Tag Archives: Environmentalism

News

Josh Mandel wants to create jobs in Ohio with more oil drilling

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Josh Mandel is pushing for energy development and more jobs in Ohio.

Excerpt:

Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, was in Tuscarawas County this week touting the potential benefits the oil and gas industry could bring to Ohio, including the possibility of 200,000 additional jobs.

Mandel is stepping into the debate over whether Ohio’s federal lands should be used for oil and gas exploration.

“I believe responsible exploration for oil and gas will be a win-win-win for families and senior citizens in Tuscarawas County,” Mandel told The Times-Reporter during a telephone interview Monday, hours before he held a meet-and-greet in Bolivar.

“It will create jobs, bring down utility bills, and it will contribute to the national security of our country. With more energy produced here in America, we will be safer as a nation.”

Mandel, a Republican from Lyndhurst, near Cleveland, is running for the seat in the Senate held by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Avon.

[…]The oil and gas boom in eastern Ohio will benefit not only the men and women working on the rigs, but also construction workers, truck drivers and service industry employees, Mandel contends. He said it will help waiters and waitresses, who will serve more customers, owners of hotels and motels and people who own businesses up and down the supplier’s chain.

But Mandel says he does see a threat to the industry.

“There are bureaucrats in Washington and in the state who are trying to block responsible oil and gas exploration,” Mandel said. “I will do everything in my power to combat the Washington bureaucrats who are trying to block new jobs and affordable energy in Ohio.”

[…]Mandel served two terms in the Ohio House of Representatives before ousting incumbent state Treasurer Kevin Boyce in 2010. He is a Marine Corps veteran who served two tours of duty in Anbar Province, Iraq.

Josh has a stellar record to run on.

Excerpt:

Amidst this week’s news of of Fitch downgrading the United States’ outlook from stable to negative, Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel has announced that Fitch has given the highest possible short term rating of F1+ for Ohio’s general obligation (GO) bonds.  Fitch credited Treasurer Mandel’s conservative investment strategy and cautious management of our tax dollars as key factors in making their rating determination:

“The rating reflects the strength of the state’s general obligation credit, the ample liquidity provided by investments in the state treasurer’s liquidity account, and the procedures in place to insure timely payment of optional tenders of bonds that have not been remarketed.”

They also noted:

“The investment profile is conservative as the fund is invested in U.S. Treasury and agency securities, highly rated commercial paper, and money market funds.”

Amidst a struggling economy and sluggish national growth, Fitch spoke of notable increases in the state treasurer’s liquidity account, as well as the state’s bolstering of its rainy day fund.

Fitch also noted Ohio’s improved budget stabilization fund balance in their rating. Ohio’s budget stabilization fund reached a low point in 2009 under previous administrations when the fund had been depleted down to just $0.89. In July, Ohio’s AA+ credit rating outlook was raised by Standard & Poor’s from “negative” to “stable,” in part because of conservative management of debt in the Treasurer’s office.

Since being elected, Treasurer Mandel has focused on reining in state budget costs by streamlining operations, eliminating waste, and serving as a steadfast fiscal watchdog for Ohio taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

The Republican-led General Assembly and Governor Kasich tackled Ohio’s $8 billion budget shortfall and spending imbalances head on, thus improving our state’s credit ratings.

Josh is going to be running for the Senate seat current occupied by left-wing radical Sherrod Brown in 2012.

News

Climategate 2.0: Leaked e-mails show scientists intended to deceive public

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The UK Telegraph’s James Delingpole writes in the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

Last week, 5,000 files of private email correspondence among several of the world’s top climate scientists were anonymously leaked onto the Internet. Like the first “climategate” leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public.

The scientists include men like Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, both of whose reports inform what President Obama has called “the gold standard” of international climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

[…][A]t least one scientist involved—Mr. Mann—has confirmed that the emails are genuine, as were the first batch released two years ago.

[…]Consider an email written by Mr. Mann in August 2007. “I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thus far unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests. Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.” Doug Keenan is a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. Steve McIntyre is the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose flaws in Mr. Mann’s “hockey stick” graph of global temperatures.

One can understand Mr. Mann’s irritation. His hockey stick, which purported to demonstrate the link between man-made carbon emissions and catastrophic global warming, was the central pillar of the IPCC’s 2001 Third Assessment Report, and it brought him near-legendary status in his community. Naturally he wanted to put Mr. McIntyre in his place.

The sensible way to do so is to prove Mr. McIntyre wrong using facts and evidence and improved data. Instead the email reveals Mr. Mann casting about for a way to smear him. If the case for man-made global warming is really as strong as the so-called consensus claims it is, why do the climategate emails show scientists attempting to stamp out dissenting points of view? Why must they manipulate data, such as Mr. Jones’s infamous effort (revealed in the first batch of climategate emails) to “hide the decline,” deliberately concealing an inconvenient divergence, post-1960, between real-world, observed temperature data and scientists’ preferred proxies derived from analyzing tree rings?

What I can’t believe is that we’ve spent billions of dollars funding myths. They lied because they were being paid by the government to lie. The government wanted a crisis that would require more government control over businesses and consumers. And the scientists found that evidence in their “research”, because that’s what the government was paying them to do.

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Commentary

Bank run in socialist Europe begins

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Europe: Annual Budget Deficit as % of GDP
Europe: Annual Budget Deficit as % of GDP

From CNBC.

Excerpt:

Money-market funds in the United States have quite dramatically slammed shut their lending windows to European banks. According to the Economist, Fitch estimates U.S. money market funds have withdrawn 42 percent of their money from European banks in general.

And for France that number is even higher — 69 percent. European money-market funds are also getting in on the act.

Bond issuance by banks has seized up because buyers have gone on strike.

From the Economist’s Free Exchange Blog:

In the third quarter bonds issues by European banks only reached 15 percent of the amount they raised over the same period in the past two years, reckon analysts at Citi Group. It is unlikely that European banks have sold many more bonds since.

Corporate depositors are also pulling their cash.

Free Exchange:

“We are starting to witness signs that corporates are withdrawing deposits from banks in Spain, Italy, France and Belgium,” an analyst at Citi Group wrote in a recent report. “This is a worrying development.”

And there are troubling signs that banks are even running out of collateral to back their borrowings from the European Central Bank .

So far the liquidity of the European Central Bank (ECB) has kept the system alive. Only one large European bank, Dexia, has collapsed because of a funding shortage. Yet what happens if banks run out of collateral to borrow against?

And from the leftist New York Times.

Excerpt:

The flight from European sovereign debt and banks has spanned the globe. European institutions like the Royal Bank of Scotland and pension funds in the Netherlands have been heavy sellers in recent days. And earlier this month, Kokusai Asset Management in Japan unloaded nearly $1 billion in Italian debt.

At the same time, American institutions are pulling back on loans to even the sturdiest banks in Europe. When a $300 million certificate of deposit held by Vanguard’s $114 billion Prime Money Market Fund from Rabobank in the Netherlands came due on Nov. 9, Vanguard decided to let the loan expire and move the money out of Europe. Rabobank enjoys a AAA-credit rating and is considered one of the strongest banks in the world.

American money market funds, long a key supplier of dollars to European banks through short-term loans, have also become nervous. Fund managers have cut their holdings of notes issued by euro zone banks by $261 billion from around its peak in May, a 54 percent drop, according to JPMorgan Chase research.

This is really disturbing. I wonder if any of my economics-minded commenters can explain to me what happens when there is a run on banks. I am guessing that there will be some rioting over benefits as austerity measures are imposed, and interest rates will go up.