Things never work out the way environmental activists say they will. Milton Wolf gives us the example of the day with his post "Green Geniuses Learn Hilarious Business Lesson the Half-Million Dollar Hard Way". This would be much funnier if all the capital invested in this scam wasn't taken from taxpaying Californians.
If you want to get angry read this. It seems Canada is sitting on a whole Saudi Arabia of oil that is destined for China. Why? Because US Bureaucrats are sitting on the approval of a pipeline to get that oil to American markets and have been for three years. China, on the other hand, is eager to invest in their economy and are pouring in billions of dollars to lay a pipeline to a Pacific Ocean port facility in British Colombia. From the Pittsburgh Tribune Review:
There is just too much oil around.
This has to be frustrating to the good souls who worry that the world is running out. Or that burning it in our cars is too terribly polluting. Natural gas and coal are also distressingly abundant, but stick with the national schizophrenia on oil for a moment.
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Environmental groups don't want Alberta's oil sands developed, according to Manning.
"They believe getting the oil out of the ground will cause increased greenhouse gas emissions." And naturally the Obama administration snaps to attention. Environmentalists speaking! The save-the-world lobby opposes a Canada-U.S. pipeline, and that's it.
This is maddening from more than merely a supply viewpoint. What comes to mind when you think pipelines? Tons of steel tubing, right? Earthmovers to dig the long, long trench. And hardhat jobs galore. Talk about stimulus.
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The oil won't come here but is fated to be burnt in cars and factories under the same atmosphere halfway around the earthly envelope -- where you can bet the steel, bulldozer and job orders will go, too.
Does this make any sense as energy strategy? Manning sees only a twisted connection: that environmentalists simply have a deep-down hostility to fuels that are cheap, the so-called fossil fuels laid down eons ago by a generous nature.
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It ought to be obvious, says Manning, that fossil fuels intersect directly with national security. For Obama's people not to see that it's better for Canada's oil to ship to U.S. refineries and consumers than to China's is just baffling.
So baffling that he thinks it's time environmental groups should publicly disclose "who gives them money to throw their weight around against our nation's economic interests." Time, in short, to clear the air.
I have referenced "Hayward's First Law of Green Thermodynamics" before. Simply put, "There is no source of energy, no matter how clean, that the left-environmentalists won't oppose if it becomes practical to scale up." An obvious case in point is natural gas production. As recently as 2009 natural gas was thought to be the energy bridge to the future.
Natural gas may be a game changer for climate politics much sooner. In fact, if a serious climate bill passes the Senate in the next several months — and I believe it will — then activism by the natural gas industry may prove decisive.
Unconventional gas makes the 2020 Waxman-Markey target so damn easy and cheap to meet, which is great for low-cost climate action, bad for coal. And it always bears repeating,......natural gas is the critical low-carbon “firming” resource that can enable deep penetration of both windpower and concentrated solar thermal power.
Now that natural gas production on a large scale is readably available, we get nonsense like this:
"This is the worst thing that can happen... It's chemical genocide. These people are ultimately dying due to the radiation contamination." Toshia Hance of the Town of Augusta, Oneida County, NY.
Ever heard of Biomass? It's a technology that turns plants into power without using oil, gas or coal. It has been thought a solid alternative energy source until Florida decided to build one of the countries largest biomass boilers. Now this newer technology is said to produce more carbon dioxide than coal fired plants and increasing the incidence of asthma, heart disease and cancer.
Electric powered cars are one of the latest fads to be pushed by the environmental lobby. This is all well and good, but did you know, that each hybrid vehicle contains about 100 pounds of copper and that the same groups lobbying for increased CAFE standards are also attempting to prohibit the extraction of an estimated 80 billion tons of copper from Bristol Bay, Alaska, where a major mineral discovery was recently made. AsThe Daily Caller noted, "predictably, environmental groups are vehemently opposed to the mine".
Ron Arnold, writing for the Washington Examiner, wants to know what Gordon Moore, the multibillionaire co-founder of computer chip giant Intel has against copper. He has planned $2.7 million against Alaska's Pebble Mine, the largest known ore body of copper on the planet.
As chairman of his private foundation, Moore gave $1.1 million to the Alaska Conservation Foundation for "Pebble mine campaign coordination;" $1 million to the Renewable Resources Coalition for "Pebble mine education and outreach"; and $624,000 to the Nature Conservancy's Alaska office for "Pebble mine science and risk assessment."
It's not just Moore. The war against Pebble is already one of the largest and most expensive Big Green campaigns ever -- Natural Resources Defense Council ($96.9 million revenue) runs a circuslike Stop the Pebble Mine crusade, replete with jeremiads of salmon doom, aging actor Robert Redford demanding that development partners Anglo American and Rio Tinto withdraw from the project, and gloats that they already chased away Mitsubishi.
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It shows, if nothing else, that environmentalism is no longer a movement. Counting its foundation funders, it's an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And it's a strange, alien industry that absolutely opposes any development anywhere.
Hard to believe, but Big Green Inc. is afflicted with a peculiar schizophrenia that shows most clearly in President Obama's clean energy economy campaign. "Clean energy economy" sounds so promising -- wind farms, solar panels, electric cars, biofuels, wonderful products -- all set in a pristine Eden, an untouchable paradise like Bristol Bay.
They want all those wonderful products, but they don't want anybody developing anything to get the stuff necessary to make them. Like mental patients or mystics, from their moral high throne, true believers can't perceive their own contradictions, can't grasp the biblical "more bricks, no straw" analogy.
Read the whole thing, but it may give some understanding as to why people are willing to risk their life to steal copper.
More info on the Pebble Mine Project.
Cross posted at Lonely Conservative
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