By Joseph D’Aleo
Rep Kuster (D-NH) partnered with Congressman Jared Polis (CO-02) and Congressman Ben Ray Lujan (NM-03) to introduce legislation to establish a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES). This bill, the Renewable Electricity Standard Act of 2013, would require utility companies to produce at least 25 percent of their power from renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and biomass by 2025, allegedly helping spur growth in our country’s renewable energy sector.
The claim is that Investments in clean energy are investments in a healthier environment and a stronger economy. This common sense bill will help create good middle class jobs, cut pollution, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil, all while saving consumers money on their utilities.
FACT CHECKS:
The Department of Energy (DOE) recently updated the list of loan guarantee projects on its website. Unlike in 2008, when Barack Obama pledged to create 5 million jobs over 10 years by directing taxpayer funds toward renewable energy projects, there were no press conferences or stump speeches. But the data are nonetheless revealing: for the over $26 billion spent since 2009, DOE Section 1703 and 1705 loan guarantees have created only 2,298 permanent jobs for a cost of over $11.45 million per job. David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis analyzed a generic RES that starts at 3 percent of total power generation in 2012 and rises by 1.5 percent per year. Such an RES would destroy 1 million jobs by 2020, when the standard reaches 15 percent. Average families will pay $2,400 more per year.
In Europe they heard the same promises and experienced serious pain instead of the promised benefits. UK Prime Minister David Cameron who once pledged to lead the ‘greenest government ever’, has publicly promised to ‘roll back’ green taxes, which add more than 110 pounds a year to average fuel bills. A senior aide said ‘He’s telling everyone, “We’ve got to get rid of all this green crap.”
Just recently, German figures were released on the actual productivity of the country’s wind power over the last ten years. The figure is 16.3 percent! Due to the inherent intermittent nature of wind, their wind power system was designed for an assumed 30% load factor in the first place. That means that they hoped to get a mere 30% of the installed capacity versus some 85 to 90% for coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric facilities. That means that, when they build 3,000MW of wind power, they expect to actually get merely 900MW, because the wind does not always blow at the required speeds. But in reality, after ten years, they have discovered that they are actually getting only half of what they had optimistically, and irrationally, hoped for: a measly 16.3 percent.
Even worse, after spending billions of Euros on subsidies, Germany’s total combined solar facilities have contributed a miserly, imperceptible 0.084% of Germany’s electricity over the last 22 years. That is not even one-tenth of one percent. Even in rock-solid Germany, up to 15% of the populace is now believed to be in “fuel poverty.” Some 600,000 low-income Germans are now being cut off by their power companies annually, a number expected to increase as a never-ending stream of global-warming projects in the pipeline wallops customers. In the U.K., which has laboured under the most politically correct climate leadership in the world, some 12 million people are already in fuel poverty, 900,000 of them in wind-infested Scotland alone, and the U.K. has now entered a double-dip recession.
Whatsmore the wind power that Kuster and her party is pushing polices that will have:
HEALTH ISSUES
Wind turbines produce human health hazards from noise even miles away from the turbines where the noise is just below the threshold for hearing. The New York Times reports residents living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility in Vinalhaven, Me., say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life unbearable. In Canada, Carmen Krogh, a retired Alberta pharmacist and a group of volunteers surveyed residents in areas near wind farms. Of 76 people who responded to their informal survey, 53 reported at least one health complaint. All across the US, lawsuits have been filed against the wind farms because of these health issues.
ANIMAL MASSACRE
According to an estimate published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin in March, almost 600,000 birds are killed by wind farms in America each year, including over 80,000 raptors such as hawks and falcons and eagles (Wildlife Society). Many of the birds are either endangered or protected species.
Even more bats die, as their lungs are inverted by the negative pressures generated behind the 170 mile-per-hour spinning blades. A new study from the University of Colorado, Denver, estimates that 600,000 bats were killed by wind turbines last year alone could be as high as 900,000. Feed on insects that would otherwise destroy crops, and it pollinates as it goes about its nightly tasks.
In Digby, Nova Scotia, an Emu farm was put out of business. Operators of Ocean Breeze Emu Farm in Digby County are shutting down due to a nearby wind turbine farm. The operators said the birds “had died of fear.”
The Obama administration last week announced it would exempt their friends in the wind industry from laws protecting the animals.
EFFECT ON TOURISM
Tourism is New Hampshire’s second-largest industry. The Outdoor Foundation reports tourism supports 53,000 jobs, generates $261 million in annual state tax revenue and produces nearly $4 billion annually in retail sales and services. Will tourists and Adirondack mountain hikers and climbers be less likely to come to areas blessed with natural beauty of mountains lakes and oceans because the turbines and transmission lines ruin what Lori Harnois, NH Director Division of Travel and Tourism called “...the natural beauty of our quintessential New England landscape?” Plans to dot France with wind farms are facing fierce opposition from critics worried they will blight a landscape that has helped make the country the world’s top tourist destination. ...opponents are urging the government to tread carefully so as not to damage France’s thousands of kilometers of stunningly beautiful landscapes.
PROPERTY DEVALUATION
Though proponents of wind say it enhances property value, there is concrete evidence to the contrary. In a wind impact study in Dodge and Fond Du Lac Counties in Wisconsin, large turbines (389 feet high) using a literature study, an opinion survey of realtors and sales studies determined that sales were less than outside the areas, and prices were lower. Land values were decreased an average of 30%.
IMPROPER MAINTENANCE BUDGETING
In Florida, the Desert Valley Star reported in January 2009 that FPL/NER operates 60 wind turbines - and reportedly 40% were “malfunctioning, in disrepair, or need maintenance.” Broken blades and fires are much more common than the industry will admit to.
Windtech International reported that a survey of 75 wind farm operators in the U.S. in 2008 found that 60% of turbines may be behind in critical maintenance due largely to a shortage of qualified turbine technicians.
NOT RIGHT IN THE NORTH
Several years ago a lengthy study was conducted evaluating the potential to harness wind power from Mount Washington’s endless and reliable supply. The study concluded that the frequent icing of equipment and the strength and gustiness of the wind at this location was so severe that wind energy would not be a practical or cost effective alternative. The Finnish Meteorological Institute, found some ice layers 6 inches thick and could be thrown up to 1800 feet and land with impact speeds up to 170 miles/hour.
Kuster’s husband Brad is a lawyer with the Conservation Law Foundation which believes “Wind power is an important part of the solution to the energy and climate challenges we face. It is an emissions-free form of energy that takes advantage of what is arguably nature’s cleanest and most sustainable power source.”
Unless congress does their homework and like in Europe says no to the environmentalists and defeats the Kuster, Polis and Lujon bill, 2025 will have our level of health and wealth reduced without real benefit.It is perfectly reasonable to be green minded and work towards conservation of our resources.
CO2 has been incorrectly blamed for the natural cycles of temperatures and weather extremes of drought, flood, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat and cold. It is now called carbon pollution, a term that really applies only to soot, largely removed from coal plant effluence with scrubbers.
In fact, EPA’s own charts show a 30% decline in these small particles the last 30 years. The US is exporting fuel oil but no thanks to the administration, which has blocked drilling on all federal lands and offshore and the Keystone Pipeline. It is the heavy drilling and fracking in states on private land that has fed the boon led by clean burning natural gas. After destroying the coal industry, the EPA intends to impede natural gas production by stopping the long used fracking process. The administration admitted openly they want $8/gallon gasoline to make their renewables cost seem less onerous. Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the UN working group on climate change wrote in the Calgary Herald in 2011 that gasoline prices in the US and Canada should increase 300-400% to encourage conservation.
Instead of a health hazard, CO2 is plant food and has helped greatly improve global crop yields and feed the increasing population. Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich wrote in The End of Affluence in 1974, “Due to a combination of ignorance, greed and callousness, a situation has been created that could lead to a billion or more people starving to death."(starting in the 1980s). Instead. thanks to improved hybrids and farming practices and increased CO2, a 50-year trend of remarkable growth in world grain production has followed. Since 1960, global wheat and rice production has tripled, and corn production is almost five times higher.
CO2’s claimed effect on climate has been falsified. A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that of the 117 global warming predictions generated by climate-model simulations, all but three “significantly” overestimated the actual amount of warming that occurred during the past 20 years. Warming has stopped for 17 years (0.9F cooling here in the northeast in winters during that period) even as CO2 has risen 11%.
The 2003 heatwave was blamed for 2,000 deaths, and treated as a national emergency. Sir David King, then chief scientific officer, declared that this meant climate change was ‘more serious even than the threat of terrorism’.
Since then, some 280,000 Brits have died from the cold and barely 10,000 from the heat. We have been focusing on the wrong enemy.
Sea level rise has slowed dramatically (down 43% from the 20th century), and there is no upward trend in drought and flood. Hurricane activity globally has been at a 34 year low. Tornadoes this season were fewer than any year since records started in the 1950s. Wildfires are the lowest since modern record began in 1985, and the arctic bounced back 57% with the coldest summer on record while new records for ice were set in Antarctica. The only weather event that has increased is snowstorms. 4 of the top snowiest years for the northern hemisphere have been in the last 6 years.
Viv Forbes, the Carbon Sense Coalition
The UN IPCC and others with a vested interest in the global warming scare have not bothered to check what sea level evidence says about global temperature changes.
Sea levels are very sensitive to temperature changes, and the oceanic indicators are currently reading “steady”.
So are all other thermometers.
Apart from bubbles of heat surrounding big cities, the thermometers and satellites of the world have not shown a warming trend for 17 years. This is in spite of some inspired fiddling with the records by those whose jobs, research grants and reputations depend on their ability to generate alarming forecasts of destructive global warming.
To explain this absence of warming on Earth’s surface, the warmists now claim that “the missing heat is hiding in the deep oceans”.
This sounds like a water-tight alibi, hard to disprove because of our inability to measure “average ocean temperature” directly.
However, the ocean itself is a huge thermometer - all we have to do is to read the gauges.
Most liquids expand when heated, and this property is used in traditional thermometers. They have a glass reservoir filled with liquid (usually mercury) and a graduated scale to measure any thermal expansion of that liquid.
Oceans have the essentials of a global thermometer - the huge ocean basins are the reservoir, sea water acts like the mercury, and tide gauges on the shoreline (or satellites) measure changes in sea water volume.
Two factors, both dependent on global temperature, are the main causes of any general rise in sea levels – how much ice has melted from land-based ice sheets like Greenland and Antarctica; and the expansion of sea water volume as ocean temperature rises.
Therefore changes in average sea levels are sensitive and accurate indicators of changes in average global temperature.
There are of course some locations where tectonic movements mean that the land is rising or falling relative to the sea, but these areas are easily identified and should be ignored in determining actual changes in sea levels.
Historically, sea levels (and global temperatures) rose steeply as the great ice sheets and glaciers melted as Earth emerged from the last ice age. Sea levels rose by 130 metres in just 10,000 years but they have been relatively stable for the last 7,000 years.
The sea level thermometer was higher than today during the Roman Warm Era, and lower than today when the Little Ice Age ended about 160 years ago. There has been no unusual spurt in recent years, proving conclusively that there is no significant extra heat going into the deep oceans, and no global warming hiding there.
By Meteorologist Art Horn
Well they’re at it again. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded yet another in what seems to be an endless number of climate doom conferences. This time it was held in Warsaw. Poland. Perhaps the IPCC’s name should be changed to the IPCD (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Doom).
The conference claimed to have some significant achievements such as the $280 million dollars pledged by the combined United States, United Kingdom and Norway to help stop deforestation. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) is the UN’s program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation. I kid you not, the program is actually called REDD, remember? like hammer and sickle? You can’t make this stuff up! The UN IPCC is using the threat of climate change caused by increasing carbon dioxide emission to coerce money from those who they believe are responsible for global warming. They are attempting to make policies that, if fully implemented, will serve to extort vast sums of money from developed nations.
The reason I make this claim is based on what leading members of the IPCC have said in the past. For example, three years ago in November of 2010, Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of the IPCC working group three said “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.” Gee, and all the while I though this was about stopping global warming, silly me!
Actually this was not news at the time. One of the most significant demands of the 2009 Copenhagen climate change conference was that “Developed counties promise to fund actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the inevitable effects of climate change in developing countries.” The key part of this statement is “Developed countries...adapt to the inevitable effects of climate change in developing countries.” By “adapt” they are saying pay up. The statement goes on the say “Developed countries promise to provide US$30 billion for the period 2010-2012 and to mobilize long term finance of a further US$100 billion a year by 2020 from a variety of sources.” That should get your attention.
In the 2010 interview, Ottmar Edenhofer was describing what the IPCC ‘s goal is. Since the assumed effects of climate change will be most severe on developing nations and since climate change has and is being caused by developed nations the UN IPCC demands that $100 billion dollars a year be provided (extorted) from developed nations.
In order to extort money from someone or some company or nation the extorting party must have the means to force payment. In the case of the mob they would extort a certain amount of money from a business for a promise of “protection” from other gangsters. If you decline the protection you end up sleeping with the fishes...dead. The UN IPCC is attempting to use climate guilt to extort payment.
The IPCC issues big reports at lavish meetings attended by thousands of people each year. The purpose is to impress everyone. They have concluded with 95% confidence that the developed nations are responsible for global warming. This climate change will have severe impacts especially on developing nations. Since these developing nations can’t use fossil fuels to lift their people out of poverty, it is the developed nations responsibility to pay reparations to them for the wrong they have done. If the leaders of the developed nations are gullible enough to believe this claim they will (and are) in favor of making these payments.
Now, as a way to implement the extortion of money from the developed nations, the UN IPCC is proposing a new strategy. Instead of paying for global warming over the long haul, they want their money now. The idea is to have a legal document ratified by the members of the conference to make the United States and all other developed nations pay for storm damage. No matter where a storm does damage and no matter what the cost the United States and other developed nations would foot the bill. Who would determine what storm was caused by climate change and which ones don’t qualify? take a wild guess!
Connie Hedegaard, EU commissioner for climate action said “We cannot have a system where there will be automatic compensation whenever server weather events happen in one place or another around the planet.” She’s right! Such a ruling would be a disaster for the United States and others. Any nation could demand payment for virtually any weather event deemed caused by “climate change.” Such a proposal could only be made by those looking for free money. That is exactly what the UN and all of these developing nations are looking for. It’s not about saving the world from global warming, it’s about taking money from those that have earned it and giving it to those that have not.
To paraphrase Apollo Astronaut Walt Cunningham “You can’t reason with someone who believes in man made global warming because reason has nothing to do with how they arrived at their belief.” The real reason behind man made global warming is to extort money from the developed world. The extortionist is the United Nations. Its troops on the ground to achieve this is the IPCC.PDF