The Obama-Gaia Energy Partnership
Years ago, a Venezuelan acquaintance told me a story: Venezuelans and Germans had a rowing race. The German crew had ten oarsmen and one leader who shouted commands; the Venezuelan crew had one oarsman and ten shouters. Surprisingly, the German crew won the race. During an after-action analysis, the Venezuelan team tried its best to figure out why they had lost; the solution was obvious and the shouter majority easily agreed on it: they just needed more shouters. Venezuela under el Presidente Chávez has been following the same policy.
The United States federal government has been doing much the same; so have many states:
Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?
The solution? Invest more in growing governments bigger and “smarter” with more shouters. Can we afford it? Afford it? Don’t be ridiculous. This is only one small part of the way to win the future:
All federal agencies and private companies that deal with the U.S. government must identify their vulnerabilities to the impacts of global warming and develop a climate change adaptation plan, as per an executive order quietly signed by President Obama.
The order was actually penned in the fall of 2009 but the president’s Climate Change Adaptation Task Force had to properly investigate the matter and come up with recommendations. Now that the task force has developed a detailed plan on climate proofing the government, yet another Obama advisory committee, the Council on Environmental Quality, has issued instructions on implementation.
Under the plan, every government agency must integrate climate change adaptation into their planning, operations, policies and programs. That means they must appoint a “climate change adaptation specialist,” participate in climate adaptation workshops and educate every employee throughout the year. All agencies must identify and analyze “climate vulnerabilities” by spring of 2012 and execute an adaptation plan by the fall of 2012.
The training will also be required at all private businesses that contract with the government, including those that provide any sort of maintenance or logistics. In all, tens of thousands of public employees will be required to participate in Obama’s “green” plan, which will also require federal agencies to create greenhouse gas emissions reduction plans, increase energy efficiency, conserve water, reduce waste and support sustainable communities. No word on what all this will costs [sic] U.S. taxpayers.
Too much dependence on foreign oil (and there certainly is)?
Tighten restrictions on and erect more regulatory barriers to domestic oil drilling to make it more expensive; then promise to ease restrictions a little bit without really doing so while promoting more expensive “alternative clean” energy sources at taxpayer expense. That’s sure to cause businesses to drill for more oil domestically. Former President Clinton recently characterized the restrictions as ridiculous — and he’s right. Interior Department and various agency moratoria and restrictions have largely excluded U.S. companies from the Gulf and made their drilling elsewhere in the United States excessively expensive as well as burdened beyond all reason (unless the reason is to kill domestic oil production).
Want more domestic oil rather than less? Really? It’s yucky and smelly and Gaia winces in pain whenever we poke holes in her fragile body to get it, so that’s pretty terrible, but President Obama has become an energy activist. OK, let’s Win the Future: lend Brazil two billion dollars to help her develop her oil reserves and some in the Gulf as well; maybe we can call it all “domestic production” by declaring Brazil our honorary fifty-first state. Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas may be active in Brazil and will appreciate our efforts. China needs oil and won’t love us any less either for helping:
The US Export-Import Bank … announced $2 billion in credit to Brazilian state-run oil giant Petrobras, Latin America’s biggest company, which aims to become one of the world’s biggest oil producers in coming years.
The announcement follows US President Barack Obama’s visit in which he sought to drum up business for US companies, adding the United States wants to “be one of your best customers” when Brazil starts pumping oil from offshore reserves.
Much of that oil will be sold to China, already Brazil’s biggest investor and trade partner:
Published ahead of a planned visit by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to China next month, [a] report said Chinese firms have announced investments of nearly $30 billion in Brazil, including $8.6 billion currently under negotiation.
The energy and mining sectors represented 90 percent of those investments, the report by the Brazil-China Business Council said.
But Chinese investors have also made direct or indirect purchases of Brazilian farm lands, especially for soy production.
China is seeking “a base for supplies of natural resources,” the study said.
Brazilian exports to China have also climbed rapidly, from $1 billion in 2000 to $30.7 billion last year:
These exports — mostly in soybeans, iron ore, oil and other commodities — helped Brazil secure an estimated $5 billion annual trade surplus with China.
Most Brazilian imports from China are manufactured products, which soared from $1.2 billion in 2000 to $25.5 billion in 2010 (emphasis added).
Wouldn’t it be nice if the U.S. had such a trade surplus? Wouldn’t it also be nice if Brazil would send us some oil (from its “domestic” production or even from the Gulf) in trade for some used U.S. politicians? Nah, we don’t hate Brazil and maybe they don’t need our cast-offs. Last year, they elected Grumpy the Clown to their own Congress:
Francisco Silva became famous as Tiririca — “Grumpy” in Portuguese — and received about 1.3 million votes, nearly twice as many as the next-highest vote-getter in last month’s congressional elections. His campaign videos drew millions of viewers on the Internet, with slogans such as “It can’t get any worse” and “What does a federal deputy do? Truly, I don’t know. But vote for me and you’ll find out.”
“What does a president of the United States do? Truly, I don’t know. But vote for me and you’ll find out.” Not satisfied with increasing our domestic oil production in Brazil, President Obama promised lots more great stuff in his March 30 address. Grumpy the Clown also brings unbidden to mind former Speaker “pass the bill to find out what’s in it” Pelosi. She likes President Obama’s energy initiatives a lot and sure wishes that all those nasty Republicans would stop being nasty Republicans:
President Obama says the federal government will buy only alternative fuel, hybrid and electric cars and trucks for its fleets, starting in 2015, to set an alt-fuel example for the country.
In his energy speech at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Wednesday [March 30], laying out what the President called his Blueprint for A Secure Energy Future, he also said:
– The government will “partner with private companies that want to upgrade their large fleets” to alternative, hybrid or electric vehicles. “Partner” typically means the government will in some way pay them to do it.
– The government will continue to promote electric cars as the answer, and will offer bigger incentives for Americans to buy them (currently $7,500 per car) and reward — he didn’t say how — “communities that pave the way for adoption of these vehicles.”
– Obama acknowledged that getting power to run electric cars requires someone, somewhere to make electricity and outlined plans to do that, starting, in the meantime, with getting you to use less for other things. He pointed to programs he’s proposed to get folks to use less for lighting, heating and cooling. He also reiterated an earlier call for 80% of electricity to be from “clean energy sources” by 2035 and listed sources as wind, solar, natural gas, clean coal and (he nodded to Japan, but did not back off on) nuclear.
– The government will continue unspecified “historic investments in high-speed rail and mass transit” so people will not “get in a car and pay for gas.”
Solar power is a wonderful source of electrical power, although the costs may (in sunny places such as Nevada) be modestly greater than the value of the electric energy produced plus the jobs saved or created. No matter; President Obama must now show his true mettle by stepping up to the bat at the UN Bangkok Conference to pledge more to the fight against global warming at the Durban Conference. Otherwise, all will be for naught:
Governments have agreed to mobilize $100 billion a year, starting in 2020, but a “transition committee” to design the fund, which was to have been formed last month, is still being discussed along with exactly how the money will be raised.
Wait: there’s even more.
Food prices too high? The little people should grow their own vegetables organically, just as Mrs. Obama does at the White House, and learn proper nutrition — at least those unfortunates who don’t vacation in the south of France or sunny Spain can learn that way. School bake sales are now under federal control and those pitiful little people who feast on fast food but hunger for enlightenment will also have fewer obesity problems because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is proposing to require approximately two hundred and eighty thousand restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores and coffee chains to “clearly post the calorie count for each item on their menus.”
Since these “smart” educational steps probably won’t do much to trim down really stupid fatties who refuse to be educated, we will continue to encourage everybody to eat prudently by ensuring that crop lands are increasingly diverted from the production of food to the production of crops needed for ethanol production in order to make transportation costs, and therefore food prices, rise. The federal government has graciously accepted the burdens of taking care of our health needs, whether we want it or not; these simple steps will reduce federal spending to deal with treating the manifold problems of obesity.
Inflation creeping up? Good! Let’s get the price of everything up to reduce demand and thereby curb inflation. Mandatory reliance on clean but more expensive alternative energy sources will also make even highly regulated domestic oil production (i.e., that in the United States) more competitive. It’s a win-win situation for all.
The “smokestack” industries, which in the past created wealth and employed many high school graduates and drop-outs, have declined as we import more and more cheap stuff from China and elsewhere. Those industries are being replaced with cleaner and more technology based industries which outsource much of their basically unskilled assembly work to other countries so that the finished products can be imported for sale in the United States. This results in unemployment. The solution? Ask the Venezuelan racing team: just do more of the same. Build a stronger labor movement while we’re at it. The community organizer in chief is front and center. You must do even more:
[I]t’s time for Obama to take off his gloves and remind America that he started his work on the mean streets of Chicago and plans to fight hard for the American people, to protect them from the oligarchic tendencies of the GOP. Given that so many of the Republican’s proposals are deplorable – from de-funding women’s health to privatizing Social Security – it would be easy to deplore their proponents.
On further reflection about Brazil and our clowns, we have a large surplus. Even though Brazil may think that she has enough of her own, she needs to lighten up a bit. We should offer her whatever incentives are necessary to persuade her to accept some of ours. If Samantha Power becomes our next secretary of State she could easily pull it off. That would be a more mutually productive form of foreign assistance than has been customary for a long time. Wouldn’t it do wonders for America’s image abroad?
In 1961 the liberals had a multitude of plans and projects for improving American society. Walter Wolfgang Heller, the JFK/LBY economics advisor declared that Keynsian economics would smooth out the business cycle, McNamara’s whiz-king systems analysts were going to revolutionize warfare, the War on Poverty promised victory over structural poverty, they would attack the root causes of crime and devise rehabilitation programs to reduce recidivism. There was even talk of a Department of Leisure to guide the population in socially desirable directions.
Almost nothing worked and that confidence in the combination of government power and High Wonkery dissipated. Today their central idea is little more than the belief that government is a good thing and there ought to be more of it. They have one success to show. They have multiplied their dependent constituency and on this they hope to retain power.
The current situation could not be better summed up in two short paragraphs then this.
Dept. of Leisure: Veblen springs to mind at once, with his “leisure class”.
Just nitpicking: Surely you meant JFK/LBJ.
I wish that the confidence in High Wonkery had faded. Unlike the JFK/LBJ time there are many other sources on talk radio and the internet but all the media sources that existed then are still as dedicated to the ponouncements of silly High Wonkery as it was then. The poison was administered to America as a result of progressives gaining substantual contol of the technical means of communications. Faith in Harvard, MIT , Columbia and other producers of High Wonks is way too great.
I worry that the solutions to problems are not known outside of the nerd herd. Do people understand that “Peak Oil” is the result of hiding oil reserves from the tax man? That Geothermal electricity from the super volcano sites could provide 100% of electricity for the west? That there would be fifty diseases cured in the next five years if the inventors could make noney on the cures. Do they that the cost of illness would drop like a rock if the FDA didn’t block cures to keep people from living longer.
Agreed
I agree. Great comment John Frary.
It is things like the “Climate Change Adaption Taskforce” that drives me crazy. Man made global warming has been thoroughly bebunked as a great scam perpetuated by the left and we are still GROWING government based on the lie. It is so frustrating to see our leaders cave in to the left’s insatiable appetite to grow their support base at my expense. Why can we not stop this madness????
Obama’s America sounds increasingly like a cross between Weimar Germany under Chancellor Bruening and Freedonia under the administration of Rufus T. Firefly.
I’m also reminded of Argentina, the former breadbasket of South America, which had a near-collapse of its agricultural production in the decade following the Falklands War. Why? Because the new, “enlightened” socialist government decided that farmers needed “political awareness” training instead of just being left alone to … farm. Generally speaking, you can sit on a tractor all day, plowing, seeding, fertilizing, weeding, and reaping in succession, or you can sit in a classroom being lectured on socialist ideology and “collectivist farming theory”- but only one form of sitting gets the crops in.
The fact that Obama is determined to “save Gaia” by not drilling for oil, or building anything useful, here, while paying Brazil and China to do things we need done, strongly indicates that in addition to his expertise in medicine (O-Care), he is also a shaman tuned in to Gaia’s consciousness. And she is telling him that drilling in Brazil won’t hurt her as much- somehow. Maybe he’s a student of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan?
“Ecologists” are for the most part delusional, humanity-hating individuals who are much like the UFO “contactees” they scammed their “philosophy” from in the 1960s; both groups long ago left the Earth mentally. The main difference between the two nut cults is that for some stupid reason, our academic and other “intellectual elites’” decided to take the “ecos” seriously forty years ago, and as a consequence of this have since done a wonderful job of screwing things up for everybody else. Obama is a case in point of the inevitable result of this “extraordinary popular delusion” as Charles Mackay would call it. (Martin Gardner, if he were still around, would no doubt put it in a new edition of “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science”.)
By the way, I like the picture at the top of this column. It nicely illustrates the fact that, like most of his “enlightened” ilk, the only world that interests The One is the world in his own head. He can’t even see the one the rest of us live in.
Not that he would bother to look. In that world, he isn’t God. Therefore, it cannot possibly exist.
clear ether
eon
Ellis Washington, in response to Obama’s State of the Union speech, said (Jan. 27, 2010), “The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails us — lack of common sense and good judgment. To paraphrase a comment on Reuters: Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who despite his promise to ‘fundamentally change America’ is, after all, merely a fool.”
I absolutely love your quote!
“Maybe he’s a student of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan?”
Haha, haven’t heard that reference since I was a young man….one of the books that CC wrote was “A Separate Reality”….maybe zero really is channeling Don Juan…..
55 million fools elected 1 big one with the help of marxist media. Now we have ObamaCare, ObamaSpeak, ObamaCzar and pretty soon ObamaJail for those that don’t like it.
Claudia Cattaneo in today’s Financial Post offers these snippets from a report entitled “The Energy Reality” by John Mawdsley:
1) biodiesels use 500 times the amount of water that oil sands projects use to generate the same amount of electricity;
2) about 149 million people per year could be fed with the feedstocks now being used for ethanol production in the US;
3)using a 100,000 barrel a day oil sands plant in Alberta to offset ethanol production could feed 34 million people per year;
4) it would cost $4.4 trillion in solar panels to replace coal-fired electricity in the US.
Many years ago Readers Digest published bar graphs portraying that the US wasted more energy than the rest of the combined industrial world used. If the ratio of wasted energy still exists then both supply and demand must be adjusted for better efficiency to salvage US economy sooner. Compound interest dollars, like gravity, increases proportionally to the mass of the principal and inversly proportionally to the square of its dollar distance from the balance owed.
Is it too much to think that maybe George Soros is massively short the US Dollar?
Ethanol: The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Corn Bread?
Ethanol (ethyl alcohol) biofuel, aka booze when it’s purified, bottled and sold in liquor stores, has been the greatest boon to some farmers and some states since the inventions of tractors and porta-potties. To everyone else, it’s been a bust.
The blending of up to 10% ethanol with gasoline, now mandated in a number of states and localities, was a government brainchild ostensibly begun in the interests of reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil imports. It has developed into a typical, wasteful boondoggle which is enriching farm states and farmers who raise corn, potatoes, and sugar cane and gaining big political points with politicians at the same time it’s helping to impoverish those needing gasoline to survive.
Alcohol as a motor vehicle fuel is hardly a new idea. Henry Ford built his Ford Model-T’s to run on it, or on gas, or on a mixture. Alcohol as a widespread biofuel, however, is very much a modern concept and very much the product of the less than supple minds of environmentalists, conservationists, and the good people at the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. As is so often the case when government gets involved in anything, bureaucrats are unable to factor in either obvious or unintended consequences. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=4124)