GREAT NEWS! Oh, I know that I usually say some depressing things on this blog… but I’m going to make up for all that right now by bringing out the Bobby and Supriya Jindal picture to illustrate this exciting story.
Here’s the story from the Wall Street Journal, courtesy of commenter ECM. The title is “U.S. Gas Fields Go From Bust to Boom”.
Excerpt:
A massive natural-gas discovery here in northern Louisiana heralds a big shift in the nation’s energy landscape. After an era of declining production, the U.S. is now swimming in natural gas.
Even conservative estimates suggest the Louisiana discovery — known as the Haynesville Shale, for the dense rock formation that contains the gas — could hold some 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That’s the equivalent of 33 billion barrels of oil, or 18 years’ worth of current U.S. oil production. Some industry executives think the field could be several times that size.
“There’s no dry hole here,” says Joan Dunlap, vice president of Petrohawk Energy Corp., standing beside a drilling rig near a former Shreveport amusement park.
Huge new fields also have been found in Texas, Arkansas and Pennsylvania. One industry-backed study estimates the U.S. has more than 2,200 trillion cubic feet of gas waiting to be pumped, enough to satisfy nearly 100 years of current U.S. natural-gas demand.
The discoveries have spurred energy experts and policy makers to start looking to natural gas in their pursuit of a wide range of goals: easing the impact of energy-price spikes, reducing dependence on foreign oil, lowering “greenhouse gas” emissions and speeding the transition to renewable fuels.
…The natural-gas discoveries come as oil has become harder to find and more expensive to produce. The U.S. is increasingly reliant on supplies imported from the Middle East and other politically unstable regions. In contrast, 98% of the natural gas consumed in the U.S. is produced in North America.
Coal remains plentiful in the U.S., but is likely to face new restrictions. To produce the same amount of energy, burning gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as burning coal.
Cap and Trade Top Ten List
1. Cap and Trade Is a Massive Energy Tax
2. It Will Not Make A Substantive Impact on the Environment
3. It WillKill Jobs
4. It Will Cause Electricity Bills and Gas Prices to Sharply Increase
5. It Will Outsource Manufacturing Jobs and Hurt Free Trade
6. It Will Make You Choose Between Energy, Groceries, Clothing or Haircuts.
7. It Will Be Highly Susceptible to Fraud and Corruption
8. It Will Hurt Senior Citizens, the Poor, and the Unemployed the Worst
9. It Will Cost American Families Over $3,000 a Year
10. President Obama Admitted “Electricity Rates Would Necessarily Skyrocket” under a cap-and-trade program. (January 2008)
I can help with number 4: the energy price increases for consumers are right here, courtesy of Michele Bachmann.
Their post goes on to list and analyze the effects of various legislation proposed by Democrats in terms of number of jobs lost and amount of money confiscated from the private sector for the government to spend. It’s amazing how many times Democrats tried to destroy the economy while Bush was President. And now they will finally be able to do it!
The article also mentions how many jobs will be lost by the proposed green jobs programs, as well as how many jobs will be outsourced to China and India, who will enjoy a manufacturing boom since they are not capping their emissions at all.
That’s right, let’s be clear on that:
The Ultimate Outsourcing: India and China have repeatedly said they would not match U.S. environmental goals in order to protect their economies. Cap and Trade will merely move manufacturing jobs to China and India.
There are people I know who voted for Obama who are worried about their jobs. They complain to me about outsourcing. They do not understanding that Obama causes outsourcing by taxing “the rich” and regulating “greedy corporations”. What a tragedy! Defeated by your own ignorance!
The 10 part series on cap and trade
The Heritage Foundation has also started a nice series of 10 posts about what cap and trade will do to the economy. In this series, they are going into a lot more detail than in the summary posted I talked about above.
It works like this: Policymakers set a cap on the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that can be omitted into the atmosphere. Each power plant, factory, refinery, and other regulated entity will be allocated allowances (rights to emit) six greenhouse gases. However, only a certain percentage of the allowances will be allocated to these entities. The remaining percentage will be auctioned off or distributed to other emitting entities. Most emitters will need to purchase at least some allowances at auction. Emitters who reduce their emissions below their annual allotment can sell their excess allowances to those who do not–the trade part of cap-and-trade. Over time, the cap would be ratcheted down, requiring greater cuts in emissions.
So this is basically a tax on energy production. Yes, Democrats think that we produce too much energy, employing too many Americans, and that we sell it for too little money. According to Democrats, we need less production, fewer jobs and higher consumer prices for electricity. And other companies who use energy will have to pay more for it as well.
Take a look at this graph showing projected job losses under the Liberman-Warner cap and trade bill:
Again, Heritage explains how cap and trade transfers money out of the private sector, where money is used to produce goods, into the public sector, where money is wasted by bureacrats on bicycle paths and gold monuments to Obama.
…if President Obama were to sign a cap and trade bill into law, he would have to call for familial budget cuts much greater than one dollar. (For a brief explanation of how cap and trade works, go here.) As recently acknowledged by a top White House official, a global warming tax could generate as much as $1.9 trillion in tax revenue over eight years, which amounts to a nearly $2,000 tax every year for every American household.* Add this up over the period of a few years and we’re talking about trillions of dollars in lost income for the entire U.S. economy.
And here’s the chart:
How much will cap and trade cost you?
I hope the people with low income who were hoping to become rich under Obama won’t be too shocked to find that the poor do better under capitalism not socialism. I mean, I hope they don’t drop their television remote controls and doughnuts.
UPDATE: Good news! Michelle Malkin says the cap and trade tax is in trouble! It turns out that the Democrats in manufacturing-intensive states are aware of what the tax will mean to their unemployment rate.
The NRCC sent out a helpful fact sheet outlining why the radical green plan is really in trouble. You can thank opposition from Democrats in manufacturing and energy-producing states.
Michelle has all the citations from the Democrat politicians who are never going to vote for this mess. So, good news!
The Discovery Institute is the headquarters for ID research and advocacy in the United States. They send out a newsletter by e-mail and I though this week’s hit on all cylinders. Below are some of their stories from the newsletter. Thanks to commenter ECM for an earlier tip on the Junk DNA story.
When “Junk DNA” Isn’t Junk: Farewell to a Darwinist Standard Response
Richard Sternberg, research scientist at the Biologic Institute supported by the Center for Science and Culture, is now blogging at Evolution News & Views, weighing in on the latest research showing that so-called “Junk DNA,” which Darwinists have discounted as “rubbish,” are actually “anything but that.”
In the Darwinist repertoire, a standard response to evidence of design in the genome is to point to the existence of “junk DNA.” What is it doing there, if purposeful design really is detectable in the history of life’s development? Of course this assumes that the “junk” really is junk. That assumption has been cast increasingly into doubt. New research just out in the journal Nature Genetics finds evidence that genetic elements previously thought of as rubbish are anything but that. The research describes tiny strands of RNA, previously thought to be junk, that now turn out to play a role in gene expression. Another finding by Dr. Geoff Faulkner shows that “retrotransposons,” a further variety of “junk” as the dogma previously taught, play a similar role.
Also at ENV, Dr. Sternberg takes a look at the old Darwinian tripe that biological systems couldn’t possibly have been designed because they exhibit “shoddy engineering”:
We often hear from Darwinians that the biological world is replete with examples of shoddy engineering, or, as they prefer to put it, bad design. One such case of really poor construction is the inverted retina of the vertebrate eye. As we all know, the retina of our eyes is configured all wrong because the cells that gather photons, the rod photoreceptors, are behind two other tissue layers. Light first strikes the ganglion cells and then passes by or through the bipolar cells before reaching the rod photoreceptors. Surely, a child could have arranged the system better — so they tell us.
The problem with this story of supposed unintelligent design is that it is long on anthropomorphisms and short on evidence. Consider nocturnal mammals. Night vision for, say, a mouse is no small feat. Light intensities during night can be a million times less than those of the day, so the rod cells must be optimized — yes, optimized — to capture even the few stray photons that strike them. Given the backwards organization of the mouse’s retina, how is this scavenging of light accomplished? Part of the solution is that the ganglion and bipolar cell layers are thinner in mammals that are nocturnal. But other optimizations must also occur. Enter the cell nucleus and “junk” DNA.
Jerry Coyne Recycles: Why Darwinism Is False
Jonathan Wells is reviewing Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True over at ENV, and already the list of problems with Coyne’s book is mounting:
On Earth Day 2009, we are reminded of the ecological importance of recycling. As a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago, Jerry A. Coyne must be keen on recycling: He even recycles worn-out arguments for Darwinism.
If “evolution” meant simply that existing species can undergo minor changes over time, or that many species alive today did not exist in the past, then evolution would undeniably be true. But “evolution” for Coyne means Darwinism — the theory that all living things are descendants of a common ancestor, modified by unguided natural processes such as DNA mutations and natural selection.
Coyne discusses the fossil record, embryos, vestigial structures, the geographic distribution of species, artificial and natural selection, and the origin of species. In the process, (1) he ignores the Cambrian explosion — which Darwin considered a “serious” problem — and he rearranges the fossil record to fit Darwin’s theory; (2) he defends Ernst Haeckel — who faked some drawings of vertebrate embryos to provide support for Darwinism — and he dredges up the doctrine that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; (3) he claims that much human DNA is useless junk — despite abundant recent evidence that this is not true — and he relies on theological arguments that have no legitimate place in natural science; (4) he invokes “the well-known process called convergent evolution” to explain many cases of the geographic distribution of species — even though the “well-known process” is merely speculation — and he again falls back on theology to justify a supposedly scientific theory; and (5) he describes examples of natural and artificial selection — none of which show anything more than minor changes within existing species — and he misrepresents experimental evidence to make it sound as though the origin of species by natural selection has been directly observed.
WINTERY KNIGHT 