Tag Archives: Socialism

Commentary

At last some honesty on global warming alarmism

1 Comment

You may have read something about the NYT article a while back that discussed the brilliant scientist Freeman Dyson and his opposition to global warming.

Excerpt from the NYT article:

Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus.

…IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism.

Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”

Well, the NYT got a fascinating letter to the editor in response to their profile of Dyson. The letter came from a graduate student at Harvard named Monika Kopacz.

The letter is excerpted in First Things (H/T The Weekly Standard):

It is no secret that a lot of climate-change research is subject to opinion, that climate models sometimes disagree even on the signs of the future changes (e.g. drier vs. wetter future climate). The problem is, only sensational exaggeration makes the kind of story that will get politicians’ — and readers’ — attention. So, yes, climate scientists might exaggerate, but in today’s world, this is the only way to assure any political action and thus more federal financing to reduce the scientific uncertainty.

Remember, in 1975, the leftist magazine Newsweek propped up the global cooling as the crisis-du-jour.

Excerpt from an article from the Business and Media Institute:

It took 31 years, but Newsweek magazine admitted it was incorrect about climate change. In a nearly 1,000-word correction, Senior Editor Jerry Adler finally agreed that a 1975 piece on global cooling “was so spectacularly wrong about the near-term future.”

Even then, Adler wasn’t quite willing to blame Newsweek for the incredible failure. “In fact, the story wasn’t ‘wrong’ in the journalistic sense of ‘inaccurate,’” he claimed. “Some scientists indeed thought the Earth might be cooling in the 1970s, and some laymen – even one as sophisticated and well-educated as Isaac Asimov – saw potentially dire implications for climate and food production,” Adler added.

Journalists, lacking marketable skills, support socialism. They believe that their word-smithing skills are more worthy than the practical skills of engineers and entrepreneurs. Socialism is their way of regaining the accolades they lost once they left the safe confines of the public school classroom.

Any myth that will allow the government to seize control of the free-market must be supported, regardless of the evidence. And the same thing applies to Darwinism. Only in this case, the target is not the free market, but the church. And the goal is not redistribution of wealth, but autonomy from moral judgments and moral constraints.

For more on scientific opposition politics masquerading as science, see here.

News

Cap and trade will raise electricity prices and increase unemployment

Leave a comment
Representative Michele Bachmann
Representative Michele Bachmann

Michele Bachmann has a post on her blog about a new study by a Spanish economist regarding the cost of green job initiatives.

Excerpt:

A study directed by Dr. Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at Juan Carlos University in Madrid, concluded that every “green job” created in Spain resulted in 2.2 other jobs being destroyed.

The study emphasized that only 10% of the “green jobs” created could be considered permanent – such as maintenance of renewable power systems. The remaining jobs consisted of temporary jobs in construction, fabrication and installation jobs; along with administrative positions, marketing, and engineering projects.

Spain has been providing subsidies to create green jobs, and this is viewed by some as a model for future US energy policy.

Bachmann continues:

“If U.S. subsidies to renewable producers achieve the same result — and President Obama has held Spain up as a model for how to subsidize renewables — the U.S. could lose 6.6 million to 11 million jobs while it creates three million largely temporary ‘green jobs.'”

Furthermore, Dr. Calzada stated that “the loss of jobs could be greater if you account for the amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to higher energy prices.”

Thomas J. Pyle of the Institute for Energy Research adds:

“As this study makes clear, Spain has spent billions in taxpayer resources to subsidize renewable energy programs in an effort to jumpstart its ailing economy – and what they’ve gotten in return are fewer jobs, skyrocketing debt and some of the highest and most regressive energy prices in the developed world. Now, as U.S. policy-makers prepare to embark Americans upon a similar course, this report offers our first realistic glimpse into what we should expect in return for that unprecedented sacrifice of public resources and personal autonomy.”

The IER has a list of the key findings from the study in that post.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air adds:

Why did the jobs disappear?  In part because of the higher capital confiscation of the government, and in part because the green policies pushed industry out of Spain. Actually, the study didn’t count jobs lost through “industrial relocation”, which in this case amounts to capital flight.  The largest stainless-steel producer in Spain directly linked its decision to move operations to South America to the higher energy costs imposed by the government.

In the US, we could see a massive flight, and not just in manufacturing.  High-tech industries that rely on cheap energy could be forced to find less expensive environments. Bloomberg’s economist notes that Microsoft and Google have already relocated their servers once to get cheaper energy.  The Internet is flexible enough to allow employers to go almost anywhere in the world to host their servers, and in this economy, there will be plenty of competition for them.

In a related post, Gateway Pundit notes that the cap and trade policies of the Democrats will also cause consumer electricity prices to soar.

Excerpt:

Democrats know that their cap and trade energy policies will devastate the economy.

…Cap and trade policies would likely cost American families $700 to $1,400 dollars per family per year according to the video above. The Department of Energy estimated GDP losses would be between $444 billion and $1.308 trillion over the 21-year period. Cap and trade also could cost the US 4 million jobs. In Missouri and the Midwest where energy is “cheap” it would cause electricity rates to double.

And, it would likely do nothing to help with the make-believe global warming junk science.

And GP also links to this video showing what we can expect from the Democrats on this issue:

Further study

I posted a list a while back of the expected increases in electricity prices, broken down by state, here. More about the impact on consumers from John Boehner is here.

More about the rise in unemployment we can expect from green jobs initiatives is here. Info about Obama’s tax hikes on energy producers is here. Information about possible carbon tariffs is here.

Information about the recent Cato statement of 700 scientists who dissent from man-made global warming is here.

Commentary

Millions Will Lose Health Care from their Employer Under the Democrats’ Plan

Leave a comment
House Republican Leader John Boehner
House Republican Leader John Boehner

I spotted this scary post over at John Boehner’s blog. The post, written by Kevin Lewis, links to this AP article that highlights a new study from the Lewin Group. I blogged before about the Democrats’ plan to equalize life outcomes and redistribute wealth by nationalizing health care. Now we get more details of how they’ll do it.

Here is a summary of the Democrats’ plan:

President Barack Obama and many Democrats want to create a government insurance plan to compete with private plans that now cover about 170 million Americans. The issue is major sticking point for Republicans and the insurance industry.

And the predicted results of that plan:

The Lewin study found that if such a plan were open to all employers and individuals, and if it paid doctors and hospitals the same as Medicare, the government plan would quickly grow to 131 million members, while enrollment in private insurance plans would plummet.

“The private insurance industry might just fizzle out altogether,” said John Sheils, a Lewin vice president and leading author of the study.

By paying Medicare rates the government plan would be able to set premiums well below what private plans charge. Monthly premiums for family coverage would be $761 in the government plan, compared with an average of $970 in private plans, the study estimated. Employers and individuals would flock to the public plan to cut costs.

Lewis cites two of the study‘s key findings:

“If as the President proposed, eligibility is limited to only small employers, individuals and the self-employed … The number of people with private coverage would fall by 32.0 million people.”

“If the public plan is opened to all employers as proposed by former Senators Clinton and Edwards, at Medicare payment levels … The number of people with private health insurance would decline by 119.1 million people. This would be a two-thirds reduction in the number of people with private coverage (currently 170 million people).”

More here at the Heritage Foundation.

Further study

Here are some previous links that are relevant: