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Obama Saves The Salamander |
The Obama
administration has
reversed a Bush administration decision and is proposing to restrict
development on 74,000 acres in Sonoma County that is habitat for the
endangered California tiger salamander. The U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service settled a lawsuit this week by an environmental group
challenging its decision in 2005, under President George W. Bush, to
withdraw the designation of land on the Santa Rosa Plain as critical
habitat for the rare amphibian. The area covers farmland, housing and open space
from Windsor in the north to Skillman Road northwest of Petaluma.
Under the agency's proposal, any development that might harm the
salamander or its habitat would have to be cleared with the Fish and
Wildlife Service. Federal officials could require developers to take
protective measures or make offsetting investments in nearby land set
aside to protect the species. "The California tiger salamander
will finally receive the protection it needs to survive," said Noah
Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity.
Salamanders used to get in my house in Florida. They're pests. |
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Obama's Pollution Standards |
Obama plans to
announce new vehicle
emission standards and pair them with a broader goal of reducing
pollution.
Officials familiar with the administration's
discussions say Obama will unveil the new standards on Tuesday.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the official
announcement had not been made.
The plan would for the first time
link federal emission standards and greenhouse gas limits.
California, 13 other states and the District of Columbia have urged the
federal government to let them enact more stringent standards than the
federal government's requirements. The states' regulations would
cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent in new cars and trucks by
2016. |
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Obama's New Rules |
Some soccer moms will have
to give up hulking SUVs. Carpenters will still haul materials around in
pickup trucks, but they will cost more. Nearly everybody else will drive
smaller cars, and more of them will run on electricity. The higher
mileage and emissions standards set by the Obama administration on
Tuesday, which begin to take effect in 2012 and are to be achieved by
2016, will transform the American car and truck fleet.
The new
rules would bring new cars and trucks sold in the United States to an
average of 35.5 miles per gallon, about 10 mpg more than today's
standards. Passenger cars will be required to get 39 mpg, light trucks
30 mpg.
That means cars and trucks on American roads will have to
become smaller, lighter and more efficient.
Eric Fedewa, vice
president of global powertrain forecasting for the auto consulting firm
CSM Worldwide in Northville, Mich., said the changes will make pickup
trucks so much more expensive that they will be used almost exclusively
for work.
And instead of a minivan or SUV, more parents will haul
their families in much smaller vehicles with three rows of seats --
something more like the Mazda 5 small van, he said. The Mazda 5 gets
about 28 mpg on the highway.
"I think what you'll see is a lot
more creativity in interior packaging," Fedewa said. "You'll get more
rows of seats where you traditionally had cargo space."
Update: With a stroke of the pen, Barack Obama has imposed
higher fuel-economy standards on the American auto industry. Those
standards can only be met by making the average car smaller and lighter
than consumers prefer. The inevitable result is that thousands of
innocent Americans, possibly tens of thousands, will die painful and
sometimes fiery deaths, while many thousands more will be seriously
injured. This prospect apparently gave Obama no pause whatsoever.
He has never so much as hinted that he sees a moral dimension in the
trade-off between human life and reduced carbon emissions.
On the
other hand, Obama sees the brief and physically harmless discomfort of
three terrorists as posing a moral crisis of almost unparalleled
dimension, necessitating endless apology and hand-wringing. The
contrast in Obama's priorities is striking, to say the least. I
would submit that this is what happens when you substitute preening for
intelligent policy-making.
Another
update: The National Academy of Sciences has linked mileage
standards with about 2,000 deaths per year. The National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration estimates that every 100-pound reduction
in the weight of small cars increases annual traffic fatalities by as
much as 715.
And what will be gained by the new mileage
standards?
The Natural Resources Defense Council said that the
35 MPG standard would save about one million gallons of gas per day.
So how does that savings balance against the 2,000 fatalities per year
that the National Academy of Sciences says are caused by those same
lighter cars?
For the sake of being utilitarian, let’s
generously assume that the mileage standards reduced the price of
gasoline by $1. That would translate to daily savings of $1
million. Is that savings worth killing more than five people per
day, plus other non-fatal injuries and property damage?
The U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency -- for the purposes of risk assessment
-- values a single human life at $6.9 million dollars. So under
the new mileage standards, it would cost about $35 million per day in
human lives (not including non-fatal injuries) to save $1 million in
gas.
Just makes me want a
1958 Cadillac El Dorado
even more. |
|
Obama Is Wrong About Energy |
So far the score card, in
my
opinion, is not too pretty for the Messiah. He is wrong on Afghanistan,
wrong on Gitmo, wrong in taking over Chrysler and General Motors,
obviously wrong on the Banks as they all want to give the money back,
wrong on trying to push unproductive Unions down our throats, wrong on
who is supplying weapons to Mexican drug cartels, wrong on many aspects
of healthcare, wrong to apologize to the Mexicans, Europeans, and
Muslims in the name of all Americans, and now; he is spitting into the
wind with a fantasy of going green with energy.
As the rest of
the world is careening as fast as the wind toward nuclear power our
visionary leader (pun intended) is wedded to ideas that the rest of the
world (even those he apologized to on our behalf) had been there done
that and moved on, or are trashing it as we speak. Actually I don’t
think Obama can even utter the word nuclear; it never comes out of his
mouth you see.
In a recent speech to Congress the Messiah
pointed to China, Germany and Japan and three forward thinking countries
that are leading the United States in developing renewable energy. Wrong! Just like the weapons used by the Mexican Cartels and his
statistics on the connection between healthcare and bankruptcy, this is
totally false and pulled right out of some fantasy land.
China
is a coal digging, coal burning, cogeneration, coal liquefaction country
primarily. They are the biggest polluter of carbon-dioxide in the world. They will continue to be far into the future. According to the Beijing
State Electricity Council, their renewable energy production is
miniscule and in fact as declined over the last two years. There is hope
though for China but it ain’t in the direction Obama would lead us to
believe. China intends to increase its already significant nuclear power
production over the next 10 years by 8 time’s current production.
Japan produces a lot of solar panels; panels primarily for export! Only 3% of their energy is renewable energy and it is heavily subsidized
by the government. Their plan is to boost their nuclear power production
from a current 30% to nearly 50% over the next 10 years.
In the
Messiah’s world I guess Germany would be a valid example of going green
if it was sustainable and if they were not dismantling a great deal of
it at this time. The currently generate 15% of their energy through
renewable sources. As it turns out Germany has neither much sun nor much
wind and renewable energy companies are mostly on the government dole at
a huge expense to the country. Sounds Obama-like with some sort of thing
they call a "feed-in-tariff" whereby the producers are guaranteed a
price 7 times higher than the wholesale rate for the next 20 years. The
German electricity bill went up 38% in one year in 2007. And the Germans
have discovered that renewable energy is very inefficient in all
respects thus it will always be tremendously costly compared to other
forms of power.
And what about the Obama fantasy called
cap-and-trade which is also a disaster in Europe. According to Alex Alexiev, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C.,
"four years after its introduction, the EU carbon trading scheme has
failed to create a functioning emissions permit market, to generate
revenues, or to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions as promised…..but lead
to large increases in the price of electricity." Mr. Alexiev further
states, "The bottom line is that for the foreseeable future renewable
energy will remain a pie-in-the-sky green fantasy, not feasible
economically without huge public subsidies."
And my God, once
again I am agreeing with the French! They generate 80% of their energy
from nuclear power. Italy, Sweden, Great Britain, Ukraine, Russia,
Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Romania all have major plans to
grow their penetration in nuclear power significantly over the next 10
years. Did I mention India and China? Same for the both of them as well! It seems that solar panels and wind turbines are not in their plans!
As Mr. Alexiev stated, "this leaves the United States in the
unenviable position of being the only major economic power led by a
president dogmatically wedded to yesterday’s make-believe universe of
green energy that has already been debunked by reality in the rest of
the world. If Obama’s dubious energy agenda is rammed through Congress,
as seems likely, not only are Americans going to be saddled with a
crushing tax burden…….the country’s economic competitiveness could
suffer lasting if not irreparable damage!" |
|
Scientists Pan Obama Climate Report |
This is a small sampling of
first reactions to Obama's new global warming
report:
Meteorologist Joe D"Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The
Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological
Society"s (AMS) Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting says,
"This is not a work of science but an embarrassing episode for the
authors and NOAA."
Roger Pielke Jr., professor of environmental
studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the
University of Colorado at Boulder, says the report "misrepresents the
science" and "ignores the relevant work in peer-reviewed literature."
Geophysicist Dr. David Deming, associate professor of arts and
sciences at the University of Oklahoma who has published numerous
peer-reviewed research articles, says, "I become more skeptical every
year. I am now beginning to conclude that global warming simply does not
exist."
Despite the scientific evidence that the globe has been
cooling over the last 10+ years, Obama
chose to publish his first "science" report void of any recent,
real-world climate science. Instead, his administration hired a
public reltions firm
to embellish the past scaremongering generated exclusively from virtual
climate computer models. Unfortunately for real science and America, he
has sided with the pseudo science of "virtual lies" and hysterical
climate claims in order to get his badly needed revenue-generation
engine, "Cap & Trade," passed in Congress.
Continue reading
here
. . . |
|
Obama’s Politicized Global Warming Agenda |
Michelle Malkin's slams the EPA for suppressing inconvenient truths
about Obama’s politicized global warming agenda. As she
blogged
early Wednesday afternoon, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released
e-mails detailing how eco-bureaucrats stifled a senior researcher who
challenged the agency’s reliance on outdated data to support its
greenhouse gas "public endangerment" finding.
Breaking late
tonight, CEI has released the draft version of the censored study that
the EPA doesn’t want you to see. You can read the entire 98-page
document
here.
Here is the preface, which begins,
"We have become
increasingly concerned that EPA and many other agencies and countries
have paid too little attention to the science of global warming. EPA and
others have tended to accept the findings reached by outside groups…as
being correct without a careful and critical examination of their
conclusions and documentation." No wonder they tried to shut up senior
researcher Alan Carlin.
Continue
reading
here . . . |
|
Obama's Solar Panels |
Here's something you
won't hear about from the Obamedia -- the solar panels that Barack Obama
and Joe Biden inspected before signing the Generational Theft Act in
Denver, Colorado, will take 110 years to pay for themselves.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden feign interest as they look at solar panels during
a tour of the solar array at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in
Denver, Colorado, where Obama bragged about the efficiencies of these solar panels -- what
he didn't tell you about was that it will take until 2118 for them to pay for
themselves.
That's 110 years.
Oh! Here's a
little detail that Obama neglected to mention --these panels have
an expected life-span of 20-25 years.
There's more details
here . . . |
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Copyright Beckwith 2009
All right reserved
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