By Bill Wichert, Express Times
The rear end of a cow could become the next source of financial hardship for farmers. Facing lower milk prices and higher operational costs, dairy farmers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania say they couldn’t afford the so-called cow tax, a suggestion made by federal officials to charge permit fees for livestock as a way of regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
“It’s just another expense a farmer doesn’t need,” said Layne Klein, whose family has been running a dairy farm for 73 years in Forks Township. “I guess you’d call it one more nail in the coffin.” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency raised the concept in a recent report on possible greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act. Those regulations also could be extended to small businesses, schools, hospitals and churches.
In its comments on the EPA proposal, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said the regulations might force permitting requirements on dairy farms with more than 25 cows, beef cattle operations with more than 50 cattle, swine facilities with more than 200 hogs and farms with 500 or more acres of corn. The permit costs would mean $175 per dairy cow, $87.50 a head for beef cattle and $20 per hog, according to Liz Thompson, a research associate with the New Jersey Farm Bureau. A herd of 75 dairy cows would carry a price tag of about $13,000.
“It’s almost incredulity,” said Thompson, describing the reaction of some farmers. “‘What, are you kidding me?’” While there is not a formal proposal on instituting such a tax—doing so would take years to implement—the agriculture community has to be part of discussions about emissions regulations and climate change, EPA spokesman Jonathan Shradar said.
In 2006, agricultural sources accounted for 6.4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions nationwide, according to the EPA. One greenhouse gas, methane, can be converted into power when it comes from landfills, but the version coming off farms does not have the same second life, Shradar said. “We don’t know how to harness the rear end of a cow just yet for power generation,” he said.
The proposed regulations, however, could put farmers out of business, some say. For Warren County farmer Frank Gibbs, he and his sons would face up to $35,000 in permit fees to cover the roughly 200 cows on their 550-acre Allamuchy Township farm. His family has been farming the land since the late 1800s. “There’s no way,” Gibbs said. “That’s the end of the dairy business.” Read more here.
By Christopher Booker, UK Telegraph
The first, on May 21, headed “Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts” , reported that the entire Alpine “winter sports industry” could soon “grind to a halt for lack of snow”. The second, on December 19, headed “The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation” , reported that this winter’s Alpine snowfalls “look set to beat all records by New Year’s Day”. Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the “hottest in history” and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to “natural factors” such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely “masking the underlying warming trend”, and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times. Read more here
See larger image here.
By KHQ-TV
On Christmas Eve, Gov. Chris Gregoire proclaimed a state of emergency in Washington due to the state’s ongoing series of winter weather and storms. Gregoire notes snowfall has reached record or near-record level in 30 of Washington’s 39 counties.The proclamation enables the state to respond quickly to local requests for emergency support and assistance arising from new storms.Prior to the Governor’s declaration the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) convened an emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss current conditions and the forecast for two major winter storm systems that could bring another 18 inches of fresh snow to the region. Seattle photo shown.
The County Commissioners were also briefed that road crews have finished plowing primary arterials and emergency routes, and are currently working on secondary arterials and well-traveled hills. With more snow in the forecast through Monday, residential areas may not be serviced for several days. Read more here. Also Seattle’s use of sand on icy roads called more environmentally harmful than salt. Read more here.
As Tom Nelson’s blog post indicates, this is a source of major embarrassment to the governor who on the first day of the 2008 legislative session, Gov. Chris Gregoire announced a multifaceted climate change bill that could dramatically reshape the state’s economy. Despite the time squeeze, Gregoire urged action on the global warming bill. “The future of our economy, the future of our great state is at stake,” she said. King County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels joined Gregoire at Monday’s media event held at McKinstry Co., a Seattle business lauded for its environmentally friendly approach to mechanical construction and engineering.”
Icecap Note: According to a Seattle resident who wrote Icecap, more snow has fallen in the Seattle area recently than any other time except the winter of 1942-43. “I am a Seattle native and 78. I had a paper route in 1942 and had to slog through snow 2 to 3 feet deep dragging a sled. This snow pack remained for four or five weeks.” He continued “The real stupidity by far is that of Mayor Nickels, who prohibited the use of salt on roads because it might harm fish in Puget Sound (salt water). The spin from the mayor is that rubber edges on plow blades that pack the snow on the roads rather than remove it is used in NY and Chicago, both of which have flat terrain while Seattle’s is more hilly than SF. Nickels and the entire city council should be recalled for stupidity.”
Greg Nickels recall proclaimed in 2007 a 50% reduction the Pacific Northwest snowfall based on the bogus study by State Climatologist Phil Mote published by the AMS which cherry picked the start and end time of the snowpack analysis - choosing the very snowy 1950 to start. We noted that in a story, given the flip back to the cold PDO, the snow drought may be over and indeed the last two years have seen record or near record snowpacks. No word from Mote or Nickels. Perhaps they are snowed in.
Our Seattle emailer also noted “Gregroire’s pride is enacting the Western Climate Initiative (Little Kyoto cap and trade system) involving 7 states and 4 Canadian Provences. Already a hundred or so employees are busy inventorying emission levels and determining the CO2 emission quotas for all emitters notwithstanding the fact that WA has one of the smallest carbon footprints in the nation. A $6.5 billion deficit is anticipated for the current budget cycle, that is large enough to bankrupt the state. They seem determined to ruin the economy while solving non-existent problems.