Tag Archives: Green Jobs

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Democrat energy policies lead to higher unemployment and higher utility bills

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Here’s an editorial from the sensible Washington Times. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The federal government is ushering in 2011 with new powers that will jack up energy costs for consumers. In the name of fighting unproven climate-change theories, bureaucrats are pushing through tough new business restrictions on emissions from energy plants that light and heat homes across the country. As a result, Americans in the near future may be forced to pay a hidden tax in their electric bills or, worse, find themselves in the dark and cold.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules, which take effect Jan. 2, will impose limits on carbon dioxide. The EPA’s primary targets are coal-plant operators, who will be forced to choose between retrofitting their facilities with expensive emissions-control equipment and cooling towers or shutting them down. Democratic Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV – whose West Virginia coal-country constituents have the most to lose from the tough emissions restrictions – announced Friday that he had failed in his 11th-hour attempt to force a Senate vote to suspend the regulations before they take effect. His measure would have delayed for two years the new emissions requirements for power plants, refineries and manufacturing factories under the Clean Air Act.

A study released Dec. 8 by the Brattle Group, an economic consultancy, found that the new EPA rules could force the retirement of older power plants that produce 50,000 to 67,000 megawatts of electricity, or roughly 20 percent of the nation’s coal-fired power plants. As many as 70 million homes could be subject to blackouts, according to American Solutions, an advocacy group for conventional energy. Equipping remaining plants to comply with the mandates would cost $100 billion to $180 billion, the Brattle report warned. Those expenses would be passed along to consumers in the form of higher electric bills.

But it’s no problem, because we can just buy more oil from nations that sponsor terrorism and ship our jobs overseas. The Democrat party is the pro-terrorism and pro-outsourcing party. They want you to pay more for oil and gas, and they want to enrich nations that are hostile to American interests abroad. The moratorium on drilling, the subsidizing of “green jobs” programs, the blocking of new refinery construction, the blocking of new nuclear power plants, and so on, all add to higher gas prices and higher energy prices. This means less money in to bank accounts of working families for the things that working families need.

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Should we embrace “green jobs” to stop global warming?

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First watch this video: (H/T The American Spectator)

And why does the phrase “global warming” keep changing?

Consider this post from the American Spectator. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

We know the memo circulating around the environoiac Leftosphere was to not call “global warming” “global warming” any more, but to instead use the greater encompassing “climate change.” Obama administration science adviser John Holdren updated the blueprint a couple of months ago:

At the Environmental Protection Agency’s 40th celebration of the Clean Air Act, Holdren said, “I think one of the failures of the scientific community was in embracing the term ‘global warming’. Global warming is in fact a dangerous misnomer.” And in a speech last week in Norway, echoing remarks he made at a 2007 speech at Harvard University, Holdren said the term “global climate disruption” should be used instead of “global warming.”

Now USA Today reports that “climate” doesn’t work either:

“Everybody is rethinking their priorities,” says Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group. He says it was a “mistake” for environmentalists to focus single-mindedly on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, he says, they need to pitch their concerns as “kitchen table” issues that directly affect people. For example, he cites the presence of the estrogen-like chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, in food packaging. “That’s personal to them. Climate is not,” he says.

“Climate … seems to have become a dirty word,” says Melinda Pierce, lead lobbyist for the Sierra Club. She says environmentalists need to seek smaller, specific victories. “If we talk electric cars,” she says, “people find that appealing.”

There is nothing that is able to be observed – we are just told by the state-paid experts that the state must increase so they can be paid more and have more power over the private sector. There is no reason given other than their will to have more money and power.

Why should we lose all of our jobs for the Secularist Delusion?

News

How Obama’s environmentalism caused 1000 jobs to be outsourced

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Story from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

Up to 1,000 jobs at Bucyrus International Inc. and its suppliers could be in jeopardy as the result of a decision by the U.S. Export-Import Bank, funded by Congress, to deny several hundred million dollars in loan guarantees to a coal-fired power plant and mine in India.

About 300 of those jobs are at the Bucyrus plant in South Milwaukee, where the company has 1,410 employees and its headquarters. The remaining jobs are spread across 13 states, including Illinois, Minnesota and Indiana.

On Thursday, the Export-Import Bank denied financing for Reliance Power Ltd., an Indian power plant company, effectively wiping out about $600 million in coal mining equipment sales for Bucyrus, chief executive Tim Sullivan said.

The fossil fuel project was the first to come before the government-run bank since it adopted a climate-change policy to settle a lawsuit and to meet Obama administration directives.

“President Obama has made clear his administration’s commitment to transition away from high-carbon investments and toward a cleaner-energy future,” Export-Import Bank Chairman Fred Hochberg said in a statement. “After careful deliberation, the Export-Import Bank board voted not to proceed with this project because of the projected adverse environmental impact.”

Ed Morrissey writes:

This decision won’t stop one carbon molecule from hitting the air.  In fact, it will likely make carbon emissions worse.  India will look for other vendors to supply the equipment, probably from neighboring Russia or China, as they will continue to build and operate the plant.  Both nations compete in the same marketplace as Bucyrus, but they don’t work as cleanly as the American company does, which means the end result will be lower efficiency and more pollution.

Democrats like Obama keep talking about eeeeeevil corporations that export jobs overseas to save costs rather than keep them in the US.  Well, Obama and his Congress just sent 1,000 jobs overseas — jobs Americans lost, and jobs that either Russian or Chinese workers will get instead. And instead of bankrupting this new coal plant, they just made it dirtier.  Good job!

When you attack corporations, you lose jobs. It’s that simple. Families are going to suffer for Obama’s climate change delusions. Let’s hope that the voters of Wisconsin have learned their economics lesson.