Liberalism: Unsafe at Any Speed

Another day, another false dilemma churned up by a smirking smartass on the left...

Here is his attempt at ridiculing us simpletons who want to bring down gas prices by tapping more of our own energy resources here at home. 

He's imitating a game show to add to the comic effect...

Hello again, everyone! I'm Matt Miller. And welcome to "You Can't Handle the Truth," our weekly quest to see if Americans can face the facts needed to solve our most pressing problems

Matt [winking]: You see the dilemma. Today's rendezvous with truth? Gas prices. With Libya in chaos and Mideast jitters sending gas past $3.50 a gallon, we'll take on the most sacred cow in the entire bovine pantheon: the entitlement to cheap gas. 

In our pre-show poll, we asked our studio audience if they would support higher gas taxes (and thus even higher prices) to achieve a rare public policy trifecta. First, we'd reduce our dependence on oil. Second, we'd create market incentives to invest in clean energy. And third, we'd raise much-needed revenue to shrink our budget deficit. As a bonus, we might eventually stop sending young Americans to die for oil in the Persian Gulf, too!

Alas, 80 percent of you said "no,"

When has higher taxes ever achieved its purpose?
Taxes go up and so does the debt.  Why?  Because politicians can't stand the sight of money just laying around.  They've got to spend it on pet projects, dubious enterprises, and goodies they hand out to get reelected.  Money collected for Social Security goes into the general treasury to pay current bills, so what makes this naive fool think jacked-up gas taxes would go to "green energy?"

Going Green = Higher Energy Costs = More Jobs Lost

It is also a myth that increasing the price of fossil fuels will make green energy more viable.  In the microcosm of the United States, sure.  Just like if you jacked up the price of every cell phone except the iPhone, you would make the iPhone relatively cheaper, but it would still be expensive!  If it were just us in the world, this progressive economic nonsense might work, but we're not.

We compete with other nations on an economic battlefield, and increasing our energy costs would be like shooting ourselves in the face with a cannon.  The cost to industry would be crushing.  We couldn't compete.

Higher gas taxes take money from working people
What about those of us who have no alternative but to drive to work?  What about those of us whose job site is 20, 30 or more miles away?  Gas tax takes money from the pockets of working people and bread from our children's mouths, as do most liberal schemes.

Progressive Schemes:  The more complex, expensive and unworkable, the better...

Drill here, drill now just doesn't waste enough money or provide opportunities to grow government and lecture everyone, so that holds no attraction to the cognoscenti on the left.  Tapping our own cheap and available resources is just common sense, therefore unappealing the the pseudo-intellectual statists on the left.

The real agenda here is to jam us all into crowded city centers and sweaty tenement slums where government trains can herd us to and from work.  Of course, our social betters like Al Gore and the Obama's would live in sprawling estates in the country and uncrowded gated communities far from the teeming hordes, as befits their superior status.

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it."  -- H. L. Mencken

Ho Ho Ho! Green Jobs Scam!

• One report examining state and local efforts to encourage the creation of "'green jobs"' found that the subsidies sometimes exceed $100,000 per job created.
• Other analysts have pointed out that much of money targeted for "'green job"' creation is being sent overseas.
• ABC News reported that nearly 80 percent of the close to $2 billion in the stimulus bill dedicated to wind power went to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines. (ncpa.org)

Here is a collection of articles on the money wasting BS known as "Green Jobs." 
Read them and you will see why those who have studied it call it a scam:

President Obama announced this week that Washington will offer $2.3 billion in tax credits for "clean energy" jobs. Using his very own pie-in-the-sky calculations, it puts the cost of every job at a tax-financed $135,000.

The uncalculated part of the above equation is this: Bogus jobs kill real jobs. At Madrid's King Juan Carlos University, for instance, a study found that in Spain -- the very country Obama has held out as the exemplar of greening (and with only a 19-plus percent unemployment rate!) -- every green job created had destroyed 2.2 jobs in other sectors of the economy. (Harsanyi - Faux Recovery)

 Government-sponsored "Green Jobs" did even more damage in Italy:

They found that in Italy, the losses were worse than they were in Spain: Each green job cost 6.9 jobs in the industrial sector and 4.8 jobs across the entire economy.  (IBD - Green Jobs Myth)

Here in  America, 'green energy" actually destroys jobs and sends work overseas:

Despite all the talk of green jobs, the overwhelming majority of stimulus money spent on wind power has gone to foreign companies, according to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University's School of Communication in Washington, D.C. 

Nearly $2 billion in money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been spent on wind power, funding the creation of enough new wind farms to power 2.4 million homes over the past year. But the study found that nearly 80 percent of that money has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines. 

"According to our estimates, about 6,000 jobs have been created overseas, and maybe a couple hundred have been created in the U.S." (ABC News - Wind Power no Jobs)

The Washington Post  explains how smart grid work may be a boon to those who manufacture the pieces, but new technologies such as smart meters will throw thousands of utility company readers and technicians out of work.

Here's the real scoop on "Green Jobs."  Millions in political payoffs to SEIU: 

Last week, the U.S. Department of Labor announced $7.4 million in green jobs training grants to SEIU Local 32BJ and H-Cap, a national partnership of SEIU healthcare unions and major employers. These two grants are part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and will provide essential green training to help 5,200 Americans get jobs in expanding green industries over the next two years. (http://www.seiu.org)

As The National Center for Policy Analysis says, .  The Green Jobs obsession distracts from real economic recovery.  

The saddest part of this progressive travesty is the opportunity costs.  Billions spent chasing windmills could have been better used by real businesses to hire real people for real jobs.

Five Myths of Green Energy

While government watchdogs did drugs and surfed porn, BP was busy wrecking the Gulf Coast.  Talk is turning again to "Green Energy."

I love the environment (it's where the tasty creatures are) and I am cheering for the good scientists struggling to advance "green energy." 

Despite what scientifically-ignorant charlatans like Al Gore and Van Jones say, "green energy" is simply too inefficient to compete with fossil fuels.  The science is advancing, but it's just not there yet.

Robert Bryce performs a public service by publishing Five Myths of Green Energy in The Washington Post.

Here are the Five Myths

1. Solar and wind power are the greenest of them all.
Wrong!  They are land hogs that actually destroy the environment by displacing natural habitat.

2. Going green will reduce our dependence on imports from unsavory regimes.
"China controls between 95 and 100 percent of the global market in" rare elements needed to construct batteries.

3. A green American economy will create green American jobs.

In a global market, American wind turbine manufacturers face the same problem as American shoe manufacturers: high domestic labor costs.

Meanwhile, the very concept of a green job is not well defined. Is a job still green if it's created not by the market, but by subsidy or mandate? 

Growth Energy, an industry lobby group, says increasing the percentage of ethanol blended into the U.S. gasoline supply would create 136,000 jobs. But an analysis by the Environmental Working Group found that no more than 27,000 jobs would be created, and each one could cost taxpayers as much as $446,000 per year. Sure, the government can create more green jobs. But at what cost?

Not to mention, Ethanol is Immoral.  Starving people to feed cars should give all human beings pause.  If that's not enough, the "Bio-fuels" industry destroys the biosphere, and there is not enough biosphere on the planet to support this government-sponsored corporate welfare travesty.

4. Electric cars will substantially reduce demand for oil.

Electric cars haven't been sidelined by a cabal to sell internal combustion engines or a lack of political will, but by physics and math. Gasoline contains about 80 times as much energy, by weight, as the best lithium-ion battery.

And in the absence of nuclear power, these cars that are plugged into the power grid are coal-powered.  How environmentally friendly is that?

5. The United States lags behind other rich countries in going green.

Over the past three decades, the United States has improved its energy efficiency as much as or more than other developed countries.

According to data from the Energy Information Administration, average per capita energy consumption in the United States fell by 2.5 percent from 1980 through 2006. That reduction was greater than in any other developed country except Switzerland and Denmark, and the United States achieved it without participating in the Kyoto Protocol or creating an emissions trading system like the one employed in Europe.

EIA data also show that the United States has been among the best at reducing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per $1 of GDP and the amount of energy consumed per $1 of GDP.

This was just a sample.  Go read the whole thing here.