Published in Environment

• Obama endorsed by major environmental groups
• Obama may not attend Rio Earth Summit, administration official says

Awarded by Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the prize would spur industry to offer the costly bulbs, known as LEDs, at prices "affordable for American families." There was also a "Buy America" component. Portions of the bulb would have to be made in the United States.

Now the winning bulb is on the market.

The price is $50.

I previously mocked the Obama administration's absurd argument that Obamacare would become affordable if the human race would simply refrain from procreating. Not to be left out of an absurdity, the environmental movement has now jumped on the bandwagon - even gone one further - by claiming that the world can be saved if people would just stop breeding.

During a discussion series on Monday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., speaker and activist Kavita Ramdas argued that contraceptives should be part of a strategy to save the planet, calling lower birth rates a "common sense" part of a climate-change reduction strategy.

Once again, human beings are the disease to be medically prevented or terminated in order to effectuate liberal policies. Liberalism seems to contain an inherent antipathy toward human beings. Of course, this environmental strategy is simply a repetition of the international "population control" movement which followed in the wake of the discredited "population bomb" theory (see Steven Hayward's Population Bomb Epic Fail).

Conservative and religious (especially Catholic) thinkers have consistently opposed the liberal urge to solve every problem by eliminating (literally) the human element. And history has consistently and unanimously proved the conservative (shall we call it, pro-life) position be correct and the liberals' (shall we say, culture of death) posture to be stunningly wrong. But liberalism just doesn't seem to be able to shed its addiction to human genocide. 

Allow me to follow up on my post on the Volt and its $250,000 / car taxpayer-funded subsidies by citing John Hinderaker's Power line post on ExxonMobile's good citizenship. He notes:

The Obama administration has devoted more energy to demonizing the oil and gas industry than just about anything else over the last three years. It has done this partly to deflect blame for its own lousy performance on the economy in general and energy costs in particular, and partly to justify transferring wealth from taxpayers to its cronies and supporters in the "green" energy sector.

But the bit I'd like to highlight follows:

Currently, the administration is campaigning to eliminate oil and gas "subsidies." The first question is what this means; when liberals talk about "subsidies" in this context, they usually mean the same routine tax deductions that are available to businesses generally. To the extent that there may be any actual subsidies, they are extremely minor. So, by all means, let's do away with them, along with subsidies for all other types of energy. Let's allow energy technologies to compete in the marketplace on their own merits. What would the effect of eliminating all energy subsidies be? Not, I am afraid, what the Obama administration has in mind. This is a slide from my Cronyism 101 presentation:

The administration demonizes disfavored American citizens, companies and industries as a tactic to increase its own political power, and slide money to its cronies and supporters. In the long term, this may be the most destructive legacy of the Obama administration.

The Chevy Volt is apparently going the way of the Dodo. GM has temporarily suspended production of the electric car. No surprises there - electric cars are about as efficient as windmills and the rest of the renewable-energy scam. But if you've not been paying attention to the electric car debacle, you may be surprised to learn that, in the wake of the Volt's utter failure, Ford and Toyota are preparing to reveal their own electric cars.

What explains this madness? Liberal radicalism? Environmental extremism? Democratic sycophancy?

Try sensible profit motive. If that seems ludicrous, consider:

Each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it - a total of $3 billion altogether, according to an analysis by James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

As Ed Morrisey concludes:

Now, why would two auto manufacturers jump into a market with almost no demand and a high failure rate?  Could it be because they're looking for the same kind of subsidies that gives them somewhere around $250,000 per vehicle before the car is ever sold?

The Obama administration has no regard whatsoever for taxpayer hardships or economic sustainability. He is motivated by the purely ideological goals of environmentalism and social democracy - goals which stand in direct opposition to economic recovery and individual rights. Obama is wantonly wasting money on liberal pet-projects in the midst of a debt crisis. He has neither understanding nor concern for the plight of struggling American (would-be) workers and has obviously prioritized his radical green agenda above American prosperity. One hopes that voters will not reward him for this inverted ethic.   

Of course it should be built, but I disagree with Republicans who think the politics of this are bad for the President--e.g., our friends at Powerline. Obama's premise is that he has either lost the economy/jobs issue, or it can be at least neutralized by improving unemployment numbers. In any case, he absolutely must have the enviros with him. Once again Obama shows he is much more clever at politics than his decent but often impulsive opponents.

Update: Joel Kotkin's two economies (regulatory NIMBY and dirty manufacturing) analysis supports my point.

The EPA faced tough questioning at SCOTUS.  Justice Alito to counsel for the government/EPA:  "If you related the facts of this case . . . to an ordinary homeowner, don't you think most ordinary homeowners would say this kind of thing can't happen in the United States?"  The case involved an alleged wetlands protection violation and whether the owners had a right to a judicial hearing.  Chief Justice Roberts to counsel for the government:  "What would you do, Mr. Stewart, if you received this compliance order? You don't think your property has wetlands on it and you get this compliance order from the EPA. What would you do?"  Counsel responded meekly about obeying the law. See pp. 36-37 of the transcript of the oral argument. See pp. 42-44 for the government's reasoning for not granting hearings to those being prosecuted by the EPA. This is not mere Tocquevillean soft despotism! Even the liberal justices expressed sympathy for the landowners.

The Pacific Legal Foundation argued for the plaintiff landowners, the Sacketts. It will put up the audio later in the week. Someone who attended the oral argument told me that Mrs.Sackett had to restrain her husband from doing fist pumps when they heard the hostile questioning from the justices. 

UPDATE:  I forgot to mention that the President paid a surprise visit to the EPA yesterday, bucking up the staff and cheering them on. "When we clean up our nation's waterways, we generate more tourists for our local communities."  In the Sacketts' backyard? Of course Obama allowed, in one of his typical throwaway lines, "we have an obligation every single day to think about how can we do our business a little bit better."

Last night, the House came together in a rare moment of bi-partisanship and patriotic unity by firmly and unequivocally telling the European Union what they can do with the new environmental laws they've decided to pass on the United States. Apparently, the EU forgot that they don't actually have the authority to regulate non-EU countries which have decided to retain their full sovereignty.

The EU's Emissions Trading System (ETS) has said that, starting next year, it will charge U.S. aircraft for carbon emissions whenever they land or take off in Europe.

The House responded decisively.

The lower chamber approved H.R. 2594 by unanimous consent after a brief debate in which most Republicans and Democrats said they reject the ETS as an extra-territorial plan to fine American aircraft that was imposed without any input from the U.S.

Of course, a few Democrats [surprise: Massachusetts and California Democrats] couldn't help but oppose U.S. sovereignty and economic interests in support of hysterical environmentalism and ever-expanding internationalism. But that's to be expected from the far left. The EU "tax grab" is estimated to cost 78,500 American jobs if implemented - a small price for the accomplishment of foisting EU-style climate-change legislation on the U.S. 

Then again, many in the bi-partisan majority were likely scrambling to save 78,000 jobs rather than standing on principle in their vote. Multi-national regulations aren't a simple matter to unravel - they depend on government-ratified treaties and indecipherable bilateral agreements. But the EU seems to have neglected that multi-national regulations require multiple nations. Eurocrats have become a bit drunk on their heady draught of super-national supremacy in the EU. One hopes the U.S. continues to have the fortitude to check their untoward advanced.

If this is a case of European over-reach, as I expect, the U.S. should fight fire with fire. If the Europeans turn out to be within their authority, leadership will be required to revisit the license granted to foreign nations in our treaty agreements.

Prague is a beautiful city in which I spend a bit of time. Particularly since the 14th century reign of Charles IV, Prague claims inclusion among the most beautiful cities in the world. However, the distorted communist regime which seized control in the 20th century polluted the city with "communist architecture." Czechs refer to the identical rows of square, multi-story communist-era apartment buildings as "rabbit cages."

Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros take up the theme of architectural design in their Guernica / On the Commons article, "The Architect Has No Clothes." The authors explain "architectural myopia" as the condition which produces "contemporary eyesores."

Laboratory results show conclusively that architects literally see the world differently from non-architects. Not only do architects notice and look for different aspects of the environment than other people; their brains seem to synthesize an understanding of the world that has notable differences from natural reality. Instead of a contextual world of harmonious geometric relationships and connectedness, architects tend to see a world of objects set apart from their contexts, with distinctive, attention-getting qualities.

There are many such confirming studies. For example, Gifford et al. (2002) surveyed other research and noted that "architects did not merely disagree with laypersons about the aesthetic qualities of buildings, they were unable to predict how laypersons would assess buildings, even when they were explicitly asked to do so."

Unsurprisingly, the authors heavily blame this myopia on the lengthy education of architects.

Up to about 1900, architects were understood to be practicing an adaptive craft, in which a building was an inseparable part of a dynamic streetscape and a neighborhood.

With the coming of the industrial revolution, and its emphasis on interchangeable parts, the traditional conception of architecture that was adaptive to context began to change. A building became an interchangeable industrial design product, conveying an image, and it mattered a great deal how attention-getting that image was.

It is telling that "the early modernists saw their work as a revolution." A "Novelty Spectacle" approach is now the "dominant model for architecture." And as with all crafts founded upon a skewered, modernist view of human nature, modern architecture fails to satisfy human needs on mental, emotional, spiritual and biological levels.

I previously noted, in an article titled "Beauty and the Bibles of Stone," an address by Pope Benedict XVI on the purpose and effect of beauty in religious architecture - specifically, the medieval cathedrals. Comparing these architectural masterpieces and they effect they have on the human soul, one cannot but grieve for the impoverishment of the modern craft.

Robert Bryce in the Wall Street Journal:

Over the past decade, carbon-dioxide emissions in the U.S. fell by 1.7%. And according to the International Energy Agency, the U.S. is now cutting carbon emissions faster than Europe, even though the European Union has instituted an elaborate carbon-trading/pricing scheme. Why? The U.S. is producing vast quantities of cheap natural gas from shale, which is displacing higher-carbon coal.

Meanwhile, China's emissions jumped by 123% over the past decade and now exceed those of the U.S. by more than two billion tons per year. Africa's carbon-dioxide emissions jumped by 30%, Asia's by 44%, and the Middle East's by a whopping 57%. Put another way, over the past decade, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions--about 6.1 billion tons per year--could have gone to zero and yet global emissions still would have gone up.

A few years ago, I heard a Cal Tech climate science guru give a talk.  He arranged it so that no questions were allowed, which was disappointing.  He said that according to the prevailing science, which he said he supports completely, we have a handful of years to change course, or the earth will be alterted forever.  His proposed solutions were to cut emissions radically.

Had questions been allowed, I would have said something like, I study politics, not science. As a student of politics, I can almost guarantee that the kinds of hair shirt cuts he demands will never happen, almost certainly not in any major country, and certainly not in all of them.  If that's the case, the challenge for science is, to paraphrase Publius, how to manage the effects of human actions, rather than impose the kind of tyranny that it would take to tackle the causes.  Still a relevant observation, it seems to me. 

(I would also add, that we need also to be sure we know what we're doing.  Sciences are at their most speculative in their infancy.  Such is the study of the enviornment.  That being the case, my guess is that scientists are guessing, more than they like to admit, about the consequences of human actions on the environment across the globe.

P.S. Why do Progressives think it is reasonable to think we can control mankind's global carbon footprint, but also think that it is impossible for most individuals to control their sex drives?

It would be a full time job monitoring all of the partisan bias and factual-errors peddled by the New York Times. Consider yesterday's story, "Climate-change science makes for hot politics," in which the Times plays scientist and concludes:

Human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels, is pumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and warming the planet.

As I write this, CNN's international broadcast is running a pre-Durbin UN climate change conference, shame-on-America special about global attempts to reduce carbon in order to fight climate change - and the science of man-made global warming, don't you know, is settled.

The Times can be excused for its ignorance of the immense damage done to global warming alarmists by both skeptics and their own revealed dishonesty and politicalization, since the Times rarely bothers to cover news harmful to one of their golden-calf platforms. The same is true for CNN and the whole lot of the derisively-labeled MSM.

At least, the Times reminds readers that Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman and the on-again (since he lost the presidential election) media doll John McCain have toed the liberal line and accepted the media narrative on global warming. The Times delights in reporting that Huntsman actually ridicules conservatives on the issue of global warming, having recently branded the GOP as "the anti-science party" and "a bunch of cranks," as well as tweeting, "I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." John Hinderaker at Power Line rights ponders why in the world this guy is running for president as a Republican.

Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann continue to strongly pronounce the science of global warming as bunk. While the Times' story is ostensibly about the GOP's political division on the issue, it doesn't even actually bother to quote Perry - but it does provides a link on the side of the webpage to "Rick Perry's made-up 'facts' about climate change." So the story continues the Times' proud tradition of fair and balanced news coverage. 

This is just one of many issues which will separate Perry and Bachman from Romney in conservative circles. While climate change will not emerge as a hot topic in this election, it is a useful litmus test for conservative credentials and isn't an issue upon which conservatives should retreat.

Remember the Spotted Owl? Apparently, not only are our efforts to save it failing miserably, . . .  (subscriber link only):

The truth is that no one fully understands why the spotted owl continues to decline. The rise of the barred owl poses an unexpected, but not surprising, complication. If the natural world would just remain static, species preservation and ecological management would be far simpler. But Mother Nature relishes competition, and the barred owl is a fierce competitor. Are we really prepared to send armed federal agents into Northwest forests in search of barred owls?

But also, those failed effofts also cost many many jobs?

In the 1980s, before the owl was listed as threatened, nearly 200 sawmills dotted the state of Oregon, churning out eight billion board feet of federal timber a year. Today fewer than 80 mills process only 600 million board feet of federal timber. In Douglas County, for example, several mills dependent on federal timber have closed. Real unemployment in many Oregon counties exceeds 20%, double the national average.

Your tax dollars hard at work.

More evidence that a regulatory holiday would be a good way to get the economy moving.

By Rich Fisher, via The Rational Optimist:

One German organic farm has killed twice as many people as the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Gulf Oil spill combined.

I've been a long-time fan of the conservative-libertarian site, Intellectual Conservative, and the good folks over there have invited me to come onboard as a columnist. So, when I wax too long for Peter's patience here on NLT, I'll occasionally redirect an article to IC.

My latest article with IC attempts to "decipher the incoherency of renewable energy." The intro:

Windmills are not the future of the global economy. They were dandy for grain-grinding in the 19th century (and much appreciated for their contribution to bread-baking and beer-brewing), but they've taken their place alongside wooden teeth and horse-drawn carriages. And yet windmills are the latest craze in Congress - the leading-lady in a full ensemble touring Washington under the title, "Renewable Energy." The troupe premiered on the D.C. circuit in the 1960's, with Al Gore soon emerging as the leading-man, and their quixotic environmentalist spectacle recently received an all-expense-paid encore from the Democrats lame-duck Congress.

I hope you'll RTWT.

As if there wasn't enough division in the world, the universe has now been exposed as lending to the problem. According to NASA: Dark Energy Is Driving Universe Apart.

A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

It's a bad day for gravity, which is now repulsive rather than attractive at great distances, and a good day for dark energy, which comprises 96% of the universe along with dark matter (reserving a mere 4% for normal matter - including everything made of atoms).

Worse yet, this inequality on the part of the universe's dark components is only getting worse. Environmentalists should take heed:

Observations by astronomers over the last 15 years have produced one of the most startling discoveries in physical science; the expansion of the universe, triggered by the big bang, is speeding up.

That is, there will be more dark bits of the universe and even less atomic bits. What's global warming compared to galactic expansion? We need to immediately take drastic action to stop the universe from growing and perpetuating inequality. It's the poorest galaxies which will be most negatively affected, after all.

Gregg Easterbrook, author of one of the better books on the environment over the last 20 years (1995's A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism) coined what he called "Easterbrook's law of doomsaying"--"Predict dreadful events whose arrival impends no sooner than 5 years hence, no later than 10. That time window is near enough to cause worry, far enough off that when it actually rolls around everyone will have forgotten what you predicted." 

But in the age of Google, it is easier to go back and check on these serial blunders.  So as Britain was paralyzed with huge snowstorm a few months ago a number of folks went back and dredged up the climate campaign's predictions that winter snowfalls in Britain would soon (as in, by now) be a thing of historical memory.

Yesterday, Gavin Atkins of Asian Correspondent.com notes that just a few years ago the UN Environment Programme predicted there would be 50 million climate refugees by the year 2010.    And so Atkins sensibly asks, um. . . where are they?  He noted we have census figures for the areas identified as most vulnerable, such as the Tuvalu Islands, and finds in every case that population is still growing.

(Hat tip: Benny Peiser.)

Rich Lowry on the controversy over the incandescent bulb:

If the new bulbs are so wondrous, customers can be trusted to adopt them on their own. Are we a nation of dolts too incompetent to balance the complex factors of price of bulb, energy efficiency and quality of light on our own?

Cass Sunstein's After the Rights Revolution:  Reconceiving the Regulatory State is one of the most horrifying books I've ever read.  Now Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OMB), Sunstein has a hand in Obama's expansion and affirmation of the Administrative or Regulatory State.  He gives off the appearance of even-handedness but clearly stacks the deck in favor of willful bureaucracy and against "private rights" (that is, natural rights), for FDR and the Second Bill of Rights against the Founders' Constitution.  He advises how the bureaucracy can collude with the courts to block off protests of pesky congressmen.  Laws after all are not that specific, so the bureaucracy needs to be able to reinterpret such laws to keep up legislative intent with the times.The 1990 book is one of the greatest assaults on the rule of law in our time.

For some examples of such bureaucratic abuses, including abolition of legal rights by bureaucratic fiat, note Columbia law prof Philip Hamburger's essays on Obamacare waivers. His most recent essay is here.

See also Eric Claeys' congressional testimony (subtly pointed at Sunstein) on how regulators might be reined in, in Steve Hayward's post below.

And finally this, also from Steve, on the crony politics of the Administrative State.

The stiff upper lip (or gaman) that Tiger Mothers produce:  Little public wailing in Japan about the earthquake and tsunami--that's saved for private times.  H/t Hugh Hewitt.

The UN climate change summit begins today in Cancun (Americans for Progress has a humorous video of the opening festivities).

Global cooling / warming / climate change has always been a fraud in the sense that its most fervent advocates corrupted data, published lies and censored critics in an attempt to control global economics under the guise of environmental protection. In the past, they had the decency to hide their real motives, but either a sense of futility or shamelessness has convinced some to speak more candidly.

Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair the Cancun summit, recently admitted:

The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.

... we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.

Luckily, the U.S. is entirely ignoring Cancun and attendees have little hope of leaving with anything more than a suntan. As the Kyoto treaty nears its 2012 expiration, may this also spell the slow death of the climate change movement.

The NY Times' "world" section leads with the UN's most recent promise that the world is about to end. Greenpeace explains that in order to be "rescued from the brink of environmental destruction, we need action by governments (naturally -ed) ... to halt biodiversity loss." Having blown past the 2010 deadline for total planetary annihilation, we are now on a 2020 deadline for total planetary annihilation. And this time they mean it. Really.

At the same time, the Times' op-ed page angrily laments that only one of the Republicans running for the Senate "accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming." The editors blame Dick Cheney.

Mark Kirk of Illinois is the one exception among the Senate candidates. Can somebody talk some sense into him? He's obviously been reading too much of the NY Times.

Obama has lifted the ban on deep-water oil drilling prior to the original Nov. 30 expiration date - though months will pass before anyone gets back to work and draws a paycheck. The political, rather than safety-oriented, nature of the ban is painfully apparent. Everyone understands that Obama needed to do something in the wake of the worst environmental disaster in American history. The decision to simply stop all drilling and wait, however, has been devastating to the coastal economy - and this during the worst recession in recent history.

To add insult to injury, during Obama's moratorium on deep-water drilling, he committed $2 billion in funding to an off-shore drilling company ... in Brazil. As the WSJ put it: "Americans are right to wonder why Mr. Obama is underwriting in Brazil what he won't allow at home." 

Lifting the ban will now annoy the left (which wants a permanent ban on all wealth-producing activities) and remind the right that the moratorium was a foolish overreaction in the first place. Just another nail in the Democrats' coffin.

Until today I'd never heard of the 10:10 campaign, in which we are all called upon to reduce our carbon emissions by 10 percent.  In Britain they've launched this classy public service spot.  You may not want to watch it if you have a weak stomach. 

Breastfeeding fish.

Just to remind you that some things are even stranger than politics.

Not since the incident at Chappaquiddick derailed the Ted Kennedy for President boomlet of 1969 has a political movement imploded so fast and so messily as the green crusade to stop global warming. . .  The greens, it is increasingly clear, bet the ranch on the Copenhagen process.  That horrible meltdown, perhaps the biggest and most chaotic public embarrassment in the history of multilateral summits, turned climate change from global poster boy to global pariah.

The latest from our friends at the EPA:

New Environmental Protection Agency regulations treat spilled milk like oil, requiring farmers to build extra storage tanks and form emergency spill plans....

The EPA regulations state that "milk typically contains a percentage of animal fat, which is a non-petroleum oil. Thus, containers storing milk are subject to the Oil Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure Program rule when they meet the applicability criteria."