Census Bureau Admitted it Over-Counted Democrat States and Under-Counted Republican States

 I knew that the Census Bureau had been engaged in trying to over-count Democrat strongholds and to under-count Republican strongholds prior to the release of the 2020 Census results.  Those results increased the number of Representatives in the House of Representatives for Texas and Florida by one less than independent population experts expected.  Other states, such as Arizona, did not gain at all, contrary to the expectation of some.  But, I missed the announcement by the Census Bureau in late May that they had errored by over- or under-counting in the following states:

Over-counted:  Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York

Under-counted:  Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas

True to the nature of the federal bureaucracy, all of the over-counting occurred in the Democratic states and five of the six under-counted states were Republican states.  It makes me wonder if the under-counting in Illinois was predominantly in the larger area of the state represented by the five of the 18 members of the House from that state who are Republicans.  Sure enough, the new congressional district map for Illinois now has only four districts that favor Republicans.  The one competitive district before, which was held by a Republican, now leans Democrat.  One might have expected that the death toll due to killings in Chicago might have led to the loss of more than one Congressional seat in the Chicago area.

Minnesota had been projected by many to lose a seat, which it did not, perhaps due to the over-counting in Minnesota.  New York had been widely expected to lose two seats, but it lost only one, perhaps due to over-counting.  Of course, the Census Bureau announced its major errors too late to allow for corrections.  We may be stuck with these errors now until the 2032 election.

We have learned that the old media, academia, and federal bureaucrats are all functionaries of the power-lusting Democrat Party elite.  The intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the Justice Department were all in the tank to falsely accuse Trump of Russian election collusion and of improprieties with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy.  Then they accused him of inciting a riot that they claimed killed five policemen.  He did not incite a riot and no policemen were killed.  One later died of natural causes and four later committed suicide.  It is mighty depressing to be a policeman in a Democrat run city these days.  As for the IRS, we have the example of them running a tyrannical syndicate ungoverned by the rule of law and clearly willing to use their power to go after Tea Party and pro-Constitution organizations.  Now, it is about to have 87,000 more agents to attack small businesses and manufacturing firms, who the Democrats count as their enemies.  Then there will be all those additional bureaucrats in charge of the alternative energy economy with its expensive, unreliable energy mandates.

The federal government consists mostly of people who are not your friends.  At least not if you are an American who thinks independently, believes in productive work, has earned some property, and does not want to force his fellow man to do his will.  The Democrats love using the power of government to make you do their will, however.

Climate Change and Forest Fires - Alarmists Desperation to Promote Fear

The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions says:

Large wildfires in the United States burn more than twice the area they did in 1970, and the average wildfire season is 78 days longer.

Research shows that changes in climate, especially earlier snowmelt due to warming in the spring and summer, have led to hot, dry conditions that boost this increase in fire activity in some areas. For much of the U.S. West, projections show that an average annual 1 degree Celsius temperature increase would increase the median burned area per year as much as 600 percent in some types of forests.

DW.com, a German news organization, says:

Unusually large wildfires ravaged Alaska and Indonesia in 2015. The following year, Canada, California and Spain were devastated by uncontrolled flames. In 2017, massive fires devastated regions of Chile - and now, a deadly blaze in Portugal has claimed dozens of lives. 

 So, have wildfires actually increased globally, or does it just seem that way because we're tuned in more to bad news and social media? 

Science suggests that over the past few decades, the number of wildfires has indeed increased,especially in the western United States. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS),every state in the western US has experienced an increase in the average annual number of large wildfires over past decades.

Extensive studies have found that large forest fires in the western US have been occurring nearly five times more often since the 1970s and 80s. Such fires are burning more than six times the land area as before, and lasting almost five times longer. 

National Geographic says:

Fires are natural in California: Many of its ecosystems, from the chaparral of Southern California to the northern pine forests, evolved to burn frequently. But since the 1980s, the size and ferocity of the fires that sweep across the state have trended upward. Fifteen of the 20 largest fires in California history have occurred since 2000. 

The graphic above shows why: Most of the state’s hottest and driest years have occurred during the last two decades as well.

Over the past century, California has warmed by about three degrees Fahrenheit. That extra-warmed air sucks water out of plants and soils, leaving the trees, shrubs, and rolling grasslands of the state dry and primed to burn. 

Let us provide some perspective and context to the relationship of forest fires to climate change by looking at a graph of US acreage destroyed by forest fires that Prof. Howard "Cork" Hayden drew to my attention:

We see that claims that "wildfires" are at an all-time high in the last couple of decades or that they are more severe in the 1999-2018 period than they were in the 1895-1914 period are clearly cases of cherry-picking the data to make a bogus point.  That bogus point is the claim that man's use of fossil fuels resulting in carbon dioxide emissions is the cause of more "wildfires", a scarier term than forest fires.  To be consistent with the claims, the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide would have had to be at their maximum in the 1930s and they would have had to drop off greatly in the 1940s and 1950s, before rising slightly since 1999.  Unfortunately for these storytellers, carbon dioxide has generally risen throughout this time-frame.  But they count on the public not cross-examining them.  They only care to frighten people to get them to adopt energy policies that will cause energy use costs to soar and make energy supply much less reliable.  Their game is very similar when they claim that severe weather events are on the rise and caused by man's use of fossil fuels as well.

The Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming and Climate Change alarmists are ever more desperate to create the fear they need to further damage free markets and the voluntary, cooperative associations people form to pursue their own self-chosen values and their own dreams.  A substantial fraction of these environmentalists literally want a planet with billions fewer people on it.  The welfare of mankind is not on their agenda.  The alarmists generally want ever so badly to scare people into giving up the exercise of their individual rights and to subject themselves to the ever-increasing demands of governments controlled by those elitists who claim they know better than we do what is good for us, or if not for us, for the planet.  They are sure that if we will only succumb to their use of force to micromanage our lives, they can provide us with better lives or with worse lives in the name of some planet god.

Of course those of them who actually do gain control of the levers of power do not actually care whether our lives are made better or not.  They have the track record to prove that their priority is power, not the improvement of our lives.  And now Nancy Pelosi is back to tell us that legislation has to be passed so we can find out what is in it.  There could not be a more blatant demonstration that it is the power given the government that is the real reason for the laws the elitist power-lusters want, not the welfare of the people. The Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming scare is but one of their tools to acquire power, not just national power, but worldwide power.  To gain that worldwide power they must also subvert the U.S. Constitution in the name of a superior globalist law.

The hidden agendas of sustainability illusions by Paul Driessen

Absurd, impractical sustainability precepts are actually a prescription for government control

As President Trump downgrades the relevance of Obama era climate change and anti-fossil fuel policies, many environmentalists are directing attention to “sustainable development.”

Like “dangerous manmade climate change,” sustainability reflects poor understanding of basic energy, economic, resource extraction and manufacturing principles – and a tendency to emphasize tautologies and theoretical models as an alternative to readily observable evidence in the Real World. It also involves well-intended but ill-informed people being led by ill-intended but well-informed activists who use the concept to gain greater government control over people’s lives, livelihoods and living standards.

The most common definition is that we may meet the needs of current generations only to the extent that doing so will not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Sustainability thus reflects the assertion that we are rapidly depleting finite resources, and must reduce current needs and wants so as to save raw materials for future generations.

At first blush, it sounds logical and even ethical. But it requires impossible clairvoyance.

In 1887, when the Hearthstone House became the world’s first home lit via hydroelectric power, no one did or could foresee that electricity would dominate, enhance and safeguard our lives in the myriad ways it does today. Decades later, no one anticipated pure silica fiber optic cables replacing copper wires.

No one predicted tiny cellular phones with superb digital cameras and more computing power than a 1990 desktop computer or 3-D printing or thousands of wind turbines across our fruited plains – or cadmium, rare earth metals and other raw materials suddenly required to manufacture these technological wonders.

Mankind advanced at a snail’s pace for thousands of years. As the modern fossil-fuel industrial era found its footing, progress picked up at an increasingly breathtaking pace. Today, change is exponential. As we moved from flint to copper, to bronze, iron, steel and beyond, we didn’t do so because mankind had exhausted Earth’s supplies of flint, copper, tin and so on. We did it because we innovated – invented something better, more efficient or practical. Each advance required different raw materials. 

Who today can foresee what technologies future generations will have 25, 50 or 200 years from now? What raw materials they will need? How we are supposed to ensure that those families meet their needs?

Why then would we even think of empowering government to regulate today’s activities today based on the wholly unpredictable technologies, lifestyles, needs, and resource demands of distant generations? Why would we ignore or compromise the needs of current generations, to meet those totally unpredictable future needs – including the needs of today’s most impoverished, energy-deprived, malnourished people, who desperately want to improve their lives?

Moreover, we are not going to run out of resources anytime soon. A 1-kilometer fiber optic cable made from 45 pounds of silica (Silicon is the Earth’s most abundant element in the crust [CRA additions]) carries thousands of times more information than an equally long RG-6 cable made from 3,600 pounds of copper, reducing demand for copper.

In 1947, the world’s proven oil reserves totaled 47 billion barrels. Over the next 70 years, we consumed hundreds of billions of barrels – and yet, in 2016 we still had at least 2,800 billion barrels of oil reserves, including oil sands, oil shales and other unconventional deposits: at least a century’s worth, plus abundant natural gas. Constantly improving technologies now let us find and produce oil and natural gas from deposits that we could not even detect, much less tap into, just a couple decades ago.

Sustainability dogma also revolves around hatred of fossil fuels, and a determination to rid the world of them, regardless of any social, economic or environmental costs of doing so. And we frequently find that supposedly green, eco-friendly and sustainable alternatives are frequently anything but.

U.S. ethanol quotas eat up 40% of the nation’s corn, cropland the size of Iowa, billions of gallons of water, and vast quantities of pesticides, fertilizers, tractor fuel and natural gas, to produce energy that drives up food prices, damages small engines and gets one-third less mileage per gallon than gasoline.

Heavily subsidized wind energy requires standby fossil fuel generators, ultra-long transmission lines and thus millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, rare earth metals and fiberglass. The turbines create chronic health problems for people living near them and kill millions of birds and bats – to produce intermittent, wholly unreliable electricity that costs up to 250% more than coal-based electricity.

For all that, on a torrid August 2012 day, Great Britain’s 3,500 giant wind turbines generated a mere 12 megawatts of electricity: 0.032% of the 38,000 MW the country was using at the time.

The United Kingdom also subsidizes several huge anaerobic digesters, intended to convert animal manure and other farm waste into eco-friendly methane for use in generating electricity. But there is insufficient farm waste. So the digesters are fed with corn (maize), grass and rye grown on 130,000 acres (four times the size of Washington, DC), using enormous amounts of water, fertilizer – and of course diesel fuel to grow, harvest and transport the crops to the digesters. Why not just drill and frack for natural gas?

That brings us to the political arena, where the terminology is circular, malleable, infinitely elastic, the perfect tool for activists. Whatever they support is sustainable; whatever they oppose is unsustainable; and whatever mantras or protective measures they propose give them more power and control.

The Club of Rome sought to build a new movement by creating “a common enemy against whom we can unite” – allegedly looming disasters “caused by human intervention in natural processes” and requiring “changed attitudes and behavior” to avoid global calamities: global warming and resource depletion.

“Building an environmentally sustainable future requires restricting the global economy, dramatically changing human reproductive behavior, and altering values and lifestyles,” said Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown. “Doing this quickly requires nothing short of a revolution.”

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, the use of fossil fuels, electrical appliances, home and workplace air conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable,” Canadian arch-environmentalist Maurice Strong declared.

“Minor shifts in policy, moderate improvements in laws and regulations, rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change,” former Vice President Al Gore asserted – “these are all forms of appeasement, designed to satisfy the public’s desire to believe that sacrifice, struggle and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary.” Environmental activist Daniel Sitarz agreed, saying: “Agenda 21 proposes an array of actions intended to be implemented by every person on Earth. Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all humans, unlike anything the world has ever experienced.”

“Sustainable development,” the National Research Council declaimed in a 2011 report, “raises questions that are not fully or directly addressed in U.S. law or policy, including how to define and control unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, and how to encourage the development of sustainable communities, biodiversity protection, clean energy, environmentally sustainable economic development, and climate change controls.” In fact, said Obama science advisor John Holdren, we cannot even talk about sustainability without talking about politics, power, and control. Especially control.

Of course, the activists, politicians and regulators feel little pain, as they enjoy salaries and perks paid by taxpayers and foundations, fly to UN and other conferences at posh 5-star resorts around the world, and implement agendas that control, redesign and transform other people’s lives.

It is We the Governed – especially working class and poor citizens – who pay the price, with the world’s poorest families paying the highest price. We can only hope the Trump Administration and Congress will dismantle and defund sustainable development, thealter ego of cataclysmic manmade climate change.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A ConstructiveTomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

Fracking - Its Water and Land Use Advantage

Deroy Murdock has an interesting article on fracking and its green advantages on the CFACT website.  Fracking is often denounced because of its use of water to fracture deep shale formations to allow trapped natural gas to flow to the collection pipe.  Yet, compared to many other sources of energy, especially many favored by so-called greens, fracking actually uses very little water.  See the amazing comparison chart below and evaluate for yourself how distorted a viewpoint many so-called greens and environmentalists promulgate.

So contrary to the impression many people have, fracking uses far less water to produce a million BTUs of electricity than do nuclear power, coal, corn ethanol, or soy biodiesel.  But note that natural gas, nuclear power, and coal all use vastly less water than do the so-called renewable energy fuels.

Let us look at the land use comparison as well:

Once again, natural gas as a source of energy does best with respect to land use.  Note that nuclear energy and coal use less land than any of the so-called renewable energy sources, especially less in the case of solar and wind energy.

Murdock also points to the "Cuisinart" nature of the wind generation farms with respect to birds and bats.  Some versions of solar energy plants that use mirrors to concentrate solar light deal out death to birds by frying them.  So wind and solar have a wildlife cooking theme, leaving fracking with a wildlife preservation advantage.

Of course none of this would matter if fracking had proven a significant cause of ground water contamination.  Even the EPA with its determination to undermine fossil fuels as energy sources has not been able to document any significant ground water contamination.

Still another concern with solar and wind power generation is the fact that these plants are usually far from population centers and due to their low-density energy generation over a large plant area, they have a huge copper wire requirement.  In addition, each wind power generator uses about 3 tons of copper in its pick-up coils in its electrical transformer.  Given the increased cost of copper in recent times, this large copper requirement is not an insignificant cost factor in the price of electricity from solar or wind energy plants.

Oppose the Senate Renewable Electricity Standard

The Senate is considering the Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) which will mandate an increase in wind and solar power to 15% of all electric power by 2021.  This is similar to the requirement of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill that passed the House in June 2009, which was called the American Clean Energy Leadership Act (ACELA).  Utilities will be forced to make huge investments in these uneconomic means of producing electricity and users will have to pay higher rates for their electricity.  This is a regressive tax with no rational benefits.

The fools backing this bill say it will provide "clean electricity", but laws already require scrubbers to clean the real pollutants from power plants.  As we all know here, CO2 is not a pollutant.  It is great plant food.  It is not causing global warming, let alone catastrophic global warming.  Finally, forcing utilities to invest in expensive alternative energy projects simply takes money from more productive efforts and transfers it to nonsense.  The net effect is a slowdown in growth of the economy and a failure to produce as many jobs as a free economy would.

Of course, this is so foolish, it is hard to believe that many of its backers do not realize this.  It is also a great way to get the alternative energy or renewable energy companies to give a politician some very large campaign contributions.  We know of many cases in which Senators knowingly do the wrong thing to gain money.  Our money.  Our response:  Throw the bums out who back this in November, whether they are running for re-election in 2010, 2012, or 2014.  Remember them as either fools or evil people, neither of whom belong in OUR Senate.

What is Progressivism?

"progressivism." Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (24 Feb. 2010).

1 : the principles or beliefs of progressives
2 : PROGRESS 4a
3 usually capitalized : the political and economic doctrines advocated by the Progressives
4 : the theories of progressive education -- contrasted with essentialism


OK, that is not very helpful.  So far we know it is some set or sets of principles or beliefs and the progressives who hold these principles or beliefs would like to think they represent some form of progress.  But, the principles and beliefs are apparently defined by those who are progressives.  Who on earth are they?


5 often capitalized : of, relating to, or constituting a political party advocating or associated with the principles of political progressivism

Whoa!  Is this circular or what?  Apparently Progressives do not want to have any limits placed upon their beliefs by anything we could legitimately call principles, or they do not wish to name their principles.  If they had principles, those could be defined, but there may be reasons why they do not want them to be defined.  Arbitrary beliefs cannot be defined and they have an advantage in being very flexible.  Today Progressives believe in minimum wage laws, but if the labor unions were to decide tomorrow that they do not like minimum wage laws, then the principle of minimum wages is tossed aside with no problem.  Today they want to reward the trial lawyers with many extraordinary awards of punitive damages in medical malpractice lawsuits, but if the trial lawyers fail to deliver enough political contributions, why then the Progressive is free to believe in tort reform, at least if the insurance companies give them more political contributions for the purpose than the trial lawyers do.

How marvelous it is to be assured that you are for progress and you are free to believe in anything you wish to believe in.  How confining it is to actually be a man of principle.  How much more freedom one has by being a woman without principles.  It is so much more practical to have no principles.  It is great to be a pragmatist and an opportunist.  Today, it is good to advocate alternative energy development by government subsidies and mandates and high fossil fuel prices, but if the ground falls out from under the catastrophic man-made global warming alarm story and the People wake up to the foolish economics of alternative energy and balk at the high cost of fossil fuels under Progressive controls, well the Progressives can simply change their beliefs to some other vague and not-yet-understood to be unsound program, which sounds plausibly like progress.


When Obama campaigned to become President, he kept saying over and over that he was for change.  Indeed, he is.  He wants to diminish the role of Capitalism and increase the role of government.  He wants to increase the central planning of government and take away the individual decisions that characterize the free markets of the private sector.  He wants to diminish those few restrictions on government power still recognized as being required by our Constitution and replace them with a more powerful Presidency and Congress.  He wants the President and Congress to have more control over the People.  These are the only changes for which he and the Progressives consistently stand.


There is a remaining program for change, however.  That program has no principles to guide it and it has no defining characteristic, except that it is a constantly changing program of claims which vaguely sound to many people as though the Progressives are trying to improve our society in some collective sense.  In fact, the particular claims are not important.  They are just whatever seems to motivate some people to back the Progressives themselves for a period of time.  The Progressives figure out what increase in government power can be used to buy the votes of a block of voters and they find a rationale for that program.  The rationale can be very flimsy and can be understood to be wrong by those who have expertise in the given area.  For instance, the Progressive is for those minimum wage laws that increase unemployment among the young and the handicapped and in the more remote rural areas of the country, proclaiming that a man must support his wife and children, so minimum wage must allow for that.  Never mind that minimum wage jobs are usually held only by those in training and who are very poorly educated.  These people will simply not be hired at all as the minimum wage is raised.  Keeping them out of jobs is hardly a good change in keeping with progress, but it is a favored program of the Progressives.


Another favored change with the Progressives is union card check.  This program is such a blatant travesty that little rationale is even offered for it.  No one wants this except union leaders and those politicians who expect they will get larger donations from the unions as the unions increase the number of poor workers who have to give union leaders union dues.  The change is to deprive employees of a secret ballot allowing them to determine who will represent them in wage negotiations.  Who on earth would want that, except the party of Progressives who only want it because they want more money to use in elections to gain more government power to gain more control over the People.


It is clear that it is not quite the case that Progressives have no principles.  They do have one principle.  They stand for more government power so the government can have more control over the lives, bodies, property, income, character, and actions of the People.  Some of those Progressives simply want the power of being in control, while others delude themselves with thinking that once they, the college-educated elitists usually, are in control, they will somehow use their power to do good things for the rabble, the trailer trash, the NASCAR fans, those who cling to their guns, religion, and Constitution, and the uneducated.

There are problems with believing this rationale for seeking power to do good.  One problem is all the harm they do to gain the money to gain the power.  Another is the pretense that these elitists know the lives and experiences of the peasants well enough to be able to figure out what is good for them when the Progressive has finally gotten his hands wrapped firmly around the levers of power and no longer has to buy the votes of those who do not care so deeply as the Progressive good souls do.  Another problem is that after decades of fighting to attain the power of government by being an opportunist looking for more power at every turn and dealing with unsavory union leaders and trial lawyers, the well-intended Progressive is very likely to become damaged goods.


Some would claim that the Progressive wants a redistribution of income so that the differences in income and wealth among the People are minimized.  There is usually a claim among the Progressives that they stand for this.  But, when they have exercised power in the U.S., their actions have rarely been consistent with such an idea being taken as a principle.  They have instead been more about picking winners and losers in our society.  Sure, they want high income taxpayers to have high tax rates, but they also want farmers, ethanol refiners, union leaders, trial lawyers, accountants, alternative energy producers, bankers, recyclers, government contractors, and others who are politically connected to have high incomes through subsidies, mandates, and make-work programs.  Meanwhile, they pile on the taxes and while many of these are aimed at the rich or better off, most of those high taxes are passed on to those who need the products and services produced by the more productive people in our society.  These people tend to be those with high incomes and/or great wealth.


In practice, the one single principle of Progressivism is a desire for government to have more power so it will have greater control over the People, while the college educated elite control the government.  Now, our colleges have long been controlled by the Progressives and such jobs as those in publishing are similarly mostly controlled by Progressives.  It is not at all surprising that Merriam-Webster did not name the principle that gives meaning to the words Progressive or Progressivism.  Naming that principle is not helpful to the goals of the Progressives.  It must be kept a bit hidden.  The Progressive is against allowing the individual to choose his own values and to manage his own life in accordance with his freely chosen values.  He is against the Constitution, because that limits the powers of government.  He is against the free market and the freedom of choice that individuals find in the private sector.  But, he is loathe yet to tell us that he is against the individual and his rights.

Eviscerating the Private Sector

The private sector is under total attack by government, the mainstream media, and socialists, who are now nearly everywhere in charge of educating our children by virtue of their control of the public schools, of colleges, arts and culture, and increasingly of religion. The attack is unremitting and the inroads toward total control of the economy are terrifyingly extensive. What has happened:

• It has been established in the courts that anything we may wish to sell, whether goods or services, is subject to regulation under the Interstate Commerce clause of the Constitution, despite its purpose being to free trade.
• The financial industry was heavily regulated, but now the winners are chosen by the federal government using bailout money, with those not being chosen being forced to merge by takeover with those who were chosen.
• The disposal of waste products is largely controlled by governments, with many areas having draconian recycling laws which make no economic sense.
• It has long been law that governments can prosecute a company for charging more for its goods and services than other companies do (proves monopoly), or for charging the same (proves collusion), or for charging less (proves cut-throat dumping). Woe be the company that angers government.
• Homes and commercial buildings cannot be built in most areas of the country without currying the favor of local and often state governments. When they are allowed to be built, they must often be built according to archaic, expensive building codes. Architectural designs must often be approved by conventional thinking local agencies. Often homes can only be built on very large lots, which means that it only makes sense to build large, expensive homes on those lots.
  
• The Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency a very freely exercised power over power plants, manufacturing firms, and the user's of many products such as paints, aerosols, insecticides, and plastic foams.
• The Clean Water Act controls the use of water and the emissions or dumping of chemicals which may pollute water sources. It also means that low spots which are only very occasionally wet, cannot be used, since they are declared wetlands.
  
• Employers are required to hire some people and reject others, sometimes forcing them to adopt racist policies. They are required to serve as unpaid tax collectors and record keepers for governments and their employees. In some cases, they are required to confiscate the pay of their employees.
• People are required to subsidize many businesses through their tax monies. Examples of such businesses are those farmers who grow corn, rice, wheat, soybeans, peanuts, sugar, sugar beets, and many other crops; banks, especially those favored with bailout money; home mortgage holders, especially those in default who will soon be given bailout money; industries protected by tariffs, such as sugar growers, ethanol producers, steelmakers, and many more; power companies using wind-driven electric generators and solar power; companies granted monopolies by government such as cable companies, electric power companies, land-line telephone companies, gas stations on many toll roads, and others; and by companies and individuals given licenses for operation such as cab companies, plumbers, electricians, interior decorators, beauticians, real estate agents, certified public accountants, doctors, psychiatrists, dentists, EPA and FDA and state and local government accredited laboratories; those who purchase energy-efficient cars or who add insulation to their homes; those who send children to college on student loans; those who send children to public education schools; those small businesses who get subsidized loans from the Small Business Administration; those businesses owned by favored minorities and by women; businesses located in depressed zones; and many other activities favored by government.
• Redistribution of income using the progressive income tax, which moves money from those who create wealth and value to those who do not. This is an essential defining characteristic of socialism and has no basis in the American heritage prior to the New Deal in about 1937.
  
• Rare and unimportant species and the occasional hill or mountain take precedence over human needs for land or resources even in situations where the harm to the living species is unknown or minimal while the harm to humans of inaction is very clear and considerable.
• Businesses are required to keep expensive records of all transactions involving money, despite the fact that their only purpose is to be used as evidence against a firm that it is not paying some tax money some government wishes to take from entities with no voting privileges. The more government can tax business the happier it is, since voters care little and understand little about how these taxes have deleterious impact upon their lives. Businesses are required by Sarbanes-Oxley accounting requirements to use accounting procedures which make little economic sense.
  

What do we have to look forward to? Much more of the same. This includes:

• The declaration that the use of most energy forms produces polluting and climate-changing CO2, so our use of all the major forms of energy will be curtailed. This means much less economic activity since coal, oil, and natural gas use will be greatly reduced, despite the fact that this will do very little to reduce climate change, which is dominated by the forces of nature, not by those of man.
• Much more massive redistribution of income, with non-taxpayers receiving deceptively termed tax rebates from hard-working and creative thinkers who earn higher incomes.
• Slower economic growth caused by reduced use of energy, more expensive energy, less efficient investment of income due to government favored redirections, less total investment since lower income people invest less, an unwillingness to invest in longer term projects because of erratic and arbitrary government interferences such as changes of tax law and emission standards, the holding of investments for excessive periods to avoid paying higher capital gains taxes, shifting investment into government bonds, the increased commitment to expanding operations abroad where corporate taxes are lower, and creative and hardworking people working less.
• A great increase in required service to the government or to those charitable activities it may favor. Women will be required to register for the draft. More schools will require community slavery, err... service, before children are allowed to graduate from high school. College loans will be dependent upon signing up for service with the government, which will put many ignorant and untrained young people into the business of using government power, resources, and our tax money to do all sorts of mischief.
• Heavier dependence upon Social Security for retirement as stocks and securities either continue to shrink in value or grow much more slowly. As the economy grows more slowly, the tax income to support those on Social Security will diminish. Obama would give tax rebates to people who do not pay income tax, claiming that the rebate is really because they pay Social Security taxes. The distinction between income tax and Social Security tax will be completely lost. Since the Social Security money already collected has already been spent largely on non-Social Security programs by the federal government, that distinction was already very weak. In order to continue the Social Security program for Baby Boomers and beyond, the tax burden on the remaining workers will increase until they rebel, assuming that their vote is any longer able to take power away from the governments. Obama may choose to rule as his socialist hero Hugo Chavez does in Venezuela where the voters have little say.
• Freedom of speech will be everywhere as limited as it is now on most college campuses and in most public schools. Important issues will no longer be discussed, because if an issue is important, it has the power to make someone upset and it is not allowable to upset anyone, unless he is intelligent, hardworking, and a creative and rational thinker. The remaining pablum which we will be allowed to talk about will be the subject of radio talk show hosts chosen initially to have equal numbers of conservatives and socialists and very few libertarians under a Fairness Doctrine. After awhile, all libertarians and most conservatives will be banned, since it will be claimed that they are guilty of hate-speech and racism or that they are global-warming deniers.
• Human beings will be discouraged from procreating, since they are considered a threat to the planet and natural ecosystems. They cut down forests, build homes, use resources, and breathe out the greenhouse gas CO2. Humans will be considered inherently evil by most people rather than just the elitist environmental radicals of today and those young people recently rolled out of the propaganda mills called schools. Western Europe and Russia, where new births are far below replacement levels, will set the example in the U.S. where our population is damned for growing.
  
• Massive depression of the population will set in as they realize that they cannot do anything unless they get the approval of 25 government agencies, all of whom are fighting for power and have different, often contradictory, requirements. Many more people will turn to alcohol and drugs, as they do in Russia, to forget their helplessness and their total insignificance. Some, those who can remember the time, will dream of living a self-directed life.
• The United States of America will be as jaded as France and Germany. People will lose all sense of individuality. They will be defined only by what gender, race, and economic class they fall into. Employers will have the duty to provide jobs and will be thoroughly hated. More and more, government will attempt to chain them to their posts. Slavery will make a historical return with minorities and women as slave masters of so-called white males. Of course, this slavery will be directed through the agency of government, so that it will be easier for people to pretend that it is just required service. The slave masters will be many, rather than a single individual.
  

If we should fly with McCain, he will push us out of the plane with a deployed, but badly ripped parachute. If we fly with Obama, he will push us out of the plane in a free-fall without a parachute. We sure do have a lot to look forward to as we watch the ground come rapidly closer, before socialism gains its last death grip on us as we imprint the earth. Our deaths as individuals will be unlamented, but we will be damned for that last imprint we make upon the earth.

Carroll - Gore's nutty idea

Al Gore proposed last week that the United States "commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years."

This man is truly insane. I shudder to think what would have happened to the United States if he had become President as he so nearly did. No, I am not saying that this man is simply wrong. I am saying that he is in this world, but he is not connected to it. He has no judgment, no wisdom, few powers of observation, and he is much less intelligent than George Bush. One has to wonder at the severe lack of judgment also generally found in those managing our newspapers and television news programs which has kept them from taking Al Gore to task for this nonsense.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages of the Rocky Mountain News, has correctly identified Al Gore's call to kill oil, gas, and coal power generating plants as the equivalent of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward in this editorial. This effort, he points out, would require utilities to mothball hundreds of existing plants and institute a crash program of building solar energy, wind farm, and new electricity power transmission lines, that would cause a huge increase in electricity costs to individuals and businesses. What is more, both sun and wind are highly subject to natural variations, so they would require something like huge banks of batteries or capacitors to store energy for later use, which would be very expensive and environmentally unfriendly.

I will repeat that it is lunatic to implement such a plan, even if it were true that carbon dioxide emissions were going to be a significant problem affecting the climate in 100 years. In actuality, there is no good reason to think this will be the case anyway. This makes calling for wrenching energy infrastructure destruction programs and crash construction programs of largely untried or incredibly expensive technology an idiot's delight.

An Evaluation of What Americans Think About Energy

As we saw in the last post, most Americans are angry about high energy prices. They should be. However, the important thing is for them to understand who they should be angry at. They could be angry at the inefficient national oil companies in most of the oil-exporting countries, but there is little they can do about that. The most constructive anger is anger directed at Congress for setting up obstacles to oil and gas production in the United States. They have prevented the drilling for oil in ANWR for 13 years, thereby making at least 10 billion barrels of oil unavailable to us now. Off-shore Alaskan waters near AMWR hold at least another 19 billion barrels of oil. Until further development of these fields is undertaken, we will probably underestimate the amount of oil in them. There are thought to be a conservative 90 billion barrels of oil on the continental shelf that Congress has put off-limits.

Meanwhile, those in Congress who oppose drilling say that the oil companies already have leases they are not producing oil from. True, leases are often bought before anyone is sure whether they have oil on them or not. If they do, the leasing company has to figure out whether there is a way to retrieve it profitably after a big investment is made to get at it. With oil prices as high as they are now, much oil which could not be recovered at $30/barrel prices can be economically produced, but the investments are huge and one also has to know that the price of oil will not again be $30/barrell one year from now. In addition, there are huge costs in satisfying the EPA about pollution protections and the process can take many years to work through. Congress could expedite the time to production by speeding up the EPA approval process.

One might say there is some price gouging by OPEC on oil, but then we set them up to be able to do it by minimizing our own drilling for oil. We chose to make them the only major source for oil in the world market. The best plan is to pursue as much oil drilling, gas production, and alternative fuel production as possible in the U.S. and the remainder of the world. We can also do better in insulating our homes, installing more energy-efficient furnaces and refrigerators, making engines more fuel efficient, and pursuing many other wise personal choices in light of the present high cost of energy. Such choices will either bring the prices of fuel down or at least keep them from continuing to grow. It is interesting to note that Americans have been putting engines into their cars which have much higher horsepower ratings in recent years and that this uses more additional gasoline even than the SUVs on the road. There are many reasons why Americans should be a bit angry at themselves as well as at Congress!

The criticism that the federal government is not doing enough is more heavily leveled at the President than it should be. It is primarily Congress that has not done enough. But Congress' role is to get off the backs of those who want to produce energy. It should not be for them to pick winners and losers. They should not be subsidizing solar and wind, while restricting coal, oil, and gas. This would be especially foolish given that solar and wind are likely to remain secondary sources of energy for decades yet. They are too seasonal and irratic in their output within a given day or week to be counted upon for large portions of our energy needs. At the present time, their total output is minuscle compared to coal, oil, and gas, or even compared to nuclear, despite no new nuclear power plant having been built in the U.S. in 30 years. Wind, solar, and geothermal power will all add to our total available power generation capacity over the next few decades, but they are very unlikely to overtake coal, oil, and natural gas.

The idea of the 5-year moratorium on coal-fired power plants is a great one if you want to live with random, rolling black-outs of power. That will surely happen unless instead we have a massive effort to build nuclear power plants. I expect it will happen unless we build many of both coal and nuclear power plants. The population is growing and people are buying more and more plasma TVs, which use four times as much power as a conventional TV did. Curiously, these same people are convinced that the U.S. should lead an effort to reduce the use of energy to prevent a catastrophic global warming which is not even occurring.

So, are those who want improved home-efficiency standards going to impose the added initial cost upon new home buyers only or are they going to have government inspectors inspect every home in America and condemn it unless it is brought up to some new energy-efficiency code within a short period of time? What on earth are they thinking here? Will grandmothers be thrown out of their homes and into the streets? Will children live with their parents until they are 30 years old as they try to scrounge up the added money to qualify for the down-payment on a much more expensive home? New business start-ups will be hit by higher first and last month rent payments due to the added insulation costs, though in time they will save money on their energy bills. Commercial building companies will have some larger construction costs and insulation upgrade costs on older commercial buildings.

Finally, I love the 56% of Americans who believe that steps taken to curb global warming will create new jobs and investment. Of course they will! But,....the big question is will they produce as many new jobs as they will destroy? Will they create more new investment and wealth than they will destroy? The answer is that they will not create as much as they will destroy, because government action is only required when one intends to destroy rather than create. The people acting as individuals are the path to efficient creation. Government is the path to destruction. The usual inducements to making money will create whatever energy is needed, if the destructive power of government does not climb upon the backs of the individuals who would create that wealth of power. Subsidies from government are always inclined to become the boondoggles such as the ethanol subsidies have become. Decades of government sponsored research into alternative energy sources has done little to produce significant power capacity using alternative energy.

There is no forseeable path to energy independence for America. Our best policy is to pursue many sources of energy both by type and by source. We need to develop more oil and gas fields within the United States and wherever else in world there is oil or gas to be found. We need to start building nuclear power plants again and to continue to build coal-fired power plants, using suitable stack cleaning processes, but not worrying too much about CO2 production, because it does not much matter. Wherever wind, geothermal, tidal, and solar power production make economic sense, then the free market should be allowed to install such power plants, even though they will amount to only minor contributors to our total power needs. Meanwhile, people do tend to under-insulate their attics, to buy bigger car engines than they have a need for, to brake late rather than take their foot off the gas earlier, and forget to turn out lights they are not using. There are many ways to conserve expensive energy, but these are best left to the free market, rather than some government coercive programs.

Food Riots and Food Fuels

Believe it or not, there is a substantial number of people who recognize that turning foods such as corn and soybeans into fuel for cars does not make sense. Steven Milloy, who publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com and is an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has written a commentary on food riots and other consequences of the Green lobbyists. The article is entitled A New 'Green' Body Count Begins.

The human population is growing and with it the demand for food and fuel. People in many areas of the world are finally improving their diets and traveling and trading more. The agricultural effort world-wide has been remarkable in doing such a great job in meeting the increased demand for food. The foolish campaign against Frankenfoods, especially strong in childish Europe, is doing what it can to restrict the increase in food production. In general, the Greens are not friendly to farmers. They do not like them using woodlands, prairie lands, or marsh lands. They do not like them using fertilizers and insecticides. They do not like them using water or fuel. They sometimes do want them to produce fuel from foods such as corn, soybeans, sugar cane, and biomass. The use of biomass such as general leaves and stalks is not yet economical and may never be very economic, due to the need to haul large masses of material to biomass fuel plants, as Steven Milloy points out. So, the conversion of valuable food such as corn and soybeans into fuel is now what is happening. This reduces the food supply and drives up prices to the point that many of the poor in the underdeveloped world cannot afford enough food.

Steven Milloy points out food riots in Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Ethiopia. He does not mention the anger in Mexico due to rising tortilla prices. He does note that troops have been deployed to protect the farm fields and food warehouses in Pakistan and Thailand. Indian and Turkish government officials are quoted as saying it is foolish to turn food into biofuels.

Milloy goes on to note that the Greens are doing everything they can to prevent us from having adequate power. They propose biomass fuel disasters. They oppose every economical means of generating power, however. The Sierra Club wants to shut down our coal power plants. The Natural Resources Defense Council opposes nuclear power plants. Earth First! opposes almost every source of power, including natural gas, whose cost is rising rapidly now due to the failure to build more nuclear power plants, restrictions on new coal power plants, and restrictions on developing new oil fields in the stable western countries. Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley has declared that no wind mills will be allowed in Maryland, since they are an eyesore! It is clear that the Greens simply do not want to allow people to have power.

So, how do we plan for a future without power. Well, in Maryland officials are planning rolling blackouts beginning in 2011. As I have noted, we already have nightly brownouts. Personally, I would much rather live with coal-fired power plants and with nuclear power plants! I want my power and, indeed, it is essential for my laboratory business that I have high quality and dependable power. The damn Greens can go and live in Antarctica or take over Paraguay and use as little power as they wish to use!

The Convenience of Not Thinking in Politics

Thomas Sowell, in Applied Economics, points out that people generally think only about the immediate intended result of any political issue they think about. When thinking that it would be nice if there were less violence, it seems so easy to wish that the elimination of gun ownership will eliminate violence. The fact that criminals will still acquire guns, while law-abiding citizens will be the ones disarmed, does not come to mind unless one takes the thought process a step further. Certainly thinking about the studies that show that there is more violence and that more homes are robbed when occupied when gun ownership is limited to the criminals, is still another step down the road of thought that is not followed.

Here in Maryland, the electric utilities have not been allowed to charge residential home owners enough for their power that the electric utilities could properly maintain and modernize their power distribution systems. In the BG&E area, residential owners were paying one-third less for power than were commercial users. In effect, commercial users were subsidizing the residential power users, since their additional payments were providing a disproportionate share of the power system maintenance costs and for the upgrades to the system. These commercial users were getting only a portion of the benefits in reliable power that they should have been getting. There is a very unreliable transformer near my laboratory which has long needed to be replaced and it has not been. This is likely a direct result of the residential home power subsidy. In addition to the many power failures experienced at my lab, we have nightly brown-outs, which I suspect are due to BG&E intentionally reducing the line voltage in the middle of the night in a desperate attempt to reduce their operational costs a bit. This may not affect many residential users of power, but my laboratory often runs experiments through the night. These brown-outs only rarely kill the computers, but they add to uncertainty about the quality of some of the data acquired by our spectrometers. Of course, those businesses which place a premium value on reliable power do not have as many concerned voters on their side as does the side which wishes for lower home power costs. It is simply assumed that we commercial users will be able to continue to provide jobs whether we have reliable power or not. It is not rocket science to understand what the effects of state power commission interference in rational power rates will be, but most of the voters will not allow themselves to think past the idea that it would be nice if the state government arranged for their power costs to be lower.

I talked to my mother tonight and she remarked that many of her elderly friends refuse to think about the effects of social programs such as Medicare, Social Security, and further proposed socialized medicine schemes. My Mom points out that medical care will suffer and that the costs of Medicare are too high because it is in no one's immediate interest to control costs. My Mom has often questioned why she or my Dad were charged so much for a procedure, a doctor walking through and asking "How are you?", or the cost of a medical product. The reply is usually, "Why do you care? You are not paying for it." Commonly, this response is an angry one. She asks her elderly friends why they do not care that the programs they want come at the expense of higher taxes on their children and grandchildren. They respond that that is depressing to think about, so why think about it? It seems to me that this is a clear case of parental and grandparental abuse of children and grandchildren, but it is apparently widely accepted practice. The AARP institutionalizes it and works mightily to lobby for this abuse. For this reason, I immediately throw away their invitations to join their organization. I love my three daughters and my nieces and nephews. I do not want to smother their life options in oppressive taxes. I will not join AARP in their crusade of intergenerational warfare. But most elderly people apparently do. They are only too happy to hurt their children. It is good not to think about this painful consequence of thinking only about their immediate convenience.

In the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC such as Montgomery County and Howard County, about half of each county has been set aside to remain farmland or to be developed in 3 acre lots. The cost of land is so great in these counties that hardly anyone can afford to buy 3 acres and put a home on them. These land-use restrictions are intended to provide plenty of open green areas. This is the wished for result and it works. This is the claimed sole intent. However, a great many of the voters have an ulterior motive. Their monetary stake in their homes is great, so they do think a bit further down the road on this issue. They are generally very aware that they are choosing a course of action here which will drive up the cost of housing in their area and increase the value of their home in particular. On this kind of political issue they have an incentive to think about the consequences of their green area restrictions and they like the result. Yes, given a money incentive, people will think about what they are doing politically, at least a bit further down the road. But, do they admit that this is the real reason they are so green? No, never. They are very happy to pull the mantle of being an environmentally friendly good guy over their shoulders. But, that is not their primary reason for wanting land-use restrictions. The primary reason is to make housing more expensive. There is little remorse that this hurts others.

So, what do the politicians think of these usually unthinking voters? That it is very easy to present ideas for legislation which have wished for intentions. This legislation always gives the politicians more power. It improves their chances of re-election. By the time the problems come home to roost, they will be in a higher office or already retired from politics. If they serve in the US House of Representatives or the Senate, they will be enjoying a retirement with more than $1,000,000 a year income from a Fedeal government pension and further income for lobbying. Far from wishing to provide leadership in the quest for good government, our politicians see only gravy in the micro-thoughts of their electors. They are intelligent enough to manipulate the voters into giving them power, but never intelligent enough to think about the consequences of their actions on future generations of Americans. You see, they do their own wishing. They wish for power and a conscience free of concern for the ill they have done the country. In my correspondence with Maryland Senators and Representatives, I have found them all to be simple-minded in their espoused thinking, but very nimble in manipulating the voters. They are clearly practiced at selective thinking. They specialize in only that thought directed at being re-elected and increasing their own power over others.

Global Warmer's Attack on Science

Those who claim that man is responsible for the global warming between about 1970 and 2000 are fond of claiming that this theory has been proven beyond any reasonable scientific doubt. Despite this, there are hundreds of climatologists and other scientists interested in the science of the atmosphere, the seas, the sun, the flora and fauna, and the history of climate both in recorded history and during prehistoric periods who are unconvinced. The world has generally warmed since the last Ice Age, but there have been many back and forth temperature movements. There have been ice ages with carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere many times what it is now. There was the Roman Warming, then the cooling that helped to bring on the end of the Roman Empire, then the Medieval Warming, then the Mini-Ice Age that ended about 1850. While warming has generally dominated since, there was a cooling period from 1940 until about 1970. Indeed, in the late sixties, there was alarm in the media about the coming Ice Age. Indeed, such a cooling as would accompany an on-coming Ice Age would be a human disaster, while the general warming after the last Ice Age, the Roman Warming, the Medieval Warming, and the present post-Mini-Ice Age have all been very kind to man.

Despite these well-known facts, some computer modelers have determined that an increase of carbon dioxide due to the use of organic fuels must lead to great temperature increases. This despite the high carbon dioxide levels of previous Ice Ages. Despite the fact that the models cannot make predictions consistent with the known history back to the pre-Roman historical periods. Despite the fact that the models predict that the temperature should increase with altitude in the lower atmosphere, while in fact it falls. There is a problem in that carbon dioxide increases seem more often to follow than precede global temperature increases. This makes sense, since as the temperature increases, then the seas will evaporate off dissolved carbon dioxide. No matter how little truth is revealed by these models of carbon dioxide induced warming, they have many eager believers.

The fact is that variations in the sun's radiance accounts for most of the variations in the earth's temperature. There are also effects due to cosmic radiation and to cycles in the ocean currents which seem to be of importance. What is missing is evidence that man has significantly changed the world temperature.

These eager believers are largely socialists who have become somewhat weary of directly supporting socialism with its many known failures. They have turned to other arguments for essentially the same ends. They seek power over their fellowman, though always in the name of a paternalistic, or now an increasingly maternalistic, concern. There is always the pretense that the would-be thug-hirers have only the interest of the people at heart even as they threaten constantly to use force to get those many who are full of Original Sin to do their bidding.

Science draws men to pay attention to reality. This is not at all what those who seek power wish. It is much easier to control men who do not understand reality. So, the claim that science supports the idea that man has caused global warming, has two purposes. It may give those who claim this power in the short-run. If, however, there is a failure in time to convince men that man is destroying the world by using organic fuels, then the unconvinced will turn against science. This too suits the purpose of the power seekers.

The anti-man environmentalists seem to be on the road to the power to squeeze the economy and to deny men the advantages of inexpensive and sufficient power. They have shut down the construction of further nuclear power plants and brought on so much uncertainty about the future of coal-burning power plants that many projects to build them have been canceled. They supposedly support wind power, geothermal power, and photovoltaic power plants, except in their backyard or anywhere where some living animal might be inconvenienced or at least they might make a case that it might be. It is impossible to believe that the proposal in the January 2008 issue of Scientific American to cover 46,000 sq. mi. of the American Southwest with solar arrays will ever be allowed to happen. The environmentalists themselves will surely turn against any such project. Only projects to starve Americans of power are ever fully embraced for the long haul.