“I hope that the United States and Europe can establish a very close partnership,” said [Elon Musk], “effectively creating a free-trade zone between Europe and North America.”
That had nearly become a reality during President Barack Obama’s second term but talks broke down after the environmental activist group Greenpeace leaked information, leading to a backlash....
In a state where the federal government owns 65 percent of the land, many conservatives already resent existing restrictions because they bar development that could generate additional revenue. Out-of-state militias came to San Juan County two years ago, when Commissioner Phil Lyman helped lead an all-terrain-vehicle protest ride through a canyon the Bureau of Land Management had closed to motorized traffic in 2007. Lyman is appealing the 10-day jail sentence he received in connection with the protest, and he argues that his case shows how BLM officials place the priorities of environmentalists over those of local residents.Much more at the link.
“I would hope that my fellow Utahans would not use violence, but there are some deeply held positions that cannot just be ignored,” Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, the veteran Republican lawmaker, said in an interview....
[S]ome lawmakers have suggested that unilateral action by the president, under the 1906 Antiquities Act, could provoke the same sort of resistance that led to the 41-day armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon earlier this year. “There is a lot of conflict that has escalated into being on the precipice of violence that is unnecessary and unwarranted,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who opposes the designation.
“The administration’s climate rule is far from perfect, but sweeping assertions of unconstitutionality are baseless,” Jody Freeman, director of the environmental law program at Harvard Law School, and Richard Lazarus, an expert in environmental law who has argued over a dozen cases before the Supreme Court, wrote in a rebuttal to Mr. Tribe’s brief on the Harvard Law School website. “Were Professor Tribe’s name not attached to them, no one would take them seriously.”...Tribe says that he's "very comfortable" representing Peabody Energy, because the arguments he needs to make "happened to coincide with what I believe." The NYT provides a quote to cast doubt on Tribe's veracity...
[A] number of legal scholars and current and former members of the Obama administration say that Mr. Tribe has eroded his credibility by using his platform as a scholar to promote a corporate agenda — specifically, the mining and burning of coal.
“Whether he intended it or not, Tribe has been weaponized by the Republican Party in an orchestrated takedown of the president’s climate plan,” said one former administration official.
“That a leading scholar of constitutional matters has identical views as officials of a coal company — that his constitutional views are the same as the views that best promote his client — there’s something odd there,” said Richard L. Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law.... and a prediction of his social death...
The Republicans who are citing Mr. Tribe’s work are not surprised. Mr. McKenna, the Republican lobbyist, said dryly, “He’s about to be banned from a lot of cocktail parties.”Oh, you poor man, now the only friends you'll have are friends nobody wants.
"Were Professor Tribe’s name..."
I first read that as referring to the name of a tribe of "Were-professors," who attack when the moon is full.
The party’s quest to keep control of the Senate could hinge on the races of these five Democrats, who have previously expressed support for the project. Many of them come from fossil-fuel rich states....
Facing mounting pressure from his environmental base, Mr. Obama said last summer he would only approve the Canada-U.S. pipeline if it didn’t “significantly exacerbate” global warming.
For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.God! God is well-represented in this speech. In addition to that "gift from God" (and "their Creator"), there's:
Even the fluids can be reused.... Transmission and brake fluids, anti-freeze, oil, gasoline, diesel and Freon from air conditioners are harvested at scrap yards for use in other vehicles. However, still-functioning engines are the most valuable part of a scrapped car....Well, that's the perspective of the recycling industry, and it's all information that was known when the program was adopted. This isn't news, just an industry press release. That should make us skeptical, but also, if it's true, more critical of the government, since (I assume) they knew all this and did it anyway.
Many of the cars that were traded in during Cash for Clunkers were perfectly functioning cars in good condition, and excellent candidates to have their engines and other parts recycled. With the engine destroyed, many clunkers bypassed the recycling companies and went straight to junkyards to be crushed and shredded.... [The engines were] destroyed to prevent the vehicles from being resold and taking the road again.....
[Cash for Clunkers] mandated that the clunkers be crushed or shredded within 180 days, regardless of whether all the usable parts were salvaged or not... Cars that are shredded are turned into small, palm-sized pieces of metal... For each ton of metal recovered by a shredding facility, roughly 500 pounds of shredder residue are produced, meaning about 3 to 4.5 million tons of shredder residue is sent to landfills every year....
The centerpiece of the Obama administration’s anti-suburban plans is a little-known and seemingly modest program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative. The “regional planning grants” funded under this initiative — many of them in battleground states like Florida, Virginia, and Ohio — are set to recommend redistributive policies, as well as transportation and development plans, designed to undercut America’s suburbs. Few have noticed this because the program’s goals are muffled in the impenetrable jargon of “sustainability,” while its recommendations are to be unveiled only in a possible second Obama term.But jokes about "Sesame Street" characters are so much more fun to play around with right now... la la la... as we run up to the election.
Obama’s former community-organizing mentors and colleagues want the administration to condition future federal aid on state adherence to the recommendations served up by these anti-suburban planning commissions. That would quickly turn an apparently modest set of regional-planning grants into a lever for sweeping social change.Big Bird... tee hee... Elmo... ha ha... woman with a slashed throat... blood everywhere....
The president angered voters with new Environmental Protection Agency policies, which some see as a “war on coal” and have stalled mining permits for the state’s coal mining industry...
Race likely plays some role here. In the 2008 primary, 2 in 10 white West Virginia voters said race was an important factor in their votes, second only to Mississippi. Those voters went for Clinton 8 in 10 times....
Potentially more interesting are the results from North Carolina, where 20 percent of Democratic primary voters chose “no preference” over the president.
Mr. Sunstein had his pick of jobs in the new administration. He chose the obscure regulatory affairs office as a potential laboratory for his sometimes iconoclastic views. He has challenged the utility of command-and-control-style federal regulation and has written favorably of programs to “name and shame” polluters as a way of getting them to clean up their operations without enforcement actions or fines. He has sought creative ways to encourage responsible economic and environmental behavior without using the heavy hand of the state.
Mr. Sunstein never really warmed to the proposed ozone rule, not least because it would, by law, be subject to revision again in 2013. He also noted that in nearly half of the E.P.A.’s own case studies, the cost of the new rule would outweigh the benefits, raising additional alarms....
“There was always a notion that they were looking for a regulation to use as an example of the reform initiative, a poster child, and this was potentially it,” said a senior E.P.A. official who asked not to be identified on a matter involving discussions with the White House. “We knew one was coming. We just didn’t know which one.”
The windfall for the industry over the last three years raises questions of whether the Obama administration and state governments went too far in their support of solar and wind power projects, some of which would have been built anyway, according to the companies involved....Read the whole thing.
Though the evidence of climate change has, if anything, solidified, Mr. Obama now talks about “green jobs” mostly as a strategy for improving the economy, not the planet. He did not mention climate in his last State of the Union address. Meanwhile, the administration is fighting to exempt United States airlines from Europe’s new plan to charge them for CO2 emissions when they land on the continent. It also seems poised to approve a nearly 2,000-mile-long pipeline, from Canada down through the United States, that will carry a kind of oil. Extracting it will put relatively high levels of emissions into the atmosphere.And here's the last paragraph, #24:
“In Washington, ‘climate change’ has become a lightning rod, it’s a four-letter word,” said Andrew J. Hoffman, director of the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Development.
In private, scientific advisers to Mr. Obama say he and his administration remain committed to confronting climate change and global warming. But Robert E. O’Connor, program director for decision, risk and management sciences at the National Science Foundation in Washington, said a bolder leader would emphasize real risks that, apparently, now feel distant to many Americans. “If it’s such an important issue, why isn’t he talking about it?”What's in all those other paragraphs?
The same groups had sued the Bush administration over its ozone policy, but agreed to suspend the suit when the Obama administration came to office and promised to reconsider the Bush standard. That reconsideration was delayed several times before finally being killed by the president last month.And so it goes. Obama is like Bush.
NPR: New Boom Reshapes Oil World, Rocks North Dakota. “Two years ago, America was importing about two thirds of its oil. Today, according to the Energy Information Administration, it imports less than half. And by 2017, investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts the US could be poised to pass Saudi Arabia and overtake Russia as the world’s largest oil producer. Places like Williston are the reason why.”It's big! Go big on oil, Obama. It's the new energy economy. Drill baby, drill! Prosperity lies ahead. Make this one yours. Hope and change! Dreams! Dreams of oil! Can't you taste it?!
Wow, I knew it was big, but I had no idea it was that big. But read the whole thing.
The White House insists it didn’t intervene with DOE on Solyndra’s behalf, but — go figure — the company’s key investor was a foundation headed by George Kaiser, a billionaire known for raising boatloads of money for Barack Obama.Via Instapundit.
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