Giving credit when undue

The LA Times story on US domestic oil production reaching a new high features a photo of a smiling Pres. Obama under the headling "Oil imports down, domestic production highest since 2003":
The visual composition would lead a casual reader to think that increased domestic production was the result of Pres. Obama's kind and caring policies implemented with the goal of helping cash-strapped consumers as they struggle to pay for a tank of gas. To its credit, the LA Times does admit, if you read to the eighth paragraph, that maybe Obama shouldn't get the credit:

But independent analysts attribute much of the fall in oil imports to slack U.S. demand in a still-anemic economy. And to a certain degree, they say, the boost in domestic oil and gas production is the result of decisions energy companies made during the George W. Bush administration to develop key reservoirs.

A more honest article would point out the Obama administration's hostility to oil develop, fracking, and the Keystone pipeline, as well as a general intransigence on oil exploration permits. But, the paragraph above is the most one can expect from the liberals at the LA Times.

PREVIOUSLY on oil:
•News reporter hypocrisy on gas pump prices
•Federal judge finds Obama administration contemptible
•The Keystone pipeline: Obama sows economic chaos
•Instead of permitting oil exploration, Obama supports "green" failures
•"Expert": By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’
•Obama ignores oil, supports "green" energy
•Obama only pretended to lift ban on deepwater oil exploration
•Obama uses faked science to ban oil drilling
•Obama subsidizes Brazil's offshore drilling
•Study: gas savings from driving a hybrid failed to make up for the higher initial price:
•While Obama bans US exploration, Russia, China negotiate with Cuba to drill for oil off Florida coast
•Ethanol subsidies are more expensive than BP oil spill
•"Peak oil" theory discredited.

Colorado cantaloupes have killed more people this year than US commercial nuclear power in its entire history

The UK Guardian reports:

A listeria outbreak linked to cantaloupes from Colorado has killed 13 people and infected 59 others, US health officials have said. [Emph. added]

The FDA associates the outbreak with Jensen Farms’ Rocky Ford-brand cantaloupes.

How many people have been killed by commercial nuclear power plants in the US? None, as best I can tell. This Wikipedia article lists deaths from nuclear and radiation accidents and none are attributed to US commercial nuclear power in its entire history. (The Wikipedia article does not list Three Mile Island because no one died at Three Mile Island. For more details, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's summary of the health effects of Three Mile Island is here.)

Hat tip: Instapundit

Federal judge finds Obama administration contemptible

As reported by the Wall Street Journal (Hat tip: MichelleMalkin):

A federal judge Wednesday blasted the Obama administration for "determined disregard" of his order to lift a ban on offshore oil and gas drilling last year, giving fresh ammunition to the oil industry and its allies on Capitol Hill who want the Interior Department to speed approvals of new offshore drilling projects.

The ruling by Judge Martin Feldman of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana means the Interior Department could have to reimburse Hornbeck Offshore Services LLC, a Louisiana drilling company, for the costs of litigation that the firm brought last year challenging the legality of the drilling moratorium. . . . .

In his ruling, Judge Feldman said Hornbeck was owed the money because the government's conduct amounted to contempt of court. [Emph. added]

Hornbeck may get reimbursed. Too bad, the judge cannot order the Administration to reimburse the whole country for damage done to health care and the economy.

Wind turbines pose threat to songbirds

In a looming enviro-catastrophe, Ohio's Oregon City Schools want to install wind turbines. As the Toledo Blade reports, environmentalists are horrified:

The Black Swamp Bird Observatory [BSBO] near Oak Harbor has voiced concerns about the district's proposed project and the lack of regulation on noncommercial midsize turbines.

Kim Kaufman, the observatory's executive director, said the Clay and Eisenhower turbines would be on the western flank of the Lake Erie marsh region and would pose risks for birds landing to rest before completing their annual flight north.

"We're talking about birds that are mostly migrating at night, and that includes songbirds," Ms. Kaufman said. [Emph. added]

The Obama administration, having no concern for songbirds, may subsidize this disaster with, as the Blade reports, "federal stimulus money, tax incentives, state grants, and other government programs." The BSBO has issued a press release calling for a moratorium:

With full support of the BSBO Board of Directors and the support of many other organizations, agencies, and private citizens, BSBO is seeking to introduce a three-year moratorium on any additional wind turbines along the Lake Erie Coast in Lucas, Ottawa, Sandusky, and Erie Counties until further research can be conducted on the potential impacts on birds and bats.

The BSBO is urging all good environmentalists to sign their petition.

Airports have long struggled with the problem of birds. As a consequence of the way their brains evolved, birds are not capable of reacting to an approaching object until the impact is less than 5 seconds away. That may work well if the approaching object is an average predator. If it is an airplane, it is too late.

PREVIOUSLY on wind turbines:
•Victims say clean energy is making life "unbearable" and destroying their property values
•Alternative energy meets reality in NYC
•Environmentalists and corporate welfare

Cap and tax in the US Senate: a who's who of the villains and their committees

Although the attention is on public-option healthcare, the NY Times reports that six committees in the Senate are working to advance cap and trade (cap and tax) legislation. Since (a) the House has already passed a version of cap-and-tax and (b) Obama will likely sign any such bill the Congress delivers to him, what happens next in the Senate is critically important:

1. Environment and Public Works Committee
   
   Sen. Barbara Boxer (chair, D-CA) and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA, chair of the Finance Committee), are expected to release a draft bill that will be based largely on Waxman and Markey's H.R. 2454 (PDF, 932 pages) . Sen. Kerry seems less concerned with what is in the bill that with what it is called:
   

   Kerry made attempts to reframe the verbiage surrounding the bill and sell its concepts more broadly, insisting it is not a "cap and trade" proposal but a "pollution reduction" bill. "I don't know what 'cap and trade' means. I don't think the average American does," Kerry told reporters. "This is not a cap-and-trade bill, it's a pollution reduction bill."
   

   Sen. Inhofe (R-OK), the Senate's strongest voice of reason on this topic, is the ranking minority member on this committee.


2. Energy and Natural Resources Committee
   
   This committee, chaired by Sen. Bingaman (D-NM), has approved an energy bill, S. 1462 (PDF, 532 pages), which the NY Times says "includes a nationwide renewable electricity standard and a raft of other energy incentives, including a provision that could bring oil and gas rigs closer to Florida's Gulf Coast." Sen. Bingaman is concerned about limiting the costs that cap and trade might impose on industry.
   


3. Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee
   
   This committee, chaired by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), is expected to hold votes on various cap and trade issues. Because West Virginia produces a lot of coal, Sen. Rockefeller is expected to negotiate special deals and exceptions for his coal producers.
   


4. Committee on Finance
   
   Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) says his committee will mark-up the provisions on international trade and the allocation of emission allowances provided Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) says the bill is "clearly moving." Politico reports that Sen. Baucus is claiming that his committee has jurisdiction over distributing "hundreds of billions of dollars in pollution allocations" and the value of this political prize is putting him in direct conflict with Sen. Boxer and her committee.
   


5. Comittee on Foreign Relations
   
   Sen. Kerry (Chair, D-MA), who is contributing to Sen. Boxer's bill (see above), is also "preparing language without convening a markup."


6. Comittee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry
   
   This committee, chaired by Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), is also "preparing language without convening a markup." Sen. Lincoln says that no cap and trade bill will pass the Senate this year.
   

Of these six chairmen, only Boxer and Kerry appear to be global-warming-true-believers. However, because they are backed by the president, the possibility of cap-and-tax legislation, which would potentially impose large and unpredictable costs on industry, continues to be a threat to the economy.


RELATED: On the Republican side, there are four senators whom Dems hope will vote for cap-and-tax: Olympia Snowe (R-ME), John McCain (R-AZ), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Richard Lugar (R-IN).

Global Warming Update

While Al Gore claims all scientists (except the 'deniers') support him, the only scientist mentioned by name in "An Inconvenient Truth" is James Hansen of NASA. However, Hansen's Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic - Says Hansen ‘Embarrassed NASA’, ‘Was Never Muzzled’, & Models ‘Useless.’

For more on James Hansen, see "Is it warm here or is it just NASA?" as well as the posts here, here, here, and here.

ALSO, scientists have found that weather events in the upper atmosphere (stratosphere) are related to fluctuations in the cosmic rays which reach the Earth:

What did surprise the scientists, however, were the intermittent and sudden increases observed in the levels of muons during the winter months. These jumps in the data occurred over just a few days. On investigation, they found these changes coincided with very sudden increases in the temperature of the stratosphere (by up to 40 ^oC in places!). Looking more closely at supporting meteorological data, they realised they were observing a major weather event, known as a Sudden Stratospheric Warming. On average, these occur every other year and are notoriously unpredictable. This study has shown, for the first time, that cosmic-ray data can be used effectively to identify these events.

How much of Earth's weather that can be explained by astrophysical events remains to be discovered.

Alternative energy meets reality in NYC

Like many dreamy-eyed liberals, New York's mayor Bloomberg went to a conference on "clean energy" and talked about the glorious future of windmills: he proposed putting them on NYC buildings and bridges. By the time he returned to NYC, as the AP reports, everyone, including the environmentalists, had already objected:

NEW YORK (AP) - Mayor Michael Bloomberg is backing off his suggestion to put windmills on city bridges and rooftops after newspapers mocked the idea with photo illustrations of turbines on the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building.

"There are aesthetic considerations," Bloomberg said. "No. 2, I have absolutely no idea whether that makes any sense from a scientific, from a practical point of view."

Bloomberg sought to dial back his windmill proposal while speaking to reporters on Wednesday after returning from Las Vegas, where he gave a speech at the National Clean Energy Summit imagining, among other things, harnessing wind power with turbines on bridges and skyscrapers. ....

David Carr, of the Alternative Energy Institute, in Canyon, Texas, said mounting turbines high above the city is "not very feasible."

"I don't think this was very well thought out," he said.

Among the complications are turbulence and vibrations the buildings would have to endure, plus the relatively small amount of wind the turbines would be able to harness in a city where other buildings and trees stand in the way, Carr said. Also, skyscrapers typically are not built to withstand the load of turbines.

"If you want it for art and decoration, that's fine, but for achieving any kind of power that's useful, it's not a very good idea, and I don't know of anywhere that's done it very successfully," Carr said.

It is also difficult to imagine residents would welcome spinning turbines outside their windows in a city where a proposal to install a cell phone tower on a building on Manhattan's Upper West Side generates protests and interference from local elected officials.

Earlier this year, Sen. Ted Kennedy, the lion of liberalism, worked on blocking windmills in Massachusetts.

When the children are in charge

The (Qatar) Peninsual reports:

Libya's most senior oil official said on Thursday he was studying the possibility of reducing output in response to a US threat to sue OPEC members, although he said the North African country had no concrete plans to do so for now. [emphasis added]

So, the child-like (that is, emotional not rational) threat by the Democrats to sue OPEC gets a child-like response from Libya.

Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.

Thinking like adolescents

In response to gasoline prices that are now over $4/gallon, the Democrats proposed a bill to raise taxes on oil companies. Of course, there is no economic theory under which raising taxes on oil companies causes oil prices to go down. So, what are they thinking? I think that becomes clear when you review their rhetoric. For one:

U.S. Rep. Paul Kanjorski said it's time for to stand up to the big oil companies and "shout out, dammit, we've had enough."

For another, former Governor and US Senate candidate Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) says:

"We need a United States Senator who will stand up to the big oil companies and fight ...."

Sen. John Edwards says:

"We need to stand up to the big oil companies ...."

When it comes to standing up, Sen. Clinton says she does it better than Sen. Obama:

"When it came time to stand up against the oil companies, to stand against Dick Cheney’s energy bill, my opponent voted for it and I voted against it.”

Schoolchildren who have "had enough" should "stand up to" a bully. Is the Democrats oil policy based on the principle that oil companies should be treated as if they were 'bullies'? Are domestic oil companies raising prices not because, with domestic oil exploration all but forbidden, they are forced to buy crude for record prices on the world market but rather because they are bullies being mean to poor consumers? Is this just another case of Democrats trying to solve adult problems of allocating scarce resources by using inappropriate childhood analogies? That explanation is consistent with this statement from another Democrat governor:

"The President of the United States -- the most powerful man in the world -- is too chicken to stand up to the big oil companies," Governor Jennifer Granholm [D-MI] told the crowd to rousing applause. [as above, emphasis added]

So, according to Gov. Granholm, Pres. Bush's policy decision is not based on reasons of economics or philosophy. No, the reason that Pres. Bush doesn't "stand up to big oil companies" is that he is "chicken"! Again, this points to reasoning via childhood analogy on the part of a Democrat.

PREVIOUSLY, I have noted various uses of inappropriate childhood analogies by Democrats and by ("pro-life liberal") Gov. Huckabee. These childhood analogies often involve either the search for a parent figure or justifications for behaving like children or treating peers as children. Examples are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

RELATED: A comparison of Democrat and Republican approaches to lowering oil prices is here. A look at where the Democrats have forbidden oil exploration is here. For more on Rep. Kanjorski, see here.

In ideology, size matters

Russell Roberts notes a curious similarity between Sen. Gore and Mao. Quoting from James Taranto's summary:

Mao More Than Ever
Blogger Russell Roberts has a fascinating juxtaposition, starting with the following, from an Associated Press report on Al Gore's congressional testimony:

Gore advised lawmakers to cut carbon dioxide and other warming gases 90 percent by 2050 to avoid a crisis. Doing that, he said, will require a ban on any new coal-burning power plants--a major source of industrial carbon dioxide--that lack state-of-the-art controls to capture the gases.

He said he foresees a revolution in small-scale electricity producers for replacing coal, likening the development to what the Internet has done for the exchange of information.

Sound familiar? Probably not, but check out this Wikipedia description of Red China's "Great Leap Forward":

In the August 1958 Politburo meetings, it was decided that steel production would be set to double within the year, most of the increase coming through backyard steel furnaces. Mao was shown an example of a backyard furnace in Hefei, Anhui in September 1958 by provincial first secretary Zeng Xisheng. The unit was claimed to be manufacturing high quality steel (though in fact the finished steel had probably been manufactured elsewhere). Mao encouraged the establishment of small backyard steel furnaces in every commune and in each urban neighbourhood. . . .

Huge efforts on the part of peasants and other workers were made to produce steel out of scrap metal. To fuel the furnaces the local environment was denuded of trees and wood taken from the doors and furniture of peasants' houses. Pots, pans, and other metal artifacts were requisitioned to supply the "scrap" for the furnaces so that the wildly optimistic production targets could be met. Many of the male agricultural workers were diverted from the harvest to help the iron production as were the workers at many factories, schools and even hospitals. As could have been predicted by anyone with any experience of steel production or basic knowledge of metallurgy, the output consisted of low quality lumps of pig iron which was of negligible economic worth.

As Roberts notes, "Giving up the economies of scale we currently use for energy production is going to be very expensive."

In a free enterprise solution, small-scale power producers would be allowed to compete with large-scale producers, with both subject to similar environmental rules, and the consumer decides who wins. In liberalism, either the Gore or Mao variety, the winner is to be decided instead by ideology.

The Oscar for best politics goes to

Al Gore for his global warming agitprop. While global warming advocates want major reductions in consumer energy use, Al Gore is showing no leadership in this area. The Tennessee Center for Policy Research looked into Al Gore's energy usage:

Al Gore’s Personal Energy Use Is His Own “Inconvenient Truth”

Gore’s home uses more than 20 times the national average

Last night, Al Gore’s global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, collected an Oscar for best documentary feature, but the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has found that Gore deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy.

Gore’s mansion, located in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES).

In his documentary, the former Vice President calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home.

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.

“As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk to walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to home energy use,” said Tennessee Center for Policy Research President Drew Johnson.

In total, Gore paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for his Nashville estate in 2006.

The problems with Gore's version of science are addressed more substantively by Dr. Patrick J. Michaels who, for instance, addresses the sea rise issue:

The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland’s 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100.

Where’s the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent Policymaker’s Summary from the United Nations’ much anticipated compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore’s film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.

Dr. Michaels has a Ph.D. in Ecological Climatology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1979) and is Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Virgina. He was a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was an author of the 2003 climate science "Paper of the Year" awarded by the Association of American Geographers. This makes is hard for his detractors to call him out of the mainstream but they do anyway.

UPDATE: Gore responds to the house electricity issue here, claiming that he tries to consume "green" energy and, among other things, he uses "solar panels and uses compact fluorescent bulbs." It would seem that solar panels and fluorescents must not be very effective if, despite their use, his electric bills are so high.

RELATED: Michelle Malkin has a post on strikingly similar story of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do in animal rights: PETA activist Pamela Anderson says she had no idea that the sheepskin boots that she made famous were actually made of sheep's skin.

UPDATE: From James Taranto:

Of course we don't begrudge Gore his life of luxury--only his sanctimonious insistence that the rest of us sacrifice our comforts to the dubious god of global warming.

It is interesting to contrast Al Gore's energy consumption with Pres. Bush's relatively eco-friendly Crawford ranch.

UPDATE: For hypocrisy similar to Sen. Gore's, see this report:With five private jets, Travolta still lectures on global warming.