Tag Archives: Global Warming

News

A closer look at Obama’s three-point plan to create American jobs

Leave a comment
Unemployment rate chart 2011
Democrats take over the House and Senate in January 2007

The Heritage Foundation outlines three of Obama’s job creation plans.

Excerpt:

This week, President Obama is again set to make a pitch for his latest plan to stimulate the economy, but meanwhile he is turning his back on projects that would put tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans to work. And he’s doing it all to appease his left-wing, environmentalist base at the expense of domestic energy production.

Heritage’s Rob Bluey reported last week on a new finding by a New Orleans-based group that the Obama administration is approving just 35 percent of the oil drilling plans for the Gulf of Mexico so far this year. It is also taking an average of 115 days — nearly four months — to secure approval from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. Those numbers are a sharp drop from previous years, well below the historical average 73.4 percent approval rate and 61 days it takes to approve plans. And for plans that require drilling activity, the numbers are even worse with an average approval time of 222 days.

That’s bad news for job creation. One deepwater rig alone can create 700 jobs locally. But slowing down oil drilling in the Gulf isn’t the only way the President is blocking jobs. Earlier this month, the Obama Administration announced it would delay the construction of the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline that would bring in more than 700,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta, Canada, to the Texas Gulf coast–and could have produced upwards of 20,000 jobs. Heritage’s Nicolas Loris explains the impact:

What this delay really means is that President Obama is putting off an important election year decision in which two of his largest supporters–labor unions and environmentalists–are split on the issue. This tactic allows the decision to be delayed until after the 2012 elections.

More importantly, this means a delay in access to easy imports from our northern neighbor, the creation of thousands of jobs, and the generation of revenue for the states where the pipeline passes. Montana, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas are collectively projected to collect $5.2 billion in property tax revenue as a result of building the pipeline.

As if that weren’t enough, the White House made another decision blocking energy-related jobs in the United States. In mid-November, the Obama Administration delayed a mineral lease sale in Ohio’s Wayne National Forest for oil and gas drilling. Apart for providing Americans access to affordable energy, the project could have had a tremendous impact in the state, including the creation of an estimated 200,000 jobs, an overall wage and personal-income boost of $12 billion by 2015, and a billion-dollar boon to Ohio landowners, schools, businesses, and communities.

So Obama has three plans to create more American jobs:

  1. Block drilling in the Gulf of Mexico
  2. Block the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline
  3. Block drilling for oil and gas in Ohio

I don’t think Obama’s three job creation plans are working.

Maybe he just just do the opposite: 1) more drilling in the Gulf, 2) build the Keystone XL pipeline, and 3) allow development of the Ohio oil shale. And while he’s at it, 4) drill for oil in Alaska. That would create real jobs.

News

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

Leave a comment

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.

Related stories

News

Obama administration blocks oil production in Ohio: 200,000 jobs lost

2 Comments
Cost of renewable wind and solar energy
Cost of renewable wind and solar energy

The Heritage Foundation explains Obama’s latest effort to appease the environmentalist cult.

Excerpt:

First, it was 20,000 jobs the Obama Administration delayed by punting a decision to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring 700,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada into the United States. Multiply that number by 10 and you have the amount of jobs the President is putting on hold by delaying a mineral lease sale in Ohio’s Wayne National Forest for oil and gas drilling. This decision kills jobs and denies Americans access to affordable energy.

The Washington Examiner reports that Wayne National Forest already has 1,300 oil and gas wells in operation, but access to Utica’s shale gas reserves would require hydraulic fracturing. The United States Department of Agriculture announced a six-month delay in the leasing of 3,000 acres in the forest to study the environmental effects of hydraulic fracturing. This decision not only delays access to the jobs and energy that Americans need now, but it blocks an important revenue source for federal and state governments. The Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program estimated that:

Natural gas and crude oil industry could help create and support more than 200,000 Ohio-based jobs from the leasing, royalties, exploration, drilling, production and pipeline construction activities for the Utica shale reserve. The state could experience an overall wage and personal-income boost of $12 billion by 2015 from industry spending.

The study also projects royalty payments to landowners, schools, businesses and communities could increase to as much as $1.6 billion by 2015—a number that exceeds the total amount of royalties distributed by Ohio’s natural gas and crude oil industry in the last decade. Total tax revenue from oil and gas exploration and development in the Utica shale formation from 2011 until 2015, including severance, commercial activity, ad valorem (property), federal, state and local taxes, is projected to be approximately $479 billion. Industry expenditures related to Utica shale development could generate approximately $12.3 billion in gross state product and result in a statewide output or sales of more than $23 billion.

Hydraulic fracturing, known as “fracking,” is a long-proven process by which producers inject a fluid (composed of 99 percent water) and sand into wells to free oil and gas trapped in rock formations. Used in over 1 million wells in the United States over more than six decades, fracking has been successfully used to retrieve over 7 billion barrels of oil and over 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Spencer Hunt of the Columbus Dispatch reports that “Tom Stewart, vice president of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, said shale well drilling would be less harmful to the forest than conventional drilling because as many as six shale wells can be drilled on a single pad.”

Fracking is subject to both federal and state regulations, and there have been no instances of contamination to drinking water. Groundwater aquifers sit thousands of feet above where fracking takes place, and studies by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Ground Water Protection Council, and other agencies have found no evidence of groundwater contamination. Where there have been unwanted environmental outcomes—such as gas migration—they were the result of poor well construction or problems with the concrete and steel casings around the well bore. Those instances have been rare, and they were not a result of the fracking process itself.

Hydraulic fracturing will be a critical process in developing energy supplies in the future. The National Petroleum Council estimates that fracking will allow 60–80 percent of all domestically drilled wells in the next 10 years to remain viable.

You can study the effects of hydraulic fracturing for six more months, but the facts are going to remain the same. Fracking is a long-proven process that can help access our nation’s abundant oil and gas reserves. Delaying lease sales is delaying the creation of much-needed jobs.

So let me get this straight. If Obama isn’t handing out $535 million of taxpayer dollars to Solyndra and $1.4 billion of taxpayer dollars to BruightSource, then he’s busy blocking oil drilling in the Gulf and blocking oil drilling in Ohio and blocking the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. It’s no wonder we have a 9% unemployment rate – this man doesn’t want to create jobs. He wants to reward the people who got him elected by handing out millions and billions of taxpayer dollars to millionaires and billionaires – in effect, transferring wealth from the middle class to rich Democrat fundraisers. I find it very surprising that labor unions back this man in elections. What sense does that make?

Global warming alarmism is nothing but a religion. Why do we have to have so much religion in politics? I understand if environmentalists want to practice their religion in their own homes and in the churches, but why do we have to give them taxpayer money for their environmentalist devotions? And why to we have to put our economy on hold just so that we are compliant with their religious beliefs? Why did we elect a President for believes in forcing a religious ideology onto the rest of us? Why do we have to have our freedom and prosperity – our right to produce goods and our right to purchase goods – limited by a religious ideology?

Related posts