The green energy bamboozle
Image via WikipediaPresident Obama hasn't abandoned his jobs-killing global-warming agenda, just wrapped it in the rhetoric of "clean energy." And that may be enough to get Republicans to sign on.There is more.
That "clean energy" is code for "anti-warming" is obvious, given that even Environmental Protection Agency numbers show that virtually all emissions have dropped dramatically in recent decades -- except for greenhouse gases.
To cut those, Obama's budget aims to hike Department of Energy spending by 12 percent from 2010 levels. He proposes $8 billion more for various clean-energy programs -- on top of the $30 billion "invested" via the 2009 stimulus. Even that's only the tip of the iceberg.
To pay for it all, Obama would stick it to Big Oil. He wants to eliminate $43 billion in oil-tax breaks over 10 years. That would be fine if he were aiming for a "level" energy market, with the government playing no favorites; in fact, he's just looking to divert the subsidies to his favorites.
Despite his talk of promoting nuclear power, the president's budget cuts support for it by 0.6 percent from 2010 levels. The big winners are -- surprise! -- solar (88 percent rise), biomass and biorefinery (57 percent), geothermal (136 percent) and wind (61 percent).
Obama is also doubling the budget of the Advanced Research Projects Agency to encourage R&D on renewables. That's because progressives are suddenly convinced (thanks to "Where Good Technologies Come From," a paper by the Breakthrough Institute) that the basic research for nearly every major technological invention -- blockbuster pharmaceuticals, high-yield crops, the Internet -- has been the result of government funding.
Pumping money into pie-in-the sky energy projects has been a perennial presidential project since Jimmy Carter. But Obama has a new wrinkle: The White House believes that past pushes for alternative fuels failed (despite subsidies) because they did nothing to ensure a market for the new products. So Obama has decreed that he wants 80 percent of America's energy to come from clean sources by 2035.
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This is clear evidence that Obama and the Democrats who support this mess are not very smart. What was the government program that replaced whale oil with oil pumped from the ground? What was the government program that replaced wood burning energy with coal? In fact market forces saw a more efficient way to create energy and people moved to make it happen on their own.
The Democrats carbon phobia matched with their belief that there is a magic energy source out there to replace carbon based fuels pushes their agenda into absurdities. The alternative energy they are "investing" in are not as efficient as existing energy and that is the reason the market for them is so limited, It is not a conspiracy, market forces require that existing energy be replaced with more efficient energy. The Democrats hope to deal with that through market manipulation rather than through breakthroughs in efficiency.
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