Supreme Court Rules EPA Must Obey the Law

It should be obvious that the EPA must obey the law.  However, the EPA and every other regulatory agency has long adopted the principle that they can exercise whatever flights of fantasy they wish in interpreting the laws passed by Congress that the agency has been empowered to enforce.   The EPA has declared that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and claimed that that gave it the power to control its emissions from power plants. Carbon dioxide was certainly not considered a pollutant when the Clean Air Act was passed into law.  It was declared a pollutant by the EPA under the Obama administration under the claim that it caused catastrophic man-made global warming.  That declaration of carbon dioxide as a pollutant had particularly threatening effects upon existing coal-fired power plants.  The Supreme Court put a temporary hold on the Obama EPA rules for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.  In 2017, the Trump EPA changed those rules to make them more lenient, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decided the Trump EPA rules were invalid.  This caused West Virginia and 18 other states to appeal that ruling to the Supreme Court.

If carbon dioxide actually did cause catastrophic man-made global warming, that would still not actually make it a pollutant and it would not really have been addressed by the Clean Air Act.  The EPA is required to provide scientific studies proving that an emitted gas is a pollutant.  The EPA cited no actual science proving that carbon dioxide caused catastrophic man-made global warming.  It did point at the UN IPCC reports, but those reports are only political documents fulfilling the desires of the governments of the world.  They are not scientific analyses, though they mascaraed as such.  The Summary for Policymakers for each report is written by the political representatives of the governments and any failures of the more detailed "science" sections of the report to support the political Summary for Policymakers are corrected as required.  There have been many re-writes of the science sections to make them more supportive of the political ends of the governments.  Nonetheless, the unwarranted assumptions and the holes in the scientific argument for catastrophic man-made global warming are apparent to any careful reader of the "science" sections of the UN IPCC reports.  Over the years, many of the scientists who wrote the original science sections stopped participating in the writing of the IPCC reports because they were furious about how the science sections were rewritten either by the scientists on the take or by purely political hacks.

In a 6 - 3 ruling, written by Chief Justice Roberts, the Supreme Court said that it was implausible that the Congress would have given the EPA the power to control carbon dioxide emissions of power plants without saying so clearly and explicitly in the Clean Air Act.  He also said that such controls have such a strong effect upon our energy service that such a power requires that Congress address it in law explicitly if those controls are entrusted to a government agency.  Indeed, the implication was that any agency making decisions with great magnitude and consequence must have been given that power very explicitly by our elected representatives.

This ruling is of huge importance for American energy infrastructure and the cost and reliability of power for Americans.  It will likely also result in a welcome reduction of regulatory overreach so common for most of our government regulatory agencies.  It will force Congress to make laws addressing many issues for which they might rather not take responsibility.  The rate of new rulings of government agencies far surpass the rate of new laws produced by Congress.  This court ruling will serve as a brake on the rapid growth of government micromanagement of most all aspects of our lives.

I propose we make 30 June a national holiday called Freedom from Regulation Day.

The EPA -- Once Again Incompetent

I have shown that the EPA rulings on harm done by mercury from coal fired power plants make no sense at all.  There is absolutely no epidemiological evidence of increased mercury sickness or of asthma downwind of major clusters of coal-fired power plants.  Indeed, maps of mercury concentrations precipitated from the air show no such correlation with coal-fired power plants.  The EPA also cherry-picks studies of the health effects of mercury from fish on some islanders, while ignoring other studies of other islanders which show no mercury effects.  They then extrapolate from the cherry-picked exaggerated effect to predict an effect at levels microscopic to the natural mercury levels found in many areas of the United States.  The reckless ruling against coal-fired power plants based on the mercury argument is incompetent and highly unethical.

The EPA has also claimed that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, even though it is necessary to plant growth and humans exhale it.  The EPA falsely claims increased CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use will cause catastrophic man-made global warming.  On the basis of this foolish claim, it is putting out a Clean Power Plan which will require the closing of many coal-fired power plants and some gas-fired power plants and the very inefficient use of many of the remaining gas-fired power plants.  The use of a global warming model with hugely exaggerated warming effects says that the new, highly disruptive and expensive ruling will lower temperatures by 0.02 Kelvin, even as vast new coal-fired power plants will produce far more CO2 than the U.S. reduction.  Wind and solar energy are to be greatly increased to replace them on the electric grid.  Yet wind and solar energy are very expensive and very unreliable.  Once again the EPA is mired in incompetence and arrogantly insists on doing great harm to energy users, investors, and workers.

Recently, the EPA demonstrated its incompetence and its unethical behavior by dramatically releasing incredible amounts of gold mining waste water laden with lead, cadmium, and arsenic into the Animas River of the San Juan River Basin.  This water flows into the Colorado River and Lake Powell.  The EPA was slow in announcing the disaster and will not take the level of responsibility it expects of businesses that it goes after vigorously when they have such disasters.  This is the government and the government is never guilty of immoral activity.  Just ask the government if you do not believe this.

There is always a double standard for business relative to government.  The standards to which businesses are held are much, much higher.

Evaluating the Mercury Emissions Danger from Coal-Fired Power Plants

The Environmental Protection Agency has recently put into effect a ruling called Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) that requires power plants to greatly decrease their mercury emissions.  This directive is aimed primarily at coal-fired power plants and is said to be authorized under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.  The EPA claims that electric power units are responsible for 50% of the mercury air pollution in the United States.  The EPA provides a U.S. map with power plant mercury air emission quantities as well, including a scary health claim. 

Let us put this map into a rational perspective by comparing it with the total measured mercury air pollution across the country.  In this way we can extract a good sense of the contribution of man-made power plant mercury air pollution compared to that of natural sources.  If we live in an environment in which natural sources of mercury produce far more mercury emissions than do electric power plants, then we may look at the cost to benefit evaluation very differently than the power-lusting EPA does. 

Now, I have actually done this in an earlier post on this blog using total mercury air deposition maps for the years 2009 and 2010.  That post is Coal-Fired Power Plants Produce Insignificant Mercury.  Clearly the EPA was either not interested enough to learn about the mercury pollution problem to read that post or it was so motivated by emotional political concerns that it knowingly ignored the facts of reality cogently explained in my previous post.  However, in the interests of educating American voters, I will try to influence thinking Americans on this topic once again and use the newer total mercury air pollution maps of 2012 and 2011 to do so.



The Mercury Deposition Network measures the total deposition of mercury from the atmosphere each year at many stations across the USA.  These maps are found here. The mercury deposition distributions from the atmosphere across the USA for 2011 and 2012 are shown below. 

 

As in 2010 and 2009, the highest concentrations of mercury deposition from the atmosphere occur in the west, with particularly high rates in the Rocky Mountains, areas east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Southwest, and areas of the Great Plains states.  The Southeast is much less bad and as one works up the East Coast through the Middle States into the Northeast, the amount of mercury deposition decreases.  This general story of the mercury deposition concentrations is supported by all of the mercury deposition maps for the years 2009 - 2012.

California varies from year to year, having been rather bad in 2012, but not bad in 2011 and 2010, and somewhere in between in 2009.  If electric generating plants produce half the mercury deposition in the US as the EPA claims, it sure is hard to imagine that the mercury output of electric power plants in California varied so much in those years to explain the major variations in mercury depositions there.  It turns out that U.S. fires cause about as much mercury to become airborne as do electric generating plants.  According to Willie Soon and Paul Driessen, U.S. fires produce an average of 44 tons of airborne mercury a year.  Now, we can make some sense of the California variability.  2012 was a much worse fire year in California than the other three years and 2009 was the second worst of the four years.

Now according to the EPA, electric power plants in 2005 produced 53 tons of airborne mercury.  This was down from 59 tons in 1990.  It we assume the same rate of decrease after 2005 as between 1990 and 2005, in 2012 the mercury output would be estimated to be about 50 tons.  This is barely more than the 44 tons due to wildfires in the U.S.  This has consequences.  If the EPA says that 50 tons of output is the source of half of the airborne mercury, then the wildfire contribution is 44%.  This leaves very little for other man-made sources and for any other natural cause.  This, I will demonstrate, is a crock!

To see why, let us look at the mercury deposition maps and compare them to the distribution of the electric power plants.  The bulk of the electric power plants are in the East!  The worst of the mercury deposition is well to the west of them.  Since prevailing winds are from the west to the east, there is no way those huge swathes of red in the West are due to the electric generating plants mostly in the East!  Even granted that there are more wildfires in the drier and more sparsely inhabited West than in the East, there is no way the 44% of the airborne mercury due to fires is the cause of those huge red areas.  The numbers and the distribution of mercury do not add up.  There are clearly natural sources of mercury that are much more important than the EPA's colorful and self-empowering story would allow.

To hammer another nail in this sadly incompetent or untruthful story, note that the EPA map of power plant emitters shows a very large concentration of such emitters in the Ohio Valley, stretching from Eastern Missouri; through southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio; Kentucky, West Virginia, eastern Ohio, and western Pennsylvania.  This cluster is such a large fraction of what the EPA says is 50% of the mercury airborne pollution, that if they were anywhere near right, there would be a bright red area where this cluster of power plants is and also to the east of them where the prevailing winds would carry their mercury output.  So what do we see?  We see some light red in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana that seems to carry over from the redder areas west of them.  We see a lot of tan in Kentucky, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania.  But note the particularly dense cluster of mercury output from power plants according to the dubious source of the EPA in eastern Ohio, northern West Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania, and ask yourself why this is not the brightest of all red areas on the distribution maps.  And ask why eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey are largely green, indicating a low deposition of mercury in those downwind areas.

Consider the case of Idaho.  There are no power plant emission sites in the EPA map of such sites in Idaho.  Washington and Oregon states to the west of it have almost no power plant emitters.  Nonetheless, Idaho is in large part red in the two distribution maps here, as it was in the two earlier years as well.  Why?  It is not because Idaho is overwhelmed with forest fires.  No, there are other important natural causes of mercury emissions which can produce much higher concentrations of airborne mercury depositions than can the densest cluster of power plants.

Overall, it is clear that the contribution electric power plants make to airborne mercury is actually trivial in comparison to natural sources of airborne mercury.  As I pointed out in my previous post on this subject, this is likely mostly due to the wind erosion of the many mercury deposits brought to the surface by the volcanoes, which have long been extinct, but once were plentiful in the southern Rockies and in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  It is very clear that electric power plants produce insignificant quantities of airborne mercury compared to the natural sources.

So if the EPA actually cared about Americans' health and if airborne mercury actually was a danger to us, then it should find the natural sources of mercury and clean up those sites.  Where a vein of cinnabar (mercury sulfide) is exposed, it would see to it that it was covered with a layer of concrete or in some other way kept from further erosion.  Of course, the west is already covered in the dust from such sources, but finding the richer sources of mercury would in time decrease the hazards.  Such an effort would have more effect than cleaning up the electric power plants in all likelihood, given the puny mercury output of the power plants.

In the meantime, people who choose to live in the West should at least be educated that they are exposing themselves to this mercury hazard.  Except, if it really is a hazard of great concern, then we should see significant health problems in the American West due to the high concentrations of airborne mercury there.  We should have no need to refer to far away island peoples with a heavy seafood intake to evaluate the medical problems caused by mercury.  This is what the EPA seems to do, though it will not make those studies public and some such studies are known to show no real problems.  There is general agreement though that most of human intake of mercury is due to eating seafood or fish from mercury-rich streams and rivers.  Eons of natural erosion of mercury deposits and volcanic outputs have loaded the oceans with about 200 ppm of mercury.

So are there any studies that show that the high concentration areas for airborne mercury in the West are the cause of elevated mercury illness problems?  No, not that I can find.  Is there any evidence of higher rates of mercury induced illness in the areas around the cluster of power plants on the Ohio River, especially in southern and eastern Ohio, northern West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania?  There is a study by the West Virginia Dept. of Health and Human Resources entitled Exposure to Mercury in West Virginia by Barbara J. Smith that concludes:

Data are inadequate to determine if:

• mercury in West Virginia fish tissue is increasing or decreasing,

• West Virginian’s are exposed to more mercury than people in the United States,

• reducing mercury emissions in West Virginia will result in reductions in mercury residues in fish caught in West Virginia waters and

• adverse health effects are occurring in West Virginian’s due to mercury exposures from
eating fish.

It seems clear that epidemiologists and physicians have been unable to find any connection to date either between the comparatively high mercury deposition rates throughout much of the American West or in the vicinity of the major cluster of power plants in the Ohio Valley.  This has not inhibited the EPA in proclaiming itself a hero in stopping evil power plant operators from spewing mercury into the air.  No, even though power plant mercury is clearly of insignificant quantities relative to natural sources, the plant owners are expected to shut down or make very expensive installations of scrubbers to remove all traces of mercury from their emissions.

Shutdowns will result in the rot of large capital investments, the loss of jobs, and required replacement of plants with new plants which will direct more capital away from other business endeavors.  In some cases, electricity capacity shortages may result.  The installation of new scrubbers that can remove mercury will also redirect capital from other endeavors and it will increase the cost of electricity production.  In both cases, the added capital investment will require electricity cost increases for consumers.

If the mercury emissions of power plants were significant compared to natural sources and if some health consequences in areas of high mercury deposition could be demonstrated, then it would be rational to make a cost-benefit analysis of power plants that emit mercury.  One might conclude that the installation of mercury scrubbers was necessary or that coal had to be replaced by natural gas as the fuel.  However, given that neither of these rationally critical conditions can be shown to exist, it is a fool's errand to require the actions the EPA has mandated with the MATS ruling.

Given the false story the EPA is telling about airborne mercury depositions, it is clear that it is either incredibly incompetent in making rational scientific and economic assessments and/or that it is simply and only interested in increasing its own power.  There is good reason to believe that "and" and not "or" applies in that statement.  The story the EPA tells when it claims carbon dioxide is a pollutant which will cause catastrophic man-made global warming is just another such case in which its science and economics are extremely deficient.  Once again, in the carbon dioxide emissions case, it is also very clear that the EPA is only interested in gaining power.

It is also very clear that the EPA is fulfilling Obama's and the Progressive Elitists' vendetta against coal under both MATS and under its claim that CO2 is a pollutant.  Having a renegade administration that is trying to wipe out a major coal and energy industry is very harmful to our standard of living.  This is even worse given that they have reduced our production of oil and gas on federal lands and offshore as well.

Supreme Court Says EPA Cost-Benefit Analysis OK

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 last Wednesday that the EPA can use cost-benefit analyses when deciding how to upgrade water cooling systems for power plants. The Riverkeepers environmental group had won a decision earlier at the 2nd U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals that cost should not matter in ordering hundreds of millions of dollars of system upgrades to protect aquatic life. More than 500 older power plants use cold water to cool their plants.

Environmental groups are not very concerned about this ruling against them. Now that they control the EPA, it is irrelevant.

Importing Japan's 1990s Miseries

Those who have not learned from history are doomed to relive the past, especially if they believe in some mythology about the past which imprints all the wrong lessons upon their minds.

One of the great examples of a mythology leading men astray is that of the Great Depression in which the demi-god Franklin D. Roosevelt gave Americans the confidence they lacked to rebuild the economy with his fireside chats and his determined pragmatic experimentation with social welfare programs. In fact, FDR greatly prolonged a recession and turned it into a deep depression and then when the economy began to improve, turned it into a second depression. The back to back depressions became the Great Depression and were not brought to an end until after the war, though wartime activity in some respects made it seem as though the depression ended when war production got well underway. FDR had an uncanny knack for creating maximal investment uncertainty and this kept private investors on the sidelines until after the war. The story is well told in The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes and in Jim Powell's FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression.

There is a more recent case of history from which we could learn. In the entire decade of the 1990s, Japan suffered an economic meltdown due to a boom in stock prices and real estate prices brought on by a flood of easy money supplied by the Japanese government in the 1980s through 1990. Benjamin Powell has written an excellent commentary on this called Avoid Japan's Mistakes in the 8 March 2009 Washington Times. Powell points out that the Nikkei stock market index fell about 70% and real-estate prices fell by 80%. This was a significantly more severe downturn than our present travails are.

Between 1992 and 1995, the Japanese had six stimulus bills providing an average yearly stimulus equal to 3% of the Japanese GDP. In 1998, the Japanese stimulus programs were 8.5% of the GDP. Even this huge stimulus had little effect upon Japan's plight. Our present $787 billion stimulus bill is 6% of the American GDP. By the mid-1990s, Japan had a very low central bank interest rate like ours now. Japan turned to big bank bailouts and to nationalization of the banks in 1998 and 1999, only to make matters still worse. Japan also provided huge sums of government funds for construction projects to no effect.

The real-estate booms in both Japan and the U.S. caused too much money, too many capital goods, and too many people to enter the construction industry. Powell says, "Bank bailouts and fiscal stimulus bills don't work because they strive to maintain the status quo. But the status quo is the problem and exactly what needs to be corrected. ..... "Stimulus" bills that emphasize public works and infrastructure merely prop up the over-expanded construction industries."

Returning to my own viewpoint: This is true, but it is also the case that the financial industry itself was on a bubble and had too many people in it. The masses of people refinancing mortgages and dealing in the financial derivatives markets were excessive and now need to be pared back substantially. The market will take care of this and also of the bankruptcy of General Motors and perhaps Chrysler as well, if only the government will get out of the way. The huge sums of bailout monies are saddling our children and grandchildren with pointless debt. The derivatives financial institutions, many real estate firms, GM, some banks, and some construction companies are way beyond saving. Let them fail and let wiser heads take over their physical assets and hire and manage the people who used to work for these loser companies. There is surely no point in wasting more money on foolish bailout schemes.

Not only is the money being wasted, but the very uncertain and surprising ways in which the government is spending it is causing private investors to take their money out of the market and wait on the sidelines. Every time Obama sneers at the "investor class" he makes them more uneasy and more passive. Obama has frozen the energy of the most dynamic and creative economic forces. The ineffectiveness of the whole effort is causing people who had signed on as part of Obama's economic team to back away from government jobs in the Treasury Department so they will not be stained by association with such a losing effort. The banks and financial institutions who took the Federal money nearly forced upon them, marked themselves as losers. GM and Chrysler also put on targets as losers when they took bailout money. Interestingly, so did the United Auto Workers Union. The image of what they did to the American automotive companies in the competition with the Japanese, Korean, and European auto makers, may be enough to defeat the union card check bill killing secret ballots to decide the issue of union representation.

The concerted efforts of the Obama - Pelosi - Reid Axis Powers to do all of the following in a massive and rapid push designed to cripple the private sector and to build the socialist government-dominated society of their choice:

• the takeover of medical services with tighter controls and rationing of medical services by means of the newly created computer record system
• the move to control medical insurance
• the elimination of a doctor's right to refuse all Medicare funding, thereby making him completely subservient to the government
  
• the threat to force increased unionization upon small businesses
• the creation of massive government debt with crippling future interest payments
  
• the coming high inflation
• the meddling with the management of banking and other financial institutions, including forcing them to continue making risky, yet low interest rate loans
  
• the transfer of money from the private sector to the ever-obstructive and meddling government sector
• the promised higher taxes on investment profits
• the vendetta against the "investor class"
  
• the higher income and Social Security taxes on higher income families
• the ban against drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and still more restrictions against drilling for oil and gas on the excessively extensive Federal lands
• the killing of funds to relocate spent nuclear fuel rods to Yucca Mountain thereby killing nuclear power in the near future
• the promised Federally orchestrated bankruptcy of the coal-fired electric power plants, which produce 50% of all U.S. electricity
• the punishing taxes or fees to be leveled on the oil and gas industries
• the restrictions of energy use and the greatly increased costs of energy use to fall on every American
• the huge stock market losses which will make many Baby Boomers more dependent upon government for retirement and health care
• the funding of more civil service organizations to remove workers from productive work in the private sector and make them cheap labor for the politicians
• the flooding of still more money into universities where most professors will use it to advocate more socialism in America and an ever-diminished role for the individual while college education costs continue to skyrocket
  
• masses of more government-chosen winners, who will be rewarded at the expense of hardworking and responsible taxpayers
• increased restrictions on trade with other countries
• increased submission to the so-called international law of the dictator and socialist government-dominated United Nations
• increased expenses for business mandated by governments as a way to keep bribes to voters off Federal and state expense accounts
  

All of which ought to cause a massive and sustained Second Great Depression. The Obama Axis Powers will be happy to use the continuing crisis as a means to push for still more government power as a means to solve the problems they have themselves caused. Of course, they will continue to blame everything on George Bush and perhaps Rush Limbaugh. Meanwhile, bewildered Americans will more and more frequently read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in order to really understand the root of all the evil which has overtaken them. Will the sign of the dollar and decals asking "Who is John Galt?" become commonplace on Depression era cars?

If you have any hope of thinking for yourself, choosing your own values, and managing your own life in accordance with those values, you are under a massive and brutal attack. It is way past time for every American who has any understanding of his right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness to stand sure in his insistence upon preserving this essence of his individual life. Without it, there is no joy in living. We must stand united and individually in rebellion against this statist takeover of our lives.

This is much, much worse than anything King George III ever conceived of. In comparison to Obama, the king was a hero of freedom. Let us hope Americans can recover some measure of the concern they once had for individual freedoms before they lose everything.

A Government-Troubled Economy

Government is the problem, it is not the solution.

For some time the housing industry has been in trouble. What caused those problems? The cost of lumber has been high for a long time due to heavy world-wide demand for lumber as much of the world has latched onto America's coattails and been carried along into relative prosperity and development. This has led to great increases in the price of steel, concrete, and copper, among many other things. Nonetheless, the housing industry has not been in trouble in much of the U.S., despite these cost factors being universal. Why not? Because the principal reason for the housing crunch has been that many communities have limited housing development in the name of planned growth and in order to maintain undeveloped, green areas. In these areas, and a few areas where the federal government owns all of the available land and makes it unavailable, the cost of housing has simply become prohibitive for people to buy homes. When it is recommended that people commit to a purchase price for a home of no more than 2.5 times their annual family income, but the average home costs 8 times their family income as it does in California, one has a recipe for disaster for the housing industry and those who stretch reality to try to acquire a home anyway.

Such situations brought pressure to bear on Congress to make homes more affordable. Congress was largely of a mind to support local community and state restrictions on home building, but needed to appear to care about the desire of middle class and upper lower class families for a home of their own. After all, this is a very real part of the American Dream. So, Congress used the Community Reinvestment Act to force banks to make mortgage loans to people who would not otherwise qualify for a loan. They used Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac to make it so the original mortgage loaners could unload their risky loans to others. They encouraged the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates down to help make home mortgages more affordable as well and what else was the Fed to do if it was to keep the housing industry afloat anyway? So, in consequence, we had not only a housing industry in trouble in those areas of the country with highly restrictive new housing development, but also many mortgage lenders, banks, government-sponsored corporations (Fanny and Freddy), and securities and investment firms in major trouble.

The auto industry has been sick for a very long time. For a long time, that industry has been under a huge burden laid on it by the United Auto Workers, which government rules for unionization and company actions when it has been unionized very much helped bring about. Of course, some other industries are also badly hurt by labor unions. Then the auto industry was further burdened with CAFE, which requires each auto company to make a set of vehicles whose average fuel efficiency is below a limit set by Congress. Basically, American companies really began losing out to the Japanese and other foreign car makers when this became the law of the land. We were used to cheap gasoline, and in comparative terms we still are. So, American companies never had as much incentive to make cars that were as highly fuel efficient as the foreign car makers. This was really what opened the door for the foreign car makers into the American market. For decades, American car makers have been forced to make money-losing small cars to meet the CAFE mandate. The tens of billions of dollars lost in this way had a multiplying effect upon the car makers to minimize innovation and the development new technology and quality manufacturing methods. Government destroyed the auto industry, with some help from bad management. Of course, when it is clear to good managers that government has it in for an industry, they steer clear of that industry. After all, the best managers are no dummies.

In addition, we have the highest corporate income taxes in the world, save those of Japan where they are equally high. This discourages American companies from bringing profits made abroad home. It encourages them to build more plants abroad and fewer at home. Most countries throughout the world have been reducing their corporate income taxes, but we have not and BO says that he will not do so in his administration. So, we raise the costs for American corporations and make it harder for them to export goods. Our policy is that they should export jobs and capital instead. Except the government pretends otherwise. The government lives in LA LA land. No, I am wrong. The government largely knows what it is doing. It thinks we life in LA LA land and will never catch on to the fraud they are putting over on us.

Then, as I have recently discussed, the government has monopolized a huge fraction of the land, especially in the West. As our population has grown and as we have used more of the resources available in our privately owned lands, these Western federally owned lands have become more and more valuable. Still, the government holds on to these lands and is constantly trying to remove more and more land from private ownership and productive use. This crimps the economy.

The government mandates for ethanol production have resulted in the misuse of much of our privately held and potentially productive farmland. There is no net energy produced by ethanol production and it simply causes less food to be produced and thereby raises our food prices. As more of our income goes to meeting our food needs, less goes to other industries and they start to hurt. American agriculture is the most productive in the world and will do well without ethanol subsidies. With these subsidies, we raise taxes for everyone, including the other industries who will only be hurt by diverting money to farmers and ethanol distillers.

The government has made it exceedingly difficult for companies to drill for oil in the U. S. and in our off-shore areas. They have made it hard to produce natural gas in many areas. They also make it hard to mine coal, use nuclear power, and frequently to deliver electric power, especially from coal-fired power plants.

Government has given over the education of our children to the teachers labor unions. These most socialist unions now pound American youth with socialist propaganda and teach them to hate making money (creating wealth) and industry. They also fail to teach them the skills they will need as productive employees, such as rational thinking skills.

So, governments have done great damage to our economy by damaging the housing industry, lenders and bankers, investors, the auto industry, other industries saddled with blood-sucking labor unions, the electric power companies, all corporations competing on a global basis, the oil and natural gas industries, the nuclear power industry, coal mines, and all companies who wish to hire young employees with critical thinking skills.

But, this does not yet give us the full scope of how government is the source of the troubles in our economy. Not yet even close!

Companies and industries must look to the future and plan how to use their employee's time, invest their capital, figure out what new products are needed, train employees to do the work they will need to do in the future, find ways to improve present products and to transport them efficiently, and figure out where to build facilities and how to heat, air-condition, and light them. Companies and industries must plan to survive. But, governments are insidious in popping surprises upon companies and industries that wreck their planning and development processes. Companies no sooner make an investment than Congress, state legislatures, and local politicians change the rules and turn their investments into losses.

The Federal government is doing just this on all sorts of fronts. With the Bush tax cuts scheduled to come to an end in 2010, the Democrat Congress is surely going to raise many taxes, especially on the wealthy who invest much of their money and on corporations. But, no one knows what the new taxes will be. Consequently, if they invest money, will the new taxes insure that they will have a bad investment? Under such conditions, people sit on their money, which is exactly what the politicians are presently complaining that they are doing. I sure am sitting on my lab's income at this time.

BO has said that he is going to bankrupt the coal-fired power plants. As I have noted several times, coal-fired power plants produce 50% of the U.S. electric power. Does this mean that we are about to lose 50% of all American electric power? If so, the coal mines, the trains that carry coal, the coal-fired power plants, the electric utilities, and all companies that use electricity are going to be hurting. Every blackout at my lab creates havoc. Vacuum pumps stop and air is sucked into some vacuum systems. All data collection stops and some long experimental runs are ruined and may take days of work to reproduce. Many industries have to undergo long processes to restart production when power is lost. At the moment of power shutdown some products are ruined. Power outages are much more serious for many businesses than they are for households. Of course long power outages at home cause concern for our two freezers and about loss of food in them. Frequently power outages and power fluctuations also increase the failures of electronics at home or in the workplace.

What will future energy costs mean for business? The imposition of cap and trade restrictions on the use of fossil fuels will have huge, unknown implications for the cost of making goods, transporting them, will in many cases determine which goods should be made, and will perhaps keep some employees from coming to work. Trained, critical employees will be lost if they live too far from the workplace. Plants may have to be moved to reduce transportation costs or to have more reliable electric power. Of course, many jobs will be exported to India and China where cap and trade does not exist.

As BO induces much of American youth to go to work on road and bridge-building, they will not be available to other industries. BO's service leagues will take still more young people out of the workforce. Labor costs will go up. Industry cannot yet know how much they will go up. Uncertainty again.

BO and Congress are determined to make it easy for labor unions to coerce workers into signing union election cards. Many more businesses will be saddled with unions. How badly will this cost the business in higher wages, less labor force flexibility, and less labor productivity?

What will BO and the Congress impose as costs for a nationalized health insurance and health system upon companies and wealthy individuals? Will this force companies to let employees go? Will this force them to export jobs aboard? Or to build new plants that use more robots and fewer people? Or redesign product to be made by more machines and fewer people?

Many privately held companies will be ruined when the death tax is reinstituted by BO and the Democrat Congress. Many companies will have to be sold to pay taxes. Many will have to be shutdown, since no buyer will be available. Many businesses will either be sold before 2010 or will be shutdown before then to take advantage of the higher threshold for the death tax that will be available before then.

Many capital investments will be cashed out before BO and the Democrat Congress raise the capital gains tax. Many investments will not be made because it is not yet certain what the capital gains tax will be.

Many individual taxpayers do not know what their tax burden will soon be. They think it will go up and will go up considerably. They know that someone has to pay for the bailout, the youth leagues, the welfare checks posing as tax rebates, the building of roads and bridges in accelerated rates, the payouts to the teachers unions, the bailout of the United Auto Workers Union, the subsidies for inefficient alternative fuels, and the nationalized health care and health insurance system coming. So, they are sitting on cash and are unwilling to invest it.

The trillion dollar bailout has failed to save the lenders, the banks, and Fanny and Freddy, and the investment firms. New winners and new losers are being picked by the politicians and bureaucrats daily. No one can figure out if they will be a winner or a loser, but most understand that there will be many more losers than winners. With this uncertainty, who wants to make an aggressive and forward-looking business decision. With no decisions, less and less money will be made, fewer goods will be delivered, and fewer services will be offered and fewer purchased. The economy slows down more due to uncertainty than due to any other cause, because uncertainty stops everyone in their tracks. Everyone feels as though they are in a minefield, so no one wants to make a step for fear of stepping on a mine. This is exactly the response to be expected.

Yes, the economy is hurting. Governments sure have worked overtime to put it in that world of hurt. Government is the problem, not the solution. We need a determined return to the concept of limited government, of Constitutional government.

The Cost of Coal

Many commodities prices have risen considerably in the last couple of years. These include oil, concrete, steel, natural gas, corn, soybeans, wheat, wood, fish, beef, and coal. The principal reason is rapidly increased demand. This demand has grown faster than the supply of these products. The increased wealth of many people throughout the world which has been brought on by a large increase in international trade and improvements in economic freedom in China, India, Brazil, and Eastern Europe has given billions of more people much more money to bid for the supply of these products. The United States exports many of them and is making a great deal of money and providing many jobs as a result.

Let us examine the case of coal. The U.S. has an abundance of coal. Presently, 600 power plants burning coal generate 49% of the nation's electricity. This is up from 43% of the electricity in 2000. However, more than 60 coal power plant proposals were terminated in 2007 due to concerns about greenhouse gases and environmental issues in 24 states. Some of the terminations were brought about by state governments and some by utilities concerned about future carbon footprint legislation. Dozens of the original 151 proposals for new coal power plants in early 2007 are being challenged in the courts.

Meanwhile coal production was cut in China this winter by heavy snowstorms and heavy rains flooded coal mines in Australia, the world's biggest coal exporter. Yes, that is Australia, not the U.S. But U.S. coal exports increased 19.2% last year and the Energy Department is expecting a further 15% increase this year. Power plants widely use Central Appalachian coal, a grade of coal with a very high energy output. This coal sold for $40 per ton in early 2007 and is now selling at almost $90 per ton. Powder River Basin coal in Wyoming and Montana has about 0.75 times the energy per ton and was selling at $10/ton in early 2007 and is now selling for $15/ton. The lower cost is not proportional to the energy content, due to longer shipping distances to most power plants and because the shipping costs are related to the weight and volume, not to the energy content. When a substantial part of the cost is determined by the world market bidding its value up, the cost of shipping relative to the energy output is even more important. The fact that the Central Appalachian coal more than doubled in cost since early 2007, while the Powder River Basin coal went up only 50% is a sure sign that the international market is playing a major role in determining the cost of the coal.

It is interesting to note that while new coal-fired power plants in the U.S. are largely being axed due to environmental concerns, Western European nations are rapidly increasing the number of their coal power plants. See the NY Times article "Europe Turns Back to Coal, Raising Climate Fears." Italy plans to produce 33% of its electricity from coal in five years, which is up from 14% now. More plants are being built in Germany and the Czech Republic. About 50 coal power plants are expected to be opened in the next 5 years in Europe. As I have pointed out before, the Europeans love to criticize the U.S. for its CO2 emissions, but our emissions are growing less rapidly than are theirs. Coal produces about two times as much CO2 per unit of electricity as does natural gas. Meanwhile, India and China are opening about 1 new coal power plant a week between them.

Both natural gas and oil are alternatives to coal for electrical power generation. Both have had larger price increases even than coal, however. Coal in 2006 cost only $1.69 per BTU, while natural gas cost $6.87/BTU. Thus, the heat output per dollar for coal was 4.1 times greater than that of natural gas. For most of us, this means that our electric bills will be going up considerably. The more we switch from coal to natural gas and oil, the more our electric bill will go up. The cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions will be very high.

On the other hand, if we emulate the Europeans and use more coal, crops and other plants will luxuriate in CO2 fertilizer and our cool planet will perhaps become slightly warmer than it might otherwise be. Of course, over most of the last 400,000 years the planet has been colder than now. We call these colder periods Ice Ages. We are about due to begin another Ice Age, if the pattern holds up. Let us hope that producing a wee bit more CO2 will have a significant warming effect, despite the weak evidence that it might have done so to date. And if it were to cause a temperature increase, would it be cause man's emissions were significant compared to the much greater emissions from the oceans and from decaying plant matter, not to mention all of the animals breathing?