph, which is why I give them as approximations. Canada is the only nation of the G-7 which had a smaller loss than the U.S. Its loss was approximately 3.0%. Canada even had growth of about 1.25% in the 3rd quarter of 2008, when only France of the G-7 had growth. In France's case, the 3rd quarter growth was only about 0.3%.

So, overall, Japan and Europe are doing very badly, while the NAFTA countries of Canada and the U.S. are doing comparatively well. Japan in particular looks to be ready to plunge even more rapidly into negative GDP growth in the present quarter. Apparently, subsidizing export industries is not always a winning strategy, observed Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland and a former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission. The Nikkei 225 Stock Average is down nearly to half of its 52-week high. It has dropped 13% this year compared to the 11% drop of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the U.S. The Japanese Research Institute is projecting a 20% decline in the first quarter of 2009! Toyota is reducing car production for the domestic market by 54%. Apparently, the U.S. Big Three Auto Makers are not the only auto makers in a world of hurt.

As usual, it is up to the U.S. to pull the world out of recession. As usual, we will do this, with a bit of help from our relatively intrepid neighbors in Canada. Of course, I am assuming that the Obama-Pelosi-Reid axis of idiocentric evil is not quite up to the task of driving the U.S. economy off the cliff. They will do their best, but probably we will just wind up in a ditch. Then tens of millions of productive, innovative American private sector workers will find a way to repair the damage and get the car back on the road, with some loss of valuable time and dragging a trailer full of additional welfare recipient deadweights.

The Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming

Internet Al Gore told the climate jamboree held last year in Bali, "My own country the United States is principally responsible for obstructing progress here." Let us examine what the rest of the world has actually done and what the US has done between the signing in Kyoto in 1997 and 2004.

• Non-water vapor greenhouse gas emissions world-wide increased 18%.

• Treaty signing nations increased emissions 21.1%.

• Emissions from non-signing nations increased 10%.

• Emissions of the European Union nations increased 8.0%.

• Emissions in the US increased 6.6%.

If we look at the data between 2000 and 2004, we see a trend looking forward for the US vs. the European Union:

• Emissions increase in the European Union of 5.8%.

• Emissions increase in the US of 1.7%.

The much smaller increases in the US occurred despite a larger population growth and faster economic growth.

Apparently, the Kyoto Protocol, which actually will do very little to change the world's temperature, serves as a holier-than-thou cover for nations who are adding to greenhouse gas emissions much faster than the US is. Just about everywhere you look in this Global Warming Scare, you find dishonesty. You also find that it is a tool used to belittle the US and for other nations and the UN to try to gain control of the US.