How did Obama's Green Jobs Model Work for Spain?

Obama believes a "green economy" should be a principal goal of his economic and environmental policy.  He claims he will produce high quality jobs to put Americans back to work with his plans to subsidize alternative energy generation, while driving the coal industry into bankruptcy.  He also claims that this is a substantial path toward energy independence.  Eight times he has said that the model for his alternative energy economy is Spain.  So, let us see what the Spanish have concluded from their experiment in a green economy based on subsidized alternative energy such as solar and wind power.

The Socialist government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has been behind the Spanish "green economy."  From 2004 to 2010, the subsidies for alternative power were increased by a multiple of 5.  In 2009, the subsidies were doubled compared to 2008.  These 2009 subsidies were about equal to the entire government budget for all research, development, and technological innovation for Spain.  Electricity from solar plants is 12 times more expensive than that from fossil fuel combustion.  The cost of electricity generated in Spain from traditional fossil fuel plants has been dropping, but the cost of the alternative fuels has been going up so fast that consumer bills have gone up, rather than down.  You see, most of the subsidy costs are charged to the consumer.  The government says that the alternative energy industry will receive 126 billion euros in the next 25 years.

The Spanish newspaper La Gaceta on 21 May 2010 reported on the developing consensus that Spain's alternative energy, "green economy" has failed miserably.  Gabriel Calzada and other authors from the Juan de Mariana Institute produced a study that the Spanish 'green economy" had failed.  The Socialist government bitterly denounced the study.  The Spanish Embassy in the U.S. got the Democrat Congress to denounce the Calzada study in an act of Congress!

But now, the Minister of Industry, Miguel Sebastian, is worrying about the huge debt which is the result of the so-called investment in "clean energy."  Some in the Spanish cabinet believe the debt is worsening and delaying the recession for Spain.  An internal document of the Spanish cabinet has been leaked and its conclusions are even more pessimistic than the demonized Calzada study's.  The government now admits that every 'green job" created cost Spain more than 2.2 traditional jobs, in agreement with the Calzada report.  This is not good in a country with 20%, and still rising, unemployment.  The internal cabinet report backs every claim made in the Calzada study about the failure of the "green economy" experiment.

Obama, just last week, recommended that Zapatero change his strategy because it was hurting the Spanish economy and threatening the stability of the entire European Union, which is likely, with help from the U.S., to be asked to bail Spain out of its financial crisis.  One has to conclude that Obama knows the "green economy" model does not work.  Yet, this is the essential model of the newest attempt to create such an economy in the U.S., the Kerry - Lieberman version of carbon cap and tax which was just introduced earlier this week.  Obama is all for that.  This means he is knowingly putting his and the Democrats quest for power over the economy ahead of American prosperity.  He is knowingly seeking to create "green jobs" at a cost of more than 2.2 traditional jobs, he is knowingly seeking to add hugely to the national debt, and he is knowingly acting to greatly increase the cost of energy use in the U.S.

Is this guy Satan or what?

The Agenda is Primary, Not the Science or the Facts

I have repeatedly pointed out that the government mandates and subsidies for ethanol production from corn and other plant sources were based on claims that net energy would be produced and air pollution would be reduced.  These were false claims and this is now well-known.  Nonetheless, Congress has not enacted new legislation to repeal the bad mistake and eliminate the mandates for ethanol use in gasoline mixtures and the subsidies for its production.  This has not happened even though this situation has driven up food prices, in addition to fuel prices, as another bad consequence.  The reason no needed reform has occurred is because the ethanol laws were actually passed to purchase the votes and to gain campaign money from many farmers and from ethanol producers.  It was a way for politicians to increase their control over parts of the private sector.

The total scientific collapse of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis, has not caused Obama and the progressives (fascist socialists) to back off on promoting alternative energy sources with mandates and subsidies at all.  Obama called for a big push to increase government controls on energy in his State of the Union address.  The EPA still seems bent upon putting draconian controls on CO2 emissions and the use of fossil fuels under the Clean Air Act as well.  The progressive machine moves forward, despite the knowledge that man's CO2 emissions have no more than a trivial effect upon climate.  Why?

The very reason that NOAA dropped out hundreds of temperature reporting stations from the surface temperature records, which reported cooler temperatures than other retained stations did, to make it falsely appear that the earlier warming cycle of the late 1970s and 1980s was continuing, makes it very clear that an agenda was long dominant over any issues of science.  The agenda of the catastrophic man-made global warming scheme was a great desire to gain massive new control over the energy sector of our economy and over all users of energy.  Basically, all American businesses are highly dependent upon energy, which is why sudden price hikes in oil have set off 10 of the 11 recessions since WWII, including the present one.  Those Americans who do not own a company dependent upon energy costs, work for one or still have a residence they must heat and cool.  The power grab by the progressives to take over the control of energy is huge.  That goal remains, whether the science of catastrophic man-made global warming has become laughable or not.

So, the fascist socialist left is not giving up.  They are attempting to make another transition in their claim on power over the American people.  They used to base it entirely on fairness and economic equality, but the fall of the USSR made the claims of central economic planning look pitiful.  Their hollowness was too easily seen in the rapid movement of Eastern Europeans away from communism and socialism.  They had lived in socialism's depressing and deadening grasp.  They fled with elation to Capitalism.  Even the Chinese Communist government realized they had to drop much of their central economic planning.  The fascist socialists in the West adopted environmentalism and global warming as the agenda that would allow them to increase their power over the People.  Now that rationale has fallen apart on the global warming side and the environmental harm exaggerations on many other fronts are more and more being questioned also.  Where can they turn?

The new approach is rather desperate.  The claim is we will run out of fossil fuels, they are dirty, and alternative energy can produce more jobs.  Someday, we will run out of fossil fuels, but they are plentiful and cheap still.  This gives us plenty of time to develop alternative energy and there is no reason for pell-mell crash programs.  The free market will develop the new energy as it is needed.  Let companies drill in the American waters and in national forests and allow them to develop oil shale, as it makes sense.  Let them also use wind generation, solar, and geothermal power as they can find and develop markets for them.  There is no need for huge, wasteful government programs.  The evolution of technology will be much more efficient at its private sector pace.  As for cleanliness, we have already made huge strides in cleaning up our fossil fuel use.  A rationally paced program to continue such work will be wiser again than any crash program.  The real problems with pollution are in the poorer countries of the world and the solution is to bring the highly efficient Capitalist system to them, so they can afford to clean up their countries, as we have cleaned up the U.S.  Will alternative energy produce new jobs?  Yes, but we want it to produce net new jobs.  A government policy of killing coal miners, oil drillers, railroad, and energy-using industry jobs in massive numbers to create a pittance of new alternative energy jobs, is a fool's errand.

But, of course, I am treating the claims of the progressive fascist socialists as though they are motivated by a respect for reason.  They are not.  They are motivated by a desire to control the lives of others.  They want to tell every American what his values should be and then give him a strict set of rules to manage his life.  We are all to be the slaves of the college-educated elite of progressive fascist socialists who want to control us.  They are to be our rulers, our tyrants supreme.  Are we going to allow this?  I do not think so.  I think we are about to start throwing these rascals out of government in droves!  But, it is clear that they will never stop seeking to rule us and if we are to be free, we must never stop fighting this ravenous beast of fascist socialism.

UN IPCC AR4 Errors on Himalayan Glaciers Revealed

An article in the Seattle Times by Seth Borenstein notes that numerous claims made about the melting of glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 were wrong.  As usual, all of the errors made it appear that global warming was much more dire than it actually is.  Here are the errors in a half page of the report:

• "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world." Cogley and Michael Zemp of the World Glacier Monitoring System said Himalayan glaciers are melting at about the same rate as other glaciers.
• It says that if the Earth continues to warm, the "likelihood of them disappearing by 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high." Nowhere in peer-reviewed science literature is 2035 mentioned. However, there is a study from Russia that says glaciers could come close to disappearing by 2350. Probably the numbers in the date were transposed, Cogley said. 
• The paragraph says: "Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035." Cogley said there are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.
• The entire paragraph is attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from the WWF, Cogley said. And further, the IPCC likes to brag that it is based on peer-reviewed science, not advocacy group reports. Cogley said the WWF cited the popular science press as its source.
• A table says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840 meters. Then comes a math mistake: It says that's a rate of 135.2 meters a year, when it really is only 23.5 meters a year.

The Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh says that some glaciers are expanding and others are receding more slowly than indicated in the UN IPCC report. But secondly, note that an Indian scientist did speculate, not in a published paper, that the Himalayan glaciers might vanish by 2035.  He says his speculation should not have been used in the UN IPCC report.  Note that losing 400,000 square kilometers of glacier by 2035 is a much greater loss of sources of fresh water than is the loss of some fraction of the 33,000 square kilometers of actual Himalayan glacier and a much greater contributor to images of sea level rise.  The error on calculating the rate of retreat of the Pindari Glacier is especially foolish, since it was particularly easy for any reader to check the calculation.  The article rate of 23.5 meters/year is also actually wrong.  The rate is really 23.7 meters/year.

This set of errors, all favoring alarmism, is simply another indicator of a massive scientific fraud orchestrated by the UN IPCC, the Hadley Center and CRU of Great Britain, and NOAA and the NASA GISS of the U.S.  All of them aided and abetted by Al Gore, Tony Blair, Obama, Pelosi, many other socialist politicians, and much of the socialist press, which is most of the press.  The People have been massively betrayed here again by many scientists, almost all universities, many politicians, and most of the press.  The desire for money from governments and/or more control and power over other people's lives is just too great.  This is a great lesson in the perils of government grown beyond its rationally limited powers as defined in our Constitution, now ignored by our government and the fascist/Marxist/environmentalist intellectual pretenders and posers.

The AGW Fraud Continues to Become More Apparent

Dr. Tim Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg and a climatology consultant, has written an interesting summary of his assessment of the revelations from the release of e-mails and files from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.  He concludes in no uncertain terms that the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming was a massive fraud.  The data supplied by the CRU was central to all the conclusions of the UN IPCC reports and was manipulated unscientifically to appear to be science in support of the agenda of socialists, rabid environmentalists, and one-world government.

Socialism - My Definition

Recently, a commenter was upset with the way I used the word "socialist" in my blog entry Tides Foundation Screed Against Capitalism in Schools.  The individual with no name and identified only by a negation did point out that

Socialism is defined by The Princeton WordNet as:

1. a political theory advocating state ownership of industry
2. an economic system based on state ownership of capital

 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says socialism is

1. A theory or policy of social organization which aims at or advocates the ownership and control of the means of production, capital, land, property, etc., by the community as a whole, and their administration and distribution in the interests of all.

2.  A state of society in which things are held or used in common.

Most Americans reading definition 1. from either to these sources would say, oh, so socialism and communism are the same thing.  I am sure that some or maybe all real Marxists would say, not necessarily.  But let us check out the definition of communism offered by the OED.

1.  A theory which advocates a state of society in which there should be no private ownership, all property being vested in the community and labour organized for the common benefit of all members; the professed principle being that each should work according to his capacity, and receive according to his wants.

This definition for communism is the same as that for socialism, except in the very last part.  Apparently socialism allows for a distribution which may be on a slightly different basis than according to everyone's wants, since it is to be in the interests of all.  Rather subtle difference and actually very academic, since by these definitions, both socialism and communism are impossible!

It is frankly impossible for a community to find any way to distribute production, capital, land, property, etc. in the interests of all.  It has never happened and never will, so socialism does not, has never, and never will exist.  Similarly with communism, no society has ever or ever will be able to distribute enough goods and property to satisfy everyone's wants.  That would be the end of economics.  It would require infinite resources and infinite free pools of labor and genius.

So, Not a Socialist is hardly a surprise.  There is no such thing, unless we allow for those who dream for the impossible, which in the real world we must do.  People are often subject to control by their irrational dreams, or even the irrational Dreams of My Father, in the case of one well-known socialist of our time.

Indeed, many people think they are socialists.  In addition to the Marxists and before Marx, the founders of New Harmony, Indiana, there have been many who have been socialists.  Mussolini and Hitler thought they were socialists, yet they did not advocate the end of all property.  Instead, they sometimes stole property, but more often they used government regulations and just plain commands to force private property owners to do as they were told.  They believed in control of the economy and the means of production, but not necessarily in the need to bother themselves with all the pains of actually owning property.  Besides, people would work harder for you if you allowed them the pretense that they had some control over their property.  But Hitler and Mussolini did claim to be running societies organized for the purpose of distributing goods and services to the people for their best interests.  They actually did redistribute the wealth with such popular aspects of socialism as government-run health care systems.

During and after WWII, it became an embarrassment to many socialists in the West that these fascists had been considered socialists.  It became very important to then try to define socialism in such a manner that the fascists were excluded.  As the Marxists and other varieties of socialists took over most universities, the dictionaries fell more and more into line with this effort to define the fascists out of socialism.  Despite this, in more recent years, many have come to be embarrassed to be called socialists, since almost everyone now understands the terrible evils of socialism in the USSR, China, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, and elsewhere.  Now, these same people and those they have taught are more likely to be environmentalists or social democrats, or some other new fad.  Strangely enough, the policies these people favor are those of fascism.  It is not practical to have community ownership of all property and Americans do not like the idea of that anyway.  So, those who seek major redistribution of the wealth leave most property in the hands of the prior owners, but saddle them with extensive regulations and controls.

A much more practical and useful concept of socialism would be:  A theory or policy of social organization which aims at or advocates the ownership or the extensive control of the means of production, capital, land, property, etc., by the government, and their administration and distribution in extensive measure as is favored by the government of the community.

Under this definition of socialism, everyone does not have to share the same toothbrush or at least put them all in one pot and pick one out with one's eyes blindfolded.  Socialism is a broader concept which some people might strive for and achieve.  It is not a desirable state of affairs at all in my opinion, but the concept has some usefulness in describing what people actually might do and can do.  By this definition, Obama, Pelosi, Mao, Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Mussolini, and Hitler are all socialists.

Like it or not.

The Green Jobs Commissar

Van Jones is the Green Jobs Commissar in the Obama administration. He is an advocate of creating jobs for the poor by having them perform insulation improvements on homes and buildings. That is fine, at least before we find the government suggesting subsidies to have people make such insulation improvements. This guy has his roots deep in socialism, however, and has even described himself as a communist and a friend of anarchists. He worked for years to be a revolutionary and is a founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which was connected with the STORM collective (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement) with Marxist influences. Kathy Shaidle has written about this here.

That Obama sure can pick them, can't he? Over and over again we find the strongest evidence that Obama's worldview is completely socialist. He is a thoroughly committed enemy of the free market system and capitalism, though he is frequently a corporate socialist.

Kudlow: Call it Corporate Capitalism

Lawrence Kudlow, in a commentary called "Death of Democratic Capitalism" says we are now in the era of corporate capitalism, or state capitalism, or government-directed capitalism. I really dislike these terms because they all allow capitalism to be painted a failure every time the state or government misdirects the use of capital and labor, which we can be absolutely certain it will generally do. Government's purpose these days is clearly not to allow individuals the freedom to invest in property, to innovate outside of the bounds of government policy, or generally to provide the services many people want. No, instead, it is simply to pay off many groups with subsidies in order to buy their votes and a series of distractions and pretensions of helping the underdog to return our precious politicians to office. We, the great masses of the supposedly unwashed and unkempt serve these elitest politicians with their patrician university faculty and select wealthy backers. There is nothing in this system of payoffs, distractions, and pretensions that makes a society productive or rational.

Kudlow justifies calling our current situation corporate capitalism or maybe crony capitalism after Cato Institute's Don Mitchell with

It's not socialism because the government won't actually own the means of production. It's not fascism because America is a democracy, not a dictatorship, and Mr. Obama's program doesn't reach way down through all the sectors, but merely seeks to control certain troubled areas. And in the Obama model, it would appear there's virtually no room for business failure. So the state props up distressed segments of the economy in some sort of 21st-century copycat version of Western Europe's old social-market economy.

I do not believe socialism has to call for more than control of the economy. That form of socialism which calls for government ownership is communism, but fascism is also a form of socialism and it does not call for general ownership of the means of production, but only for its control. Of course, America is still a democracy, but so was Germany as Hitler acquired his initial power over Germany. The question is how long will America be a democracy or even whether it matters if it remains a democracy, as it becomes even more tyrannical as it squashes the rights of the sovereign individual.

So, let us not stain capitalism, the only system that allows every individual to pursue his own happiness and respects his property rights in his body, mind, and the results of his productive work while keeping him free from others, including government, who would force him to live in accordance with values other than his own. We stain it by associating it with any system which forces capitalism to kneel at the feet of government. This is the equivalent of forcing every individual to kneel at the feet of government. This system that Obama is now putting in place is much better termed corporate socialism or even fascist socialism.