The Coming Regulatory Black Hole
Forget the fiscal cliff. Sooner or later — probably later — Speaker Boehner and the president are going to come to an agreement that will raise taxes on the wealthy with a solemn, cross-our-hearts-and-hope-to-die promise from the Democrats to cut an unspecified amount from the budget at an unspecified later date.
Just when the Democrats are going to screw over the GOP and refuse to make any significant budget cuts or engage in negotiations that would reform entitlements will also be unspecified.
But there is another looming crisis for the taxpayer and businesses large and small. It is the flood of new regulations that will be issued in the coming months. Delayed by the White House before the election because their implementation would have adversely affected business and cost jobs, thousands of new rules will be issued that will cost American business an estimated $100 billion. This is on top of the already gargantuan regulatory burden that the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates at $1.8 trillion — $215 billion this year alone.
Just how many new regulations will business have to deal with? We don’t know because the administration has failed to issue a report, required by law, that would set out Obama’s regulatory agenda. The Heritage Foundation’s Diane Katz explains:
Congress mandated a regulatory agenda from each agency in 1980 under the Regulatory Flexibility Act. The statute calls for release every April and October of a description of all rules likely to have a “significant economic impact” on a substantial number of small entities. A series of subsequent executive orders extended agenda requirements to all regulations under development or review by some 60 departments, agencies, and commissions.
Of course, the Obama administration is no stranger to flouting the law when it comes to deadlines. Senator Coburn pointed out that the administration has failed to meet dozens of deadlines when it comes to Obamacare alone. It also missed a budget deadline last summer, failing to send Congress a mid-session review. Most recently, the president was late with his report to Congress on the impact on departments and agencies of going over the fiscal cliff.
What is it with these people? They’re like college kids putting a major paper off until the last minute and then pulling an all-nighter to write it. But in the case of the regulatory agenda that is required by law to be submitted to Congress twice a year, the Obama administration fell asleep in the middle of the night and woke up a year later. Their last regulatory agenda report was in the fall of 2011.
The dog must have eaten the Spring 2012 report, and the Fall 2012 agenda must have been lost in the campus mail.
Senator Rob Portman was forced to send a scolding letter to the president, reminding him he’s not following the law:
“For nearly three decades, presidents of both parties have published their plans for new regulations twice a year,” Portman wrote to Obama today. “Now, with the spring plans still missing, the Fall 2012 Regulatory Agenda is also overdue. In light of this apparent trend, I am writing to inquire whether your Administration has chosen to abandon this tradition of transparency altogether.”
Now that the election is over, it is obvious why the administration has refused to update Congress on its regulatory plans. There are as many as 4100 rules in the pipeline ranging from the annoying to the tortuous. And the White House bottled them up for “review” until the president was safely re-elected because many of them are so onerous that they would have cost jobs.
Great… more arbitrary “rulings” on what we can/can’t do because there hasn’t been a proprer lawful budget and regulatory legislation therein for years now. Thank you, Democrats, for letting bureaucrats run our lives.
I’m non-partisan & would like to point out that the Dem v Gop tussle is playing into the hands of those who use the age old tactic of divide & conquer while continuing their greedy rush to gobble up what’s left of the public estate before the metaphorical crap hits the fan of impossible endless growth in a finite biosphere that’s now staggering toward the abyss like a drunk determined to lurch over a cliff.
IMO it’s now TOO LATE.
I’m glad I’m old because I’ll be dead by the time my grandchildren have to remove breathing apparatus to spit on my grave for being part of a system that destroyed the future of this once green planet.
Silly old Hippy/Boomer: Your grandkids won’t be the only ones spitting on your grave.
Rod Blagojevich to be released from prison
http://illinoispaytoplay.com/2012/12/14/rod-blagojevich-to-be-released-from-prison/
So what does that have to do with this topic?
And who cares what happens to the clown governor, former governor
of Illinois? Bloggo is only one of 3 former IL Govs in the big house
for being stupid while in office. Too bad only IL has laws that sentence
elected reps to prison for being stupid while in office… There are enough
elected reps, local, state and federal who deserve some time in the big house
for being stupid on the job… better they be stupid in the unemployment line.
But I digress… I work in a factory, where there are rules on rules for everything related do the job. Employees break the employer’s rules, OSHA
rules and the ‘rules’ of common sense all the time… 19 years ago, somebody
lost his life because he failed to adhere to a single rule… and even if you
follow all the rules, employees still get hurt on the job, cuz accidents happen..
And again I digress… We need rules because people will be greedy and do things to make a buck first, screwing everybody between them and that buck. But making rules for the sake of making rules, is not a good thing for our fragile economy…
Obama and his people have NO clue as to what it takes to make that buck and they don’t really care about you or me… This clown should be unemployed… but alas Santa failed me again…
Why all the economic strangling via regulations? To kill the economy! There is nothing rocket science about it and there is a plan in place to destroy capitalism, albeit dressed up under other verbiage.
And while this is being accomplished (stealth-like) the underlying plan – importing Shariah Law into the US, is being borne.
A win-win, but not for Americans.
It takes the most anti-American POTUS in US history to accomplish the above – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/07/27/barack-hussein-obama-the-radical-in-chief-his-subversive-underlings-lurching-from-one-anti-american-disaster-to-another-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
“WAIVER NATION”
One thing I think we will likely see as a result of this regulatory tsunami is another wave of “Waivers,” this time from some burdensome regulations or another. Waivers will be handed out to those businesses that are willing to toe the line, as in: hiring only union labor, contributing to Democrats, and — in the case of any businesses in serious distress — to allow themselves to be virtually “nationalized” like GM and Chrysler.
Companies belonging to people who are already big-time Obama supporters will also get waivers by default.
Ding, ding, ding….
We have a winner.
The ambit of these regs is to make Crony Capitalism the only way to fly.
If you don’t tithe to the Wan — you’re crushed.
Every move Barry makes is to grow Barry.
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One is reminded of ‘dry counties’ whose politicians take payoffs from moonshiners — and their retailers.
Yep, the Obama Administration is just “Chicago politics” writ large–”pay to play,” or you’ll find yourself in a regulatory nightmare! Jon Corzine can swindle thousands, but he’s not going to jail since he’s a loyal Democrat, but woe unto those who don’t contribute to the DNC.
I wonder how long it’ll take the low information voters to ‘get it’ – that they’ve been had? Electric bills are going up – expect gasoline to do the same. Prices for new cars with hybrid or fully electric drive-trains will go up too – not that its such a big deal since many of those low information voters won’t be working anyway. Unemployment will follow the trend of the electric bill as the economic engine that is America – small businesses – slowly die on the vine for lack of care and feeding – and in fact are being actively targeted for destruction.
I expect that a good percentage of the low info voter will at some time in the next year or two have a mild epiphany – a sense that all is not right in America. Maybe that ‘feeling’ will grow – lets hope so – we need to take back this country from these commie bastards. Most of them are (obviously) to the left of center on the Bell Curve but they are smarter than a frog at the least. I think they’ll feel the heat in the water soon enough. Most of them anyway. Will it come too late for the 2014 mid terms? I suspect Feckless Won won’t play his full hand before then – he wants full control of the House and Senate for those final two years and it’ll be Dusey.
I’d just like to thank those low info voters and the Republican Party too – for getting Feckless Won reelected. He couldn’t have done it without their help.
Actually I have different words than thanks but I don’t think PJM staff would be happy with me posting my actual feelings on this subject so I’ll just say in advance to all those low info voters and G-D’ed RINOS – I TOLD YOU SO!
Ya know…
I am a not-particularly-bright product of public education (the way it was when it wasn’t quite so dangerous to the Republic) and a not-so-insightful observer of human nature, yet even I could see that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were leftist demagogues who did not give a **** about the rule of law or had the slightest respect for the Constitution and their pivotal role in preserving and protecting it as they came to power in 2006.
With those two, toilet paper was both more useful and was given more respect.
Then came Obama.
You didn’t need much more than a room temperature IQ to tell that this guy was trouble – big trouble – back in early 2008
No greater threat has emerged to the existence of this Republic since its founding – not secession, not slavery, not war, not depression. Nothing. He came to power with the express purpose of destroying this Republic.
And he is succeeding brilliantly – even has time for hundreds of rounds of golf to boot.
Secession is not a threat to the republic, but rather, the only means available to restore it.
Stop dreaming that the low informational voter will wake up around 2014. Journalist and Democratic party will blame Repuplican/ capitialist bourgeios obstructionism for the discomfort. And it’ll work.
In Old Europe, whenever the powers-that-be created a catastrophe, the Jews and the Gypsies were blamed. The populace fell into line, burned down ghettos and hanged gypsies, and that was that. It worked for centuries.
Modern “progressives” have Republicans and the Tea Party as their new “Jews and Gypsies.” I suspect that “low information” types will go along with blaming those entities for quite some time.
You are spot on with your observation about the low information voter. I had discussions with several people who I thought were intelligent before the election, and believe me, they were totally clueless about what the Obama Administration was going to do if re-elected. The kook-aid drinkers will continue to sip the Obama brand–just like the frog in the pot as the heat is being turned up–they lack the intellectual ability to discern the long-term implications of what is going to happen, but then again, like those who are on the receiving end of the Federal largesse, e.g., food stamps, AFDC, etc., as long as they can suck from the Federal tit, they are quite willing to continue (or to increase) their Federal dependency–they think that money grows on trees—at least until Bernanke’s endless money printing makes the US dollar worthless and we experience the 21st century version of the Weimar Republic’s hyperinflation.
C’mon. Are you going to believe the BLS falling CPI and PPI, or your own lying eyes in the grocery, clothing, and hardware stores?
A big part of the reason for all these regulations can be found in this revealing quote published in an interview with Yale Environmental 360 by UN Climate Chief Christine Figueres:
“It is the most inspiring job in the world because what we are doing here is we are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken. The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science. So it’s a very, very different transformation and one that is going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different.”
So all this regulation most adversely impacts entrepreneurs who are not political players. Not on board with the Crony Capitalist, China seems to work just fine, “coordinate to compete in a Low Carbon Green Economy where there is no clear distinction between public and private sectors” economy for the 21st century. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/didnt-adam-smith-write-a-book-explaining-why-this-is-a-bad-idea-back-in-1776/
There was even a conference on this in May in London called “Breakthrough Capitalism” that none of us got invited to. But the tech companies did. They are in charge of collecting all that data and crunching it that is supposed to make central planning via regulation easier this time. If only the Kremlin had had such info and supercomputers.
The Age of the reason of the Enlightenment, economic freedom, and the legitimacy of the Individual and his zone of liberty and autonomy has been official declared to be over. Funny how that announcement got held up too unless you play tiptoe through the footnotes of government and NGO reports.
These DC gangsters have been hitting the agricultural sector for some time and now they EPA has really gone overboard. Amongst the regulations released already is one that was defeated earlier. They are declaring dirt roads a point source of water pollution which means loggers and farmers will have to get expensive permits and face stiff fines for things like mud puddles after a rain.
This is really going to hurt a sector already shaky because of high fuel costs and declining demand because of the tanking economy. With any luck our worthless politicians will quash this again and muzzle the increasingly berserk EPA. If not, then governors need to whip out the nullification pen and strike it down that way.
It is hard enough managing a business in this economy and even worse when the biggest threat comes from bureaucrats at all levels from local to federal all increasing fees and permits.
Let me add that I think the people writing these regulations, especially in the EPA, should be deeply and thoroughly investigated. There has to be a reason why they want all of this land put up for sale. It’s either Agenda 21 or someone in the system is lined up to make a lot of money.
I’m sure that a large driver of these “regulations” is Agenda 21. Its an all out drive to push you off your land in the exububs and hinderlands and corral you in the cities. After all the deer and the antelope need land to romp and roam, you not so much. And how much better to corral you like cattle than to have you live in a government apartment, in the city, and taking the bus with all the vagrants and criminals? Cars will out after gasoline becomes $8.00 per gallon and price sticker price is pushed up with onerous regulations.
And expect a lot of cities of dissolve into the counties, so that the rich counties can subsidize the uneducated, the shiftless, and lazy in the cities.
Welcome to the brave New World, commrad. Enjoy the ride to the bottom. After all, its only “fair”.
Three characteristics of regulation make it particularly devastating:
1) No budget or appropriations process exists. The object of regulation is to inflict costs on a private entity, or to transfer wealth from one private entity to another, so the murkier the cost estimates the better. Agency cost/benefit calculations are a joke.
2) Regulatory agencies are captured by special interests, including ideological interests as well as economic ones — EPA by the True Greens; NLRB and the Labor Dept by the unions; and so on. Couple this with #1, and the results become disastrous. As the late, and brilliant, economist Mancur Olson noted, there is no limit on the costs that a special interest will impose on others or on the economy as a whole for the sake of relatively minor benefits for its own constituencies. Furthermore, the government and its employees has become a special interest all its own. And Washington is filled with representatives of organizations, and these representatives have become a weird special interest that resists any change in the culture of corruption.
3) Under a legal rule called The Chevron Doctrine, an agency has great scope to define its own authority. Congress passes a vague law and then the interpretation is up to the agency. The Supreme Court lives in a fantasy world in which agencies are staffed with disinterested experts, rather than with the dogmatists, political hacks, and opportunists of reality.
(JV DeLong is a reformed regulator and a former Research Director of the Administrative Conference of the United States. For more – see “Ending Big SIS (The Special Interest State) and Renewing the American Republic” [www.specialintereststate.org])
Translation: our Mussolini for Morons ramps up his rule-by-decree, further marginalizing the American people. As Hitler said to the Reichstag after getting his Enabling Act: “And now I have no further need of you.”
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I’ve had the unfortunate experience of meeting Lisa Jackson and hearing her speak on environmental regulation. She’s a whack job, pure and simple.
Just this week she is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s monument to junk science and emotional idiocy, Silent Spring.
Hey Lisa, how many millions have died due to malaria in third world countries, that could have been easily prevented with judicious use of DDT?
The radical environmental movement really was the last refuge for American communists and fellow travelers.
The ‘we care for you nanny-state’ disguise is only ‘the big-brother state of 1984 fame is only the new techno-police state in which we now live. The noose is tightening. The low information voter will remain happy with their pork.
Yesterdays WSJ page one: “U.S. Terror Agency To Tap Citizen Files.” “Counterterrorism officials wantd to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens-even people suspected of no crime.”
We are now all guilty and must pay to pledge our innocence. The purge is in session. These words and yours will be recorded for potential evidence.
It’s the last chip thrown on the table. Education, health care, the courts are in the bag and now business. Since the government doesn’t want to be seen nationalizing business, they’ll do the next best thing with the same result by regulating them under their facsist thumb.
Mussolini and Hitler would be proud. I guess all we have left is the Military or do we?
Thanks
Darn,
Forgot they really should pick up all of our guns before they send out the National Security Force. I like Brownshirts better, but they won’t listen to guys like me as they march us to the gulag for re-education.
Call it State Capitalism or Crony Capitalism, the shape of the monster being designed should be clear to all. Small businesses, family farms, self-starters–they all have to go. These tend to be the type of people who think for themselves, go their own way and do things that are a little too unpredictable for Central Planning. An important aspect of Central Planning is to mold and shape.
The media arm of Central Planing has done an outstanding job of keeping half the country blaming big business while the other half blames big government. Isn’t it obvious by now that when government extends its tentacles far enough they merge with big business, and big business with government? The top names at Central Planning move effortlessly from the business arm of the monster to accept top positions in the administration, or to run for office. And when the stent in government is finished, a cushy position awaits back on the business arm.
So at a time when many small businesses and family farmers are barely hanging on, the regulatory flood gates are thrown open. What other possible reason could there be, other than to wipe out the livelihoods of those pesky little people who dare to think for themselves.
Call it Crony Collectivism… because that’s what it is.
The federal government has no permission to engage in such activity… and yet, the oath-breakers in all 3 branches, in every department and agency, and even in some state and local governments, do engage in such corruption.
H.R. 3200 (111th): America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 111th Congress, 2009–2010. Text as of Oct 14, 2009 (Reported by House Committee).
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/111/hr3200/text
The wicked goal is to DESTROY small and medium sized businesses and force more people into joblessness and homelessness.
Nothing less than the DEATH of the great nation of America is sought. The death of freedom that gave America her prosperity and greatness.
I don’t get it, I can’t understand how so many people can either be so effing stupid, so ill informed, or just don’t care enough to see what’s coming.
I truly want to grab people wearing Obama propaganda and ask them if this is really what they wanted.
I’ve asked everybody who voted for Obama, what does his relection do for personal freedoms and indivdual rights?
I get a blank stare and then, “well Romney is just one of those rich guys.”
Sheeple, damn sheeple who refuse to think for themsleves.
When the wolves train the lambs to be docile, the easier they are herded. This has always seemed the obvious mistake with utopians. You can popularize groupthink, indoctrinate the young, but there will always be a few willing to do whatever it takes to gain power. Everything coming from DC is setting up the country to be controlled.
It’s called well intended ill informed apathy. It is the final stage before collapse and rising of a dictatorship of the elite, by the elite and for the elite and out of this benevolent oligarchy will eventually arise a tyrant who will reign supreme until eventually everything collapses again and hopefully a republic rises out of the ashes. But who knows, technology may prevent that from happening again.
Another classic PJ “Pornography, threat or menace” piece. No need for arguments when your conclusion is identical to your premise. But are Federal regulations harmful to business? Does it even make sense to lump everything that counts as a regulation into the same category?
I deal with Federal regulations in my day job, which involves the power generation industry. Over the years, some of the regulations have been intelligently framed, others were remarkably obtuse. None, so far as I can recall, were malevolent. In fact, since the last quarter century has been an era of conservative dominance, deregulation, and privatization in the utility industry, the regs have demonstrated signs of regulatory capture by industry more often than not.
Running power plants and transmission systems is an incredibly complicated undertaking. You folks think of regulations as a set of burdens or constraints on free enterprise, which you seem to think has magic powers to figure out technical questions. Thing is, the regulations and the research that goes into them actually provides a service in many cases. The Feds aren’t the only source of such guidelines and advice—various professional bodies and non-governmental agencies also out standards that are authoritative in practice—but what the Feds do, especially in the nuclear area, would be hard to do privately.
The American economy has always been partly private, partly governmental, right back to the Erie Canal and the National Road. The regulatory superstructure isn’t an imposition on the economy. Like the hugely important research financed by government, it’s an integral part of it.
Sorry Jim:
If you’re talking to Rick Moran, then you are creating a straw man to knock down. Regulation is not the problem he’s bringing up, but rather, a veritable tidal wave of what you referred to as “obtuse” regulations is about to be unleashed, and Congress had absolutely nothing to do with crafting them. Do you see the difference?
If you’re referring to this comment thread, you have a point about the over-the-top assumptions some posters may be making. But how bad does reality have to be before you, Jim Harrison, realize that massive, paralyzing regulation is a problem?
Also, “deregulation” is a misnomer in this case. What you call “deregulation” is simply a roll-back of regulations. The affected industries are still regulated, just not as stringently. See the difference? And, incidentally, much “deregulation” was nothing of the kind. In your own industry, the “deregulation” of California utilities was fraught with regulatory boobytraps placed there by California legislators. They wanted to insure that “deregulation” would fail, and they succeeded.
In the absence of standards, competitive pressures will ensure that every firm will screw the public as much as possible. Of course the firms that are most eager to screw the public are also most eager to avoid regulation. In the utility business these firms tend to be major supporters of right-wing causes.
Hostility to regs isn’t just motivated by economics, of course. There really are plenty of poorly written regs, which is probably inevitably granted the complexity of the business and the arbitrary requirements put in place by legislators. What I find more often is that regs are resented by businesses simply because they irritate big boppers accustomed to getting there way. When the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 were passed under the elder Bush, the engineers and scientists in my world looked at the limits on pollutants and told the guys upstairs that they wouldn’t be a serious problem to implement. The tycoon types, especially the owners of the dirtiest power plants, nevertheless went ballistic and dreamed of telling the Feds to go piss up a tree.
In my experience, at least, the limits on the behavior of business that are most resisted are the ones that are needed the most.
It is a fundamental conceit of the Statists that government employees, appointees and elected officials are — by that status — made more moral than private citizens working towards their own financial interest.
This is the faith that permitted every historical abuse of government/ despotic rule.
The most extreme case on record was the Tsar of Russia. It was actually argued that since he had absolute power — he could not lust for more — and would, therefore, rule like Solomon.
It was an absurd notion — but it sure found favor in the Tsar’s court.
Such thinking echoes in your sentiments WRT Barry & Co.
His anti-coal crusade is religious in nature. It’s also sure to be futile and counterproductive. As long as we live under one atmosphere — the pollution of Red China and India will still waft our way. And both have absolutely no intention of backing off wide open dirty coal.
Indeed, though Red China has top of the line power plants — with bag houses for soot — she is permitting all of her power companies to bypass them — just to save chump change.
The resulting soot is melting the ice sheets all across the Arctic. Which is then blamed by idiots in the MSM upon AGW.
The soot in Red China is so bad that ones vision is constrained like 1870s London — in a bad fog. That, and the coughing, is not enough to get the Chinese autocrats to clean their own air.
Since Red China already releases more dirty exhaust than America — and is on track to double its output in fifteen-years — the entire ambit of Barry’s crusade is tilting at windmills.
He’s also entirely against American drilling. At every turn, he’s putting the screws to it.
Not withstanding that impulse, fracking is releasing so much methane that the American carbon footprint is going down faster than any other major power.
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Barry’s maladministration is driven by religious impulse: a faith of regulation over all.
Regulation for regulation’s sake.
After which, politically motivated waivers may be necessary.
It’s the Chicago way.
Get a clue.
I have 36 years of experience in municipal water and wastewater treatment. I’ve dealt with USEPA and the Ohio EPA on some level for evry day of my career. I’ve had this same discussion many times over the years, and you my friend, just don’t get it.
Nobody with two functioning brain cells wants to go back to the pre-1970 days when industry and cities just dumped things in the streams and air with no regulation whatsoever. The pedulum, however, has swung so hard in the other direction it has smashed the clock.
I have a question I challenge you to answer in a serious way. How clean is cean enough? I had an EPA engineer tell me once “I don’t care how much it costs, I want zero risk.”
Zero risk? Don’t step ouside your front door then, because life is full of risk. The trick is figure out how much you are willing to take. If EPA would have an independent organization such as NSF or UL do their cost-benefit analyses on new regs, and only promulgate those that have a positive balance I’d cheer and jump on the bandwagon.
You want an example? All new NPDES permits for wastewater plants have a mercury lmit for discharge of 1.4 nanograms per liter or parts per trillion. Now get this – that is well below the minimum detectable concentration using today’s most sophisticated methods. The recent air quality regs for coal fired power plants have the same kind of crap embedded in them. Every wastewater treatment plant in the nation had to file for a variance, contingent upon upon new detetion technology that might in the future lower the MDC.
For crying out loud if someone dumps just one broken CFL in their toilet in our town, we’re over the limit!
No malevolence? I don’t buy it, not by any stretch of the imagination. Do we need sesible environmental regulations on a federal level? Of course!! We all breath the same air, and most rivers affect somebody downstream. But we definitely do NOT need regulations intentionally designed to kill manufacturing, increase the cost of energy through the roof, and redistribute American wealth to developing countries.
At the risk of giving a non-ideological response on an ideological website:
I know about the overreach you speak about. For example, I’ve worked on jobs that relate specifically to the mercury limits and, like you, I’ve marveled at regs that insist on levels below what is detectable by current analytical means. Maybe we’ve dealt with different EPA guys, but my take on such situations is not that the regulators were out to get the utilities but that legislatures like to write laws in ways that sound good and political appointees like to overpromise. For me, the classic case is the Superfund legislation that called for 100% remediation of toxic sites and set off a huge series of law suits. If I were running the zoo, I would have mandated 80% remediation with a promise to revisit the question of whether you want to go for an 80% reduction of the remaining 20% in a second go-round. Political realities guarantee that environmental measures will be done in a haphazard way. Thing is, haphazard or not, only government action is going to deal with problems that cost billionaires a lot of money. The elephant in the room, after all, isn’t mercury emissions. It’s CO2.
Shocking science by way of NASA:
Way back in the 60s NASA was intensely interested in closing the food cycle in orbit/ transit to Mars.
So it funded basic research as to just what could be done — with the least weight — to bring human waste ( breath, liquids and solids ) back around, biologically, so that at least a decent percentage of astronautical food could be self-sourced.
Immediately thoughts turned to algae brightly lit with solar rays, via some lens or mirror.
When grown hydroponicaly, algae is impressive. The kicker was that the best results only occurred if the partial pressure of carbon dioxide was elevated.
But the real kicker is that the tempo of improvement was exponential.
Carbon dioxide is plant fuel — fertilizer.
As its partial pressure rises, the tempo of plant growth goes up e x p o n e n t i a l l y.
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Today’s world has a partial pressure of carbon dioxide significantly above that two-centuries ago. So much so that NASA’s calculations indicate that 15% of today’s agricultural yields are directly due to this effect.
It goes otherwise unremarked because its a gradual — u n i v e r s a l effect.
The exponential ramp means that as our contribution rises, the Amazonian rainforest just kicks into a higher gear. Current partial pressures of carbon dioxide are far, far below what plants would really like.
Hence, pot growers have been known to use bottled carbon dioxide under hydroponics to replicate NASA’s test conditions — to produce a super crop in super time.
If the world were to actually reduce the partial pressure of carbon dioxide — from today’s levels — global harvests would decline 10-15%. That’s what NASA research shows.
IN SUM: carbon dioxide is Plant Fertilizer — and todays levels are stimulating plant growth — natural and man made.
BTW, coral reef’s growth rate is constrained by the partial pressure of dissolved carbon dioxide. As sea water is made more acidic — the critters just suck it down into shell matter — making it less acidic at quite a tempo.
For both plants and corral, death is the consequence of zero carbon dioxide. They live to Hoover it up.
Oddly enough, scientists are aware that plants use CO2 in photosynthesis.
When you were studying for your PhD in stupid, they apparently didn’t tell you that. In fact, there have been a long series of experimental studies testing the effects of increased atmospheric CO2 on crop yields and forests. If you do the math, whatever increases in growth you get—you don’t always get any—are trivial in the context of climate change. Since huge vested interests would love to find some reason not to deal with global warming, every possible wrinkle that could buck the current scientific consensus has been exhaustively explored and very well financed, just as in the day the tobacco companies paid big bucks for research that could demonstrate that Camels really are good for you.
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Delightfully non-responsive.
Test conditions and current practice are crystal clear: elevated levels of carbon dioxide lift plant growth.
It’s the mark of Bad Science to fake otherwise.
BTW, when NASA performed their tests the matter was not politicized at all.
Now, however, entire careers can be financed by jumping on the carbon dioxide hustle.
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For the ultimate in hilarity…
60 Minutes broadcast of a terrible melting in Argentina — Patagonia, no less. You see, a massive glacier was melting like a wicked witch. The talking head and camera crew were filming from the ice.
The idiots were standing atop a soot and ash ridden ice cube! In the distance a sharp eye could see an erupting volcano — across the border in Chile — spewing ash like it was Mt. Saint Helens. Consequently, the albedo of the glacier went way low, even as the ash dissolved into the ice.
Then, with a seriously straight face, the boob uses this peculiar instance to ‘prove’ that we’re all doomed if we keep using so much energy.
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For most plant systems NASA studied, carbon dioxide partial pressures were RATE LIMITING.
Hence, with every step of partial pressure increase, their growth rate took off.
Because of the nature of chemical reactions — a shift in a rate limiting reagent always causes an exponential ramp in the number of activated complexes until other, limiting, effects kick in.
For the issue at hand, no limiting factor stops an exponential rise, for the partial pressure of atmospheric carbon dioxide is so low that even a full doubling still leaves it trivially low.
In the distant geological past, carbon dioxide levels ten times current did not trigger a green house, runaway effect. If it had, Earth would’ve joined Venus in the Permian period, which, come to think, is when most of the best oil deposits were laid down.
BTW, Kenya just struck oil — in quantity — in Permian strata. Yes, their very first test wells are all producers. It may prove up to be the southern end of the strata that runs up through Saudi Arabia and off to the Caspian Sea.
In which case, Kenya has a shot at joining OPEC in less than seven years.
I’ve also had extensive experience in predicting and sizing water distribution systems using computer modeling. There are a number of problems with the “science” claimed by Hansen etc. in predicting future climate with computer models.
-At best computer modeling can only give rough indications of what may happen in the future under a given set of conditions. This is true of water systems, which are many orders of magnitude simpler than global climate. The variables in global climate modeling are so numerous as to make the practice only a little more reliable than reading chicken entrails or rolling the bones.
-The models conveniently ignore the Medievil Warm Period by only using data from after the year 1200.
-GIGO! We know now that data was intentionally manipulated to slant the results.
-Recent research (including ice corings from the Anarctic spanning tens of thousands of years) show CO2 levels peaking not before the warmest periods but AFTER!
-Even the UN’s climate research body has recently published admitting that solar influences may play a much greater role in our global climate than previously thought.
-None of the most prominent high priests of AGW live as if CO2 is of any concern whatsoever. See Al Gore, Hollywood, etc.
I could go on all day, but in summation, cheap and abundant energy is the very foundation of a decent standard of living. Scarce and expensive energy, OTOH, kills people and keeps the ones left living in miserable poverty. Treating carbon dioxide like a pollutant is the biggest scam ever perpetrated on mankind.
Raising doubts about the role of CO2 in global warming is rather like denying the reality of evolution. The scientific evidence is overwhelming in either case, and if there were no ulterior motive for endlessly questioning it, nobody would. Scientific theories are all provisional, and models are all approximate; but they are the best we’ve got and a hell of a lot better than the religious and ideological alternatives. The scientific consensus, the result of a long and spirited debate, is overwhelming and is now subscribed to by something like 99% of the people who have a right to an opinion on the subject.
It’s getting hotter. Our activities are the main cause of the problem. The consequences will hurt a lot of people. The longer we wait to deal with the climate change, the less effective and more costly are efforts are likely to be. Whether Al Gore is fat or not is beside the point.
You make some legitimate points, just hope you aren’t in the coal end of the grid,could be bad news.
All this outrage, both feigned and imagined, at consequences that were foreseeable. Those who believe in limited govt are vastly outnumbered, even within the ranks of the GOP, as the Boehner/McConnell wing demonstrates on an ongoing basis.
Romney was hardly the second-coming of Reagan but he is a sight better than BO. Yet the Repubs’ combination of religious bigotry and economic ignorance did much of the Obama campaign’s work for it. Millions fewer voted for Mitt than did for McCain, and this is four years AFTER all suspicions regarding Obama had been proven. Couldn’t be because anyone thought McCain is some conservative vanguard; he is as pro-govt as most of his cronies on the other side. What is now happening results from two things: the success of the left in establishing the dependency state, and the fecklessness of the right in insisting on ideological purity from a man with whom it agreed on 70% of things, at least. Congrats.
Actually, you are wrong about Romney’s election numbers. Romney passed McCain in votes some time ago is the 4th leading vote-getter in history behind Obama’s two elections and Bush 2004.
The title of this piece is RACIST.. how dare you use the word ‘BLACK’ ??
I dunno, “hole of color” is a bit off-putting.
Ironically, there are NO government regulatory policies whose origns are of political or government Bureaucrats. They ALL originate from the private sector special interest groups and their lobbyists.
human beings are fools !!!! , the black hole of “idiot’s ” are running this “cesspool” of a nation and going ” over” the cliff is a forgone conclusion!( ephesians 6 : 12 )
You want yer Waiver or not?
Hoo buddy it’s gonna cost ya
I will admit that the Dems seem to have overplayed their admittedly powerful hand. They’ve alienated the right almost completely. Long term, that could be a very bad mistake.
Short term or long term, this article gives us a good example of what both parties have been doing in D.C. …increasing the cost, size and scope of government on a y/o/y basis. That’s our budget crisis in a nutshell…and both parties bear the guilt.
We’ve got to get rid of entire departments of government, at every level of government, including the regulations, laws, rules and compliance costs on the economy. While you can pick and choose which departments are eliminated, you can’t pick and choose which departments get slashed and cut back…dramatically. They’ve all got to be slashed…including the ones that you, personally, love and adore. If we don’t do this, we’re not serious about addressing this problem.
We’re spending 40% – 50% more than we take in, people. Raising taxes won’t cover it, because you reach a point of diminishing returns along the way…gutting the economy in the process, which will, in turn, slash tax revenues.
Thus far, and except for a few, rare individuals hre and there across America, no one else is discussing the reality or the true depth of the problem we face. Not even the author of the above article.
The survival of the nation is at stake…and we’ve done it all to ourselves…and only we can fix it.
But it won’t be easy, and it won’t be pretty.
Your comment is based on the false assumption that we are faced with some crushing debt emergency when, in fact, the bad deficits of the last couple of years are largely a consequence of the crash and are already declining. Of course, as a conservative (well, radical really), you oppose measures that would actually goose economic growth and ease the deficit situation. In any case, the long-term problem is almost totally a function of insisting on a wasteful and inefficient private system of health insurance. If we paid for health care at the same rate as France, Germany, England, or Japan, there would be no deficit problem. Meanwhile, it simply isn’t true that Americans pay an especially high proportion of their incomes as taxes or that we have a bloated government. America has long been a land of private opulence, public squalor because we have opted for (relatively) low taxes and low services.
AS far your warning about Obama alienating the right goes, one can only laugh. How the Hell more alienated can you lot get? You’ve been talking about secession, for Christ sake. You go all Ann Frank if you have to recycle your beer cans. I think people underestimate how much of ideology is an addiction to certain pleasures, in your case the pleasure of working yourselves into hysterics about imaginary threats to your integrity or manhood. You can’t cure this form of mental self abuse by indulging it. It can’t be appeased. It certainly can’t be argued away. Maybe the best thing is to simply laugh at it until so much of the country discounts it that it becomes irrelevant and loses its current ability to prevent taking practical steps to deal with real problems.
You are under the well neigh universal mis-apprehension that the Federal Government is borrowing money — in the classic sense — wherein the borrower pays the money back.
BUT: Our government is UNIQUELY able to ‘pay back’ lenders with a fiat currency that it prints right out of digital ether. There’s no there, there — or even then.
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For reasons of space and time, I’m going to jump to the close:
For fiat issuing governments the following equation is universally, mathematically true:
Spending = Taxation
At this time taxation takes the following forms:
Excise taxes, import tariffs ( the taxes of our Founding Fathers )
Income taxes ( for the last century )
Estate taxes ( ditto — not an income tax — it’s a death bed WEALTH tax )
Labor Wage taxes ( aka Social Security and Medicare taxes — not a graduated tax at all )
[Both income taxation and estate taxes were enacted to go after the 1% of the 1%. The rest is history.]
Those taxes now fall short, covering only about 55% of today’s Federal outlays.
The remainder is ‘borrowed’ — with the ‘lender’ being the US Federal Reserve System — it’s SOMA account.
In plain English: it’s being printed into being. The ruse of cycling it through Wall Street with fake auctions is cute. It only fools the public — not Wall Street. It’s got you, though.
Money printing in a fiat system = a Wealth Tax upon all financial assets, however constructed, that are keyed to the currency — for it is being debased.
You see the net results when critical imports, such as crude oil, explode in price. Right now you’re paying twice as much for gasoline as four years ago. The entire difference is due to the currency debasement tax. The evil foreigners are trying to compensate for the horrific slide in their REAL values of their American investments.
And, they’re not quiet about them. Red China and Putin have been howling. Our MSM kicks their commentary off the table. It’s not suitable for the proles.
Weimar Germany used a government financing scheme IDENTICAL to ours during the 1920s. There’s not an iota of difference between our system and the one that blew up in 1923.
We’ve managed to attain the same magical thresshold, too: 45% money printing, 55% collections.
They got away with it for a while — until it ran away.
It is never the case that the powers that be EVER see the breakdown coming. That’s because it is an intrinsically unforeseeable event. It’s due to crowd psychology. You can’t model it.
Once the break occurs — it’s chaotic, abrupt and terminal to the government issuing the fiat currency.
At a stroke, everyone on it’s payout list gets absolutely hammered.
For Weimar Germany, the British experts came on in and took over the national budget. Millions were cut from the government teat. Actual tax collections went up.
While most everyone has heard about the Weimar hyper-inflation — it’s a rare bird who knows that Germany ended up being run by Britain and France. These two powers took over Germany’s national budgets and simply called the shots. This was done technocratically — with the legislature still left sitting. It, however, was reduced to rump status.
In many ways, this was a prequel to Hitler’s enablement act. The second time around, everyone was used to the ineptness of the legislature and its politicians. Hitler made a convincing argument that this time he’d have to clean things up — just like the foreign bankers did before.
This last bit is entirely lost upon most modern historians – because the whole re-boot of Weimar Germany is simply not taught. Even at the time, the shift in control over to the hated foreigners was played down.
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One last thing: when the currency was re-booted — silver coins were used. No nation ever got rolling on the gold standard. Every last major power of history ran their books on a silver standard:
America
Britain
Spain
China
Rome
Greece
et. al.
Gold simply does not trade. Every owner is a Midas.
We do, in fact, have a debt crisis, but its full effects have not yet surfaced. That will happen as soon as we experience some inflation. Our interest rates are at an all-time low, which is good for borrowing (though lousy for investing). However, they are so low that it would be very easy, once we get a little inflation (which will surely come as the economy recovers), to, say, double or even triple the interest rate. At that point, the amount of money required to simply pay the interest on the debt alone will exceed the total revenue of the US. Once that happens, we are simply bankrupt as a country.
It’s hard to take someone seriously when they so easily and casually dismiss the significance of four consecutive years with $1 trillion plus annual deficits. When BO was running for POTUS in ’07/’08, he expressed his own concerns (justifiably, I might add) about the annual deficits compiled by George W. Bush. But Obama has managed to surpass, in only four years, the total debt that Bush added to the total national debt in his eight years in office. I’m extremely concerned about deficit spending regardless of which party is in power (i.e., the White House and/or Congress). But what essentially rubs salt into the wounds of those fiscal concerns is the blatant hypocrisy of those on your side of the spectrum who repeatedly decried the deficits accumulated during Bush’s two terms in the White House but so quickly excuse the far bigger deficits that have been realized with Obama sitting in the Oval Office. But, I really shouldn’t be all that surprised. After all, liberals are the experts at double standards and bald-faced hypocrisy.
It’s hard to take anyone seriously about the deficit who belongs to a group that never game a damn about deficits until they became a club to wield against the Democrats.
Deficits matter, which is why I’ve been complaining about Republican fiscal irresponsibility for a good 30 years now. Deficits aren’t all that matters, however; and in times of insufficient aggregate demand, cutting deficits is counterproductive. Indeed, as the Europeans are learning, austerity budgets don’t even reduce deficits because the main reason for the deficit explosion of the last four years is the Depression itself so that policies that don’t promote growth result in lower taxes and unavoidable government spending.
Suppose you had to tell the truth for a change—I know you won’t do it here in public, but just imagine. Isn’t the real reason you beat the drums about the deficits so loudly that you see the current situation as an opportunity to finally destroy Social Security and Medicare and the other programs you’ve been against forever? After all, if you really cared about the soundness of our finances, why were you so silent before?
Of course part of the problem here is the pop Conservative understanding of economics. You look at deficits as if governments were individuals or families, which they are not. Deficits create problems, but they simply don’t make governments go bankrupt. And as we’ve seen over the last four years, they don’t even cause inflation when they don’t crowd out investment, something they can’t do now because nobody wants to invest when the customers aren’t buying.
All of the Democrat plans for this Nation and our future are on track..Aidded and assited by Stupid Repubilicans Esp. Bush Jr. the Stupid!
Do you think Obama and Democrats really care this Nation is getting getting poorer and deeper in debt every day and the quality of life is decreasing and the misery index is increasing?
That is their plan!
Normal people thinks no one would be diabolic and sick enough to purposely use policies to reduce the Nation and its population to a state of Poverty, Crime, Misery and Corruption, but you would be wrong!
That is exactly the Democrat plan for this Nation!
The more Democrats can decrease Education achievement,, Reasoning ability and increase the Liberal idealogy, Poverty, Welfare and the Entitlement mentality the more Democrat voters they make and the closer they get to a Third World Socialist Food Stamp Paradise controlled Lock, Stock and Barrel by the Democrat party!
The last piece to achieve their goals is nearly in place. Amnesty for the 12 to 30 million criminals and uneducated invading Illegal Aliens. That with chain Immigration for the ones still left in Mexico and Latin American and with a Prolific breeding rate will assure a Democrat majority forever and a Third World Slum here of Crime, Corruption, Poverty and Misery modeled on Mexico and controlled by the Socialist/Democrat party of Northern Mexico!
It is all about Power, Control and the Democrat party and how to use lies, false compassion and the people,s tax money, to achieve their Sick and Treasonous goals!
whats totally awesome is the resulting morass can justify more power for the feds. all these unemployed people will need food.
I’ll turn 50 this coming June 14th, Flag Day. I’ve always taken great pride when I get out of bed on my birthday, step outside and place the pole holding that flag into it’s usual hanging bracket. But when I perform that solumn task next June, it’ll be with a very heavy heart. I never thought I’d live to see the day when so many Americans would express their approval–through their votes (twice now)–for a man so blatantly hostile to the very things that made this country great. The Democrat’s “regulatory black hole” Mr. Moran describes above will almost certainly take us further down a very dangerous road, both economically and politically. I fear that we’ve gone so far down this road already that it’s going to be next to impossible to get back to the proverbial fork in the road and go in the right direction again. Simply put, I’ve never held so much disgust for so many of my fellow Americans for willingly embracing the left’s radical anti-business, anti-free enterprise, anti-success agenda (personified in our current president).