Tag: politics

Obama and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Keystone XL pipeline decision.

The Obama administration announced Nov. 10 it would delay a politically explosive decision on the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline until after the 2012 elections.

Congress corrected this dithering by forcing Obama to make a decision one way or another. He chose not to build it.

This decision was bad on so many levels it is hard to count them all.

Let’s try to look at the ways: Canada has oil sands and is exploiting the resources.

U.S. is dependent on importing a large portion of its crude oil.

The cheapest and most efficient way to transport crude oil is through a pipe line. It is also the safest and most reliable way of getting crude oil from point A to point B. To not O.K. the pipeline increases the cost and makes us more dependent of crude oil from the Middle East and Nigeria, as well as Venezuela. The cost of shipping this oil via pipeline is $5/barrel. To ship it via rail is about $15/barrel. This is the way it is done right now.

Canada really, really wanted this deal. It would help improve our relations. Now they are strained.

The unions really wanted the jobs. It would supply them with more than 20000 direct, well-paid jobs. In addition there is secondary business generated whenever a project of this magnitude is undertaken. Why not generate jobs?

The newly discovered oil fields in North Dakota and Montana could use the pipeline as well. Now they will have to go it alone or transport their oil on railroad or barge traffic instead, a more expensive and less safe option.

So why did Obama delay the decision? It was because of the environmentalists.

Let us examine why this decision was equally horrible from an environmentalist’s perspective.

Canada is a sovereign nation. They have the oil and will sell or use it one way or another.

The most energy conserving way is to transport it through a pipeline. Transport via train, truck or barge uses more energy (read more CO2), Canada will sell it’s oil to China if we don’t want it. China has a well deserved reputation for producing a lot of pollution.

The best environmental solution is for us to import this oil.

Nebraska protested there was a danger to damage their aquifer. The Keystone XL management offered to reroute the pipeline away from this sensitive aquifer, thereby solving that objection.

By not importing oil from Canada the total carbon footprint will increase. We lose, and Canada loses. (I am not concerned that the CO2 is increasing, but that a valuable natural resource is excessively depleted.) Now it turns out that Canada has left the Kyoto Protocol, thereby being free to burn as much of its carbon as they want. Was that really what the environmentalists wanted?

So why did Obama first delay the decision until after the 2012 election, and then, when forced, deny the permit? Here are five possibilities:

1. Obama is a true believer that ”this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”. As a true environmentalist his role can not be overestimated .

2. Obama is deliberately wrecking our economy, refuses to have an energy policy that will create jobs, but will support protest movements and foment unrest.

3. Obama is acting on orders from Global Governance people that do want U.S. to be totally dependent on international law and U.N. mandates.

4. Obama promised to be Brazil’s best customer from their deep sea oil drilling success, paid for by U.S. loan guarantees. He must be true to his promises.

5. Obama is half insane and surrounded by bad advisors.

This is the best I can do to explain the reasons for this decision.

Mitt Romney can’t go after Obama on Crony Capitalism, Sarah Palin can, A Limerick.

The croniest capitalism

Obama’s is sort of fascism

But Mitt Romney can’t say

He is out of the fray

So Run, Sarah Run, for we can’t have a schism.

Sarah Palin: Criminal penalty if vote traded for campaign contribution. [The Alaska Senate watered down the 2007 ethics bill] The Senate’s action was politics-as-usual. We were determined to keep the pressure on.

That pressure paid off when legislators approved an omnibus ethics bill. It included my administration’s ethics proposal, as well as the House’s muscular amendment that imposed criminal penalties on lawmakers who traded votes for campaign contributions. Plus, any legislator convicted of a felony would forfeit his or her state pension. We were pleased that no one could claim pride of authorship on this. Finally the Capitol had pulled together and passed a strong bill. A Democrat lawmaker noted: “This is one of the best pieces of work I’ve seen come out of the legislature because it came out as a policy document and not a political document.” It was music to my ears: POLICY, not politics. From Going Rogue, by Sarah Palin, p.156

The Keystone XL pipeline decision: A view from Canada and rebuttal from the Obama campaign.

From our neigbor in the North comes this unbiased opinion about the Keystone XL pipeline decision:

Here is the other side of the story, given to you by your friendly Obama/Biden 2012 campaign:

The first trillion dollar month for the U.S. treasury. A Limerick.

February 2011, the first trillion dollar month for the U.S. Treasury. Look at the sum 1.009.944.000.000 dollars as the monthly sum. Something to be proud of?

Click to access viewDTSFiles

The treasury just broke a record of sort.

Last month they came up a trillion bucks short.

 The media is mum.

And I do feel numb.

Other than that, no real news to report.

CO2, Man’s best friend.

They published a book I can recommend

It tells CO2 is our very best friend.

The warming is done.

Saturated*, we won.

Too hard for you warmists to comprehend?

The book is called “The many benefits from atmospheric CO2 enrichment.” and can be ordered from: http://www.valeslake.com/bookmart.htm

From:  http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/other/benefits_of_co2.html A synopsis can be downloaded in pdf form:

Click to access 55_benefits_of_co2_pamphlet.pdf

* The atmospheric rise in CO2 has no bearing whatsoever on temperatures in tropical and moderate climates for two reasons: It is swamped by water vapor which determines the final temperature rise. During the ice age the tropical temperature was about the same as it is today. Secondly the temperature rise due to CO2 has reached its upper limit because the free wave length of Infrared light in the frequencies of CO2 absorption is thirty to sixty feet, which means there is saturation of energy absorption, and fundamental physics holds that you cannot absorb more than all available energy for that particular frequency. There is a small additional absorption at high altitudes over the poles, so they will warm up a couple of degrees if we go from 380 to 1000 ppm of CO2. This too is good, the storms will be less severe, (the worst North Atlantic storms recorded occurred during the little ice age), and the polar bears like it a little bit warmer. (They might get competition from increased biodiversity though). The snowfalls over Greenland and Antarctica will increase, the glaciers will again increase. The biggest problem yet to be solved is insufficient amount of water in the 10:40 corridor. Even there CO2 is coming to our aid, for it enables vegetation using less water, and the yields are greater too!

British nuclear secrets revealed in START treaty.

Washington lobbied London in 2009 for permission to supply Moscow with detailed data about the performance of UK missiles. The UK refused, but the US agreed to hand over the serial numbers of Trident missiles it transfers to Britain.
Obama has done it, this time without reason

To give British secrets to Russia is treason.

He is but a fraud

Yet people applaud.

So issue subpoenas; it’s us that he pees on.

Trouble in Sweden. “The State is always Right”. Children taken from parents without due process.

Every now and then there is a news story that upsets me, and I am not clear why this story and not the riots in Egypt, the disregard for constitutional law, the general breakdown of civility and countless other stories that should upset you. The video shown below is of a Russian woman living in Sweden with her twin daughters and the government takes them away from her to protect the children from her. I know nothing of the case except it does not pass the smell test.

Maybe it is because as a child growing up in Sweden we lived in a textile town with an unusual amount of refugees from WWII, mostly from Estonia, but also Finland and Lithuania. I had many Estonian playmates. They spoke perfect Swedish, but their parents, often a single mom spoke none and were dependent on their children to function in the Swedish society. The Children translated the letters the government sent them and tried as a family to cope in this foreign land. They made it through only because their family unit, broken as it was, was all they had and this was enough.

Fast forward to today. Sweden is a total welfare state, champion of Children’s rights (against their parents). This means that the State, not the parents has total control over the children. There is a strong movement to take away the Parents Rights here in the U.S.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s goal is to make this country sign the UNITED NATIONS Convention on the Rights of the Child. This convention is signed by 194 countries but not US and Somalia. While looking good on paper the effect of this convention is that the State (Remember “separation of Church and State”) has first dibs on the children, not the parents. This clip is from Russian Television.

Job Czar Jeffrey Immelt: Crony Capitalism 101: A Limerick.

Corruption shows a familiar ring:

Immelt has friends in the White House wing

Re: Power consumption.

He got his exemption.

It  helps to be friend of the King.

Obama issues global warming rules in January, gives GE an exemption in February

By: Timothey P.Carney, Washington Examiner 02/02/11 4:50 PM

Jan 2011, the Obama EPA began enforcing new rules regulating the greenhouse gas emissions from any new or expanded power plants.

A week later the EPA issued its first exemption, Environment & Energy News reports:

The Obama administration will spare a stalled power plant project in California from the newest federal limits on greenhouse gases and conventional air pollution, U.S. EPA says in a new court filing that marks a policy shift in the face of industry groups and Republicans accusing the agency of holding up construction of large industrial facilities. According to a declaration by air chief Gina McCarthy, officials reviewed EPA policies and decided it was appropriate to “grandfather” projects such as the Avenal Power Center, a proposed 600-megawatt power plant in the San Joaquin Valley, so they are exempted from rules such as new air quality standards for smog-forming nitrogen dioxide (NO2).

There’s something interesting about the Avenal Power Center The proposed Avenal Energy project will be a combined-cycle generating plant consisting of two natural gas-fired General Electric 7FA Gas Turbines with Heat Recovery Steam Generators (HRSG) and one General Electric Steam Turbine.

Maybe GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s closeness to President Obama, and his broad support for Obama’s agenda, had nothing to do with this exemption. But we have no way of knowing that, and given the administration’s record of regularly misleading Americans regarding lobbyists, frankly, I wouldn’t trust the White House if they told me there was no connection. On the upside, at least Job Czar Immelt is creating jobs!