Thursday, April 21, 2016

Green Energy Poverty Week

by JASmius



Lying, fraudulent propaganda is an outsized portion of the leftwingnut playbook,  From their self-congratulatory reference to themselves ("progressives"), euphemizing of favored groups and issues ("gays," "diversity," "green energy"), and demonizing of hated groups and issues ("reactionaries," "haters," and the entire murderers' row of "-phobes"), it's all about propaganda and the ideological war - or what we business types know as "marketing".  Making your side look good and the other side look bad is the name of the game.

Which is why the EEEEEVIL fossil fuels industry may really be onto something with the label in the headline above, because it represents what can be the most powerful propaganda of all - the truth:

This year, on April 22nd, in a high-level celebration at the United Nations headquarters in New York, the Paris Climate Agreement will officially be signed. Thirty days after its signing by at least fifty-five countries that represent 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the agreement will take effect — committing countries to establishing individual targets for emission reductions with the expectation that they will be reviewed and updated every five years.

While news reports of Earth Day 2016 will likely depict dancing in the streets, those who can look past the headlines will see a dire picture — one in which more than 10% of a household’s income is spent on energy costs; one of “green energy poverty.” 
To meet the non-binding commitments Barack Obama made last December in Paris, he is counting on, among many domestic regulations, the Clean Power Plan (CPP).

Last week, on the Senate floor, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, delivered remarks in advance of Earth Day on the unattainability of the U.S. climate commitments. He said: “The Clean Power Plan is the centerpiece of the president’s promise to the international community that the U.S. will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 26% to 28%.” It would “cause double-digit electricity price increases in forty States” and “would prevent struggling communities from accessing reliable and affordable fuel sources, which could eventually lead to poor families choosing between putting healthy food on the table or turning their heater on in the winter.”

The Heritage Foundation has just released a report on the devastating economic costs of the Paris Climate Agreement, which it calls “a push for un-development for the industrialized world and a major obstacle for growth for the developing world.” Because global warming regulations “stifle the use of the most efficient and inexpensive forms of electricity, businesses as well as households will incur higher electricity costs.” The report concludes: “restricting energy production to meet targets like those of the Paris agreement will significantly harm the U.S. economy. Bureaucratically administered mandates, taxes, and special interest subsidies will drive family incomes down by thousands of dollars per year, drive up energy costs, and eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs. All of these costs would be incurred to achieve only trivial and theoretical impacts on global warming.” [emphases added]

A naked indication that "fighting [mythical] anthropogenic global warming" isn't about mythical global warming at all, but about de-modernization, de-industrialization, and economic de-pression.  It's about punishing and expanding the ranks of the poor, reviving primitivism and filth and pestilence and disease and starvation and misery.  For everybody but the Obamunist Left (i.e. the "ruling party elite"), of course.

It is, naturally without saying so, what took place in Russia almost a century ago.



For further proof of the PCA's true orthodox communist objectives, check out the consistent results of its smaller scale applications, and the intractable proportionality of the levels of induced energy costs and greenhouse emissions:

Germany is one of the best examples of green energy poverty as the country has some of the most aggressive greenhouse gas reduction programs that offer generous subsidies for any company producing green energy. Based on an extensive study done by green energy believers in 2014, I addressed the program’s overall result: raised costs and raised emissions. I stated: “After reading the entire eighty-page white paper, I was struck with three distinct observations. The German experiment has raised energy costs to households and business, the subsidies are unsustainable, and, as a result, without intervention, the energy supply is unstable.” At that time, I concluded: “The high prices disproportionately hurt the poor, giving birth to the new phrase: ‘energy poverty.’”

More recently, others have come to the same conclusion (read here and here). On April 13, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) opined: “Germany’s sixteen-year-old Energiewende, or energy transformation, already has wrecked the country’s energy market in its quest to wean the economy off fossil fuels and nuclear power. Traditional power plants, including those that burn cleaner gas, have been closing left and right while soaring electricity prices push industries overseas and bankrupt households. Job losses run to the tens of thousands.” Meanwhile, emissions over the past seven years have increased. Last month, Mike Shellenberger, President, Environmental Progress and Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” tweeted: “people really want to believe good things about Germany’s energy shift, but ... its emissions rose.” WSJ concludes: “The market distortions caused by overreliance on expensive but undependable power already have pushed German utilities to rely more on cheap and dirty coal-fired power plants to make up the shortfall when renewable sources can’t meet demand.” [emphases added]

We on this site have long and often chronicled how, historically, the spike in "greenhouse gas emissions" over the past two centuries, corresponding with the rise of the Industrial Revolution and "world capitalism" has similarly spiked freedom, liberty, prosperity, life expectancy, and quality of life around the globe.  We have also expounded at length about how carbon dioxide is not a "pollutant" (just ask the nearest tree), but a natural part of the environment without which the bottom part of the food chain - plants - couldn't survive, and which the oceans do an efficient job of absorbing.  And we have educated our readers about how even the higher CO2 emissions of the past two hundred years are minuscule compared to a single volcanic eruption, Earth's climate is far more stable and resilient than the Chicken Little alarmists ever give it credit, and the sun has vastly more influence over "climate change" than modern human civilization ever could, no matter what it opportunistically and arrogantly wants to believe.

But even if all the faux hysterical global warming shrieking was all true and justified, a "climate catastrophe" would be a fait accompli anyway, because look at what (openly) communist countries are doing in terms of energy policy: "[Red] China is building 350 coal-fired power plants, and has plans for another eight hundred.”  The ChiComms are the biggest "polluters" on the planet, beyond any conceivable doubt.



They don't give a frack about the "environment".  No communist regime, or "developing country," does.  Because the latter are too busy trying to "develop" and attain the (former) prosperity that Western communists are zealously trying to throw away, using phony "environmentalism" as the pretext.

One place where Marita Noon is off is in her ray of hope punchline that the PCA isn't legally binding on its signators.  That may be true, and O won't be able to hold any other country to it, but that isn't the reason he's signing it.  His only concern is with finishing the "fundamental transformation" of the United Soviet Socialist States of Obemerikastan, and you can bet your bonny buttcheeks that he will legally enforce it here, law, Constitution, Congress, and courts be damned.  Because Barack Obama's job will not be complete until ever last non-Democrat has been bludgeoned into impoverished dependence upon him.

It's what "Great Energy Poverty Week" is all about.

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