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Losing The Battle

Posted by Average Voter on Saturday, June 27, 2009 10:15:22 AM
   The global warming nutters have taken over. With the passage of the 1300 page cap and trade bill that most of our representatives have not even read, we have now only to wait for passage in the senate to fully realize the devastating effects of junk science and the transfer of more of our wealth to the nanny state.
 
   Some senators are confident that the bill will die there, but the house had eight defecting republicans; how many republican senators will defect? Here is a list of the House republicans that decided to tax the american people:  
 
Mary Bono Mack (CA), Mike Castle (DE), Steven Kirk (IL), John McHugh (NY), Leonard Lance (NJ), Frank LoBiondo (NJ), Dave Reichert (WA), and Chris Smith (NJ). (New Jersey sure has a bunch of strange republicans?!)
 
   Obama is out today pleading to the senate to pass the bill.
 
"My call to every senator, as well as to every American, is this," he said. "We cannot be afraid of the future. And we must not be prisoners of the past. Don't believe the misinformation out there that suggests there is somehow a contradiction between investing in clean energy and economic growth."
 
   Even if that were true, we will be taxing energy and business by charging them to pollute so as to generate dollars in hopes they build more renewable types of energy that are less effecient and more costly to operate. Makes sense. Add in the current economic environment and we have a recipe for disaster. More people will need help paying their energy bills, forcing the energy companies to raise there rates even further to make up the difference. And yet we are one step away from passing one of the largest tax increases in the nations history; without even reading or understanding what is in the bill.
 
 
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised that once a bill was passed by Congress, the White House would post it online for five days before he signed it.
 
Now, in a tacit acknowledgment that the campaign pledge was easier to make than to fulfill, the White House is changing its terms. Instead of starting the five-day clock when Congress passes a bill, administration officials say they intend to start it earlier and post the bills sooner.
 
   Of course, the problem with that is like what they did with this bill...at three in the morning! The democrats added three hundred pages to the climate bill in the middle of the night to be voted on later that day. No five days there either.
 
   It is a big sham and the American people will be the losers.
 
 
 
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Global Warming Needs A New Face

Posted by Average Voter on Friday, June 19, 2009 11:20:20 AM
   Democratic leaders want to put a new spin on global warming by changing the words around.

In a strategy memo, Democratic think tank Third Way and top party strategist Stanley Greenberg warned Democrats that swing voters don't care about fighting global warming, and said terms like "cap-and-trade" are useless. Instead, the memo suggests that Democrats tap into Americans' optimism that clean energy can help improve the faltering economy.

"For most voters, global warming is not significant enough on its own to drive support for major energy reform," the memo says. "So while it can be part of the story that reform advocates are telling, global warming should be used only in addition to the broader economic frame, not in place of it."
 
   The problem is, it will probably work. Most people don't even understand what global warming is other than they were told it is bad. But tell them that you want to pass legislation that will provide 'clean energy' and it will be an easy sell. People generally want to be good stewards to the planet, but this bill is really nothing more than a tax-generating-bill-so-they-can-pay-for-health-care nightmare.
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Keeping The Story Alive

Posted by Average Voter on Friday, June 19, 2009 11:05:45 AM
   Just when you thought that the world was beginning to forget about the horrible ravages of global warming, a new study comes out to reinvigorate the warming nutters.
 
Even today's atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are high enough to cause a global increase in temperature of between 2 and 2.4 degrees Celsius. "Drastic and immediate" emissions reductions would be "impossible," the paper, which was presented in Brussels on Thursday, argues. The concentration of these gases will thus continue to increase in upcoming decades. The researchers write: "An overshoot of the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations needed to constrain global warming to 2 degrees Celsius is thus inevitable."
 
  Well, there you have it. It is inevitable that the temperature will rise. Of course this fly's in the face of the current data showing that the temperature since 1998 has actually gone down.
 
 
 
   The nutters have got to keep the story alive, so they keep sending out scientists to keep publishing papers on why global warming hasn't yet stopped. As long as the funding keeps coming, the alarmism will still get written.
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Nobody Is Doing Enough To Be Green

Posted by Average Voter on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 7:26:51 PM
   Clearly, when it comes to green blogs, global warming is a foregone conclusion. They are truly convinced that some sort of disaster is going to take place on Earth because we are not doing enough to curb our emissions. But it is not just green blogs, it is those in high places in our government as well. Take this Treehugger article for instance...
 
 
Now here's a scary thought: If we don't see significant cuts in China's carbon emissions by 2050, even if every other country reduced theirs by 80%, the world will still see a 2.7°C rise in average temperature. That's what Assistant Secretary of State for Energy David Sandalow said in The Guardian:
 

Sandalow went on to say,

China can and will need to do much more if the world is going to have any hope of containing climate change.
 It doesn't end their though; they still have to blame America for not doing enough as well as every other nation in the world.

No One is Making Strong Enough Emissions Reduction Commitments
Fair enough, but frankly that statement could just as easily apply to the United States, to Japan (whose recent emissions reduction pledges are just 2% below its Kyoto agreement pledges and are being universally lambasted for being weak), to Australia, to any number of smaller nations flying under the radar as "developing nations" but where per capita emissions are higher than in Europe...for plenty of places.

The long and short of it is, every nation, China included, thinks they are doing enough to curb emissions and in a time frame that they believe effective (or effective when compared to political expedience), but not one of them is making deep enough emissions reductions commitments that happen quickly enough to avert the worst of climate chaos.
 
   At the end of the article they use the ever favorite line of the greenies 'inaction is not an option'. Blah, Blah, Blah...
 
   The worst enemy of these greenies is the economy. And now that it has come crashing down, disposable income spent on trying to be more environmentally savoy is no longer in style. Obama will try to force it down our throats with a cap and trade system (or more honestly an 'energy tax') but hopes are dwindling on that front as well. People are not interested in the environment when they are trying to keep food on the table. They will try to do their part, like recycling cans or using their local trash recycling, but they are not going to spend extra money to do it, and they are not going to vote a tax on themselves to do it.
   Most importantly though, I think ordinary citizens are starting to see the light. They are not buying all the alarmism any longer, looking instead at the facts for themselves. They are seeing the money involved and the favoritism from the left. They are seeing that they don't have to feel guilty about it being hot outside. It is just the weather. The information age we live in overloads us with way to much of it. We are inandated with stories of global catastrophies and 'what if's' about global warming, yet none of them has happened, and there is simply no proof that they will. Some days it is hot, somedays it is cool, other days it rains. It's the weather stupid!
 
   
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New Car Gadgetry Not Needed

Posted by Average Voter on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 6:54:48 PM
   The high margin 'hybrid' equiped, GPS navigation systems, and 6,000 watt stereo systems now available in cars is no longer needed or wanted in the average Americans purchase of a new vehicle. Seems we are happy now with four wheels and a seat.
 
   The trouble is, right now a lot of American consumers just aren't that into any of this wizardry, based on results from a recent survey conducted by market-research firm J.D. Power & Associates, a unit of McGraw-Hill Cos.
 
Fuel-saving hybrid-electric technology, priced at $5,000, ranked eighth in the Power study after the price was revealed. That's a respectable showing for such an expensive feature. But the share of consumers who said they are "definitely interested" in a hybrid car dropped to 15% in 2009 from 23% a year ago. After Power told respondents that a hybrid system would add $5,000 to the price of the car, the "definitely interested" share fell to 4.2%.
 
   This is probably the most telling aspect of our current economy...
 
   The loudest message from Power's sample of U.S. consumers is that the economic shock has damped enthusiasm for bells and whistles across the board, says Mike Marshall, director of automotive emerging technologies for J.D. Power. He characterizes the drop in interest in technology features this year as "startling."
As an element of the survey, Power researchers tell respondents to consider what features they would buy on their next car if they had $3,500 to spend. In 2008, about 4% of the respondents said they wouldn't spend any of that money. In 2009, about 7% said they would keep the $3,500 in their pocket.
 
   We are not on a spending spree any longer.
 
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Let's Make Some Green Jobs!

Posted by Average Voter on Saturday, June 06, 2009 11:37:18 PM
   This is from SmallDeadAnimals.com. This may explain where Obama gets some of his ideas for a green economy. Obama must have some Acorn members planted in this organization.
 
wind_jobs.jpg
 
   This was in a flyer from some anti-nuke group in Canada.
 
What made me laugh was the first writer in the comment section:

Geeze, with that kind of reasoning we should outlaw power saws and go back to hand saws to build houses.

Here is a neat idea, let's outlaw power lawnmowers and legislate that lawns have to be cut with toenail clippers, that would produce a lot of jobs. I can just see it now, all those former welfare recipients on their hands and knees working their way across a verdant green expanse as though they were goats.
 
   If that happened in the U.S., they would have to start a labor union, say, the Unified Lawn Clipers of America. What the writer forgot to mention is the amount of carbon that would not be put into the atmosphere because of the outlawed lawnmowers. See...another value added benefit!
 
   
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Study Finds That The Earth Has Been Cool And Warm

Posted by Average Voter on Saturday, June 06, 2009 11:14:44 PM
    A new study out led by the University of Zaragoza (UNIZAR) has confirmed through fossil testing that the temperature in the past has been cold and hot.

The resulting study involves climatic inferences being drawn on the basis of the fossil associations of small mammals whose remains have been deposited in El Mirón over the past 41,000 years. The fossil associations of these mammals reveal the composition of fauna living around the cave at the time, and have made it possible to develop a paleoclimatological and paleoenvironmental reconstruction of the environment.

The research shows that there have been seven periods of cooling and warming in the Cantabrian cornice over the past 41,000 years. An analysis carried out by other authors on data relating to pollen, marine isotope stratigraphy, and materials deposited by glaciers backs this up this result.
 
   Only seven? We have had more cool and warm periods in Colorado in the last 20 years than that! Ooooooh, wait a minute, that must be because of man-made global warming, right? Otherwise it would be a comfortable 72 degrees all the time...
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California Doesn't Know When To Stop...Again

Posted by Average Voter on Saturday, June 06, 2009 10:58:28 PM
   The state of California has now decided that eveything that is produced and/or sold in the state now has to have a label on it stating how much carbon was emitted making it.
 
Carbon labels are modeled on federal nutrition labels, the federal Energy Star program, and efforts abroad like Britain’s Carbon Label for apparel and food (see example below) and are meant to address the overblown global-warming menace that the bill says “poses a serious threat to the economic well-being, public health, natural resources, and the environment of California.”

“When nutrition labels started letting consumers know about the trans fat in their food, they responded by buying healthier products,” says bill sponsor and Cal Assemblyman Ira Ruskin. “Consumers don't want trans fat, and they don’t want global warming.” But apparently they do want nanny bureaucrats telling them what they should buy.

   So, next to the 35mg of sodium in your diet pop will be the 6 tons of carbon emitted to make it. Brilliant. 

   Since this is such a great idea, let's see the amount carbon spent on each bill that comes out of the California congress as well. I mean really; the amount of gas coming out of that place should put it out of business in a matter of weeks! And by the way, since McDonalds got rid of the trans-fats from their fries, they simply are not as good as they once were.
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It's Not Governemnt Motors...

Posted by Average Voter on Tuesday, June 02, 2009 11:09:17 AM
   ...it's Public Motors. President Obama in his prophetic wisdom just purchased the majority share of GM with monies that we haven't even given him yet. We are putting  $1.84 trillion dollars in debt on the books over the next 3 years, and in return we own a bunch of losers.
 
   My last four vehicles have been GM products. I have always been a lover of Chevrolet trucks and would have never really considered buying anything else. Now, that is all different. Actually, it has become quite a dillema for me. My love for the brand is now in conflict with my hatred of it being owned by the government. Obama has used my money to purchase something that should have been allowed to fail. Poor management and too many concessions to the labor unions got them there and in the U.S. bad choices lead to failure. It really is the American way. I hate to see an icon of the industry go away, but that is less painfull then the strung-out death it is now going through. There is still no guaranty they will survive.
 
   In this Wall Street Journal article, Mr. White writes of the hardships facing GM.
 

General Motors will be split in two. The New GM will be shadowed by an old "Bad GM" that will house assets and liabilities the company no longer wants, including the four brands that the company plans to sell or close: Pontiac, Hummer, Saab and Saturn. The Bad GM could have ads in which a guy rolls up in a jacked-up Pontiac GTO, V-8 engine growling, turns toward the camera and says, "That's right, we're the Bad GM." But it probably won't.

What happens to sales of GM vehicles in the next several months will be a critical test of Mr. Obama and Mr. Henderson's efforts to build consumer confidence.

GM has told owners of all its brands that their warranties will be honored and repair parts will be available. As dealerships wind down, GM says it will let customers know where to take vehicles for service.
 
   I have little confidence in anything run by our government; and now they are going to ask me to keep buying a GM? I should get my next one for free since they used my money to build it.
 
   
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It's Hurricane Prediction Time!

Posted by Average Voter on Monday, June 01, 2009 7:31:52 PM
   Time to place your bets on this years hurricane season! Will it be a bad one, or will it finally calm down? Well, here are your 2009 predictions brought to you by the NOAA and the University of Colorado.
 

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's predicts a 70% chance of:

  • Named storms: 9-14
  • Hurricanes: 4-7
  • Major hurricanes: 1-3

The other major forecaster in the U.S., the University of Colorado, recently revised down its expectations for the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season:

  • Named storms: 12
  • Hurricanes: 6
  • Major hurricanes: 2

Further, the Colorado forecasters predicted the following probabilities that a major hurricane could strike the U.S., all of which are about average for the past century:

  • Entire U.S. coastline: 54%
  • U.S. East Coast (including peninsula Florida): 32%
  • Gulf Coast (from the Florida Panhandle westward to Brownsville, Texas): 31%
  • Caribbean: Average
   They did pretty good last year on thier estimates. Wasn't sure they were going to get there, but a few late season storms saved their predictions.
   These are always fun because once a large one, say a category 4 or 5 comes, the global warming nutters come out of the wood-work. Obviously, I don't wish any hurricanes to do any damage or take any lives, (but we insist on living near the beach, so that is the risk) but it is funny to see the nutters start in on the 'lack of inaction' talk and the future consequences of that inaction.
 
   Who knows anyway? In 2005 the 'experts' said global warming was causing more hurricanes. In 2008 the 'experts' said global warming is not the cause.  Guess we need to funnel more money to the climate scientists so they can study it some more...or something.
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