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NH 350 Action’s home page has a list of checkboxes. Like any “movement,” this Climate Action group wants to know how you think you can help. But nowhere on the list does it say “stealing.” So, why were 67 NH ‘activists’ arrested at Merrimack Station in Bow yesterday?
On Tuesday, a few protesters dumped a few buckets of coal at the State House. It was, they said, a bold act of civil disobedience because they stole the coal from the Merrimack Station power plant in Bow. Yes, they admitted this.
Put your land hogging species killing inefficient, green energy windmills and solar panels away. Oh, and the billions in pro-ups, handouts, and subsidies as well. Scientists in Australia have come up with an affordable, scalable process for turning CO2 from the air into solid carbon.
Over at Breitbart is a post with this headline: “Coal Use Set To Surpass Oil In A Decade: IEA“. I used to go over and post comments over at TreeHugger, as regular readers of the ‘Grok know, and bring the Lefty Enviro-wacko stream of consciousness back here just so that you see what the mindset is (which is, pretty much, you all HAVE to get with our program to save GAIA from our destructive ways). Smaller is better, and that less is best. Pretty much, everyone needs to be shoved into tiny apartments into urban areas because, after all, we have to be conscious firstly and always with the energy we are using and the carbon footprint we are using to stomp on future generations lives. And of course, “white European Developed Nation Guilt” plays a large role in their sackcloth living mantra. Betcha there’s much wailing and rending of said sackcloth at this:
Coal is set to surpass oil as the world’s top fuel within a decade, driven by growth in emerging market giants China and India, with even Europe finding it hard to cut use despite pollution concerns, according to a report published Tuesday.
Yes, the enviros can complain that coal gets more of a subsidy than solar; true enough. Add the subsidies for the top 4 items vs the renewables? No contest – fossil fuels get $4.557 billion while renewables get $5.954 Billion. In the end, however, is what is the bang for the buck. It … Read more
As I posted here, I purchased a copy of Van Jones’ new book and had it signed by Van himself. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a shot to start reading it. Until today.
There’s been a lot of stuff going on, both in my blogging life as well as in the life outside of the laptop (little as it might be) and I just needed to switch gears for a bit. So, I started to read some of the books that have been sitting on the shelf for a while – and realized how much I’ve missed holding a book in my hands! So I as said earlier, it was time to read this book by one of the biggest cheerleaders for a “government centered life” for us all – and basically, someone who has no problem in slagging folks like TEA Partier me. After all, I’m not someone who studied Marx as a political way to follow and have little truck with Communitarianism – a word that you’ll be seeing more often here on the ‘Grok. Essentially, the emphasis is on “the community” and while the Wiki definition makes it seem benign, read the section on Positive Rights:
Central to the communitarian philosophy is the concept of positive rights, which are rights or guarantees to certain things. These may include state subsidized education, state subsidized housing, a safe and clean environment, universal health care, and even the right to a job with the concomitant obligation of the government or individuals to provide one. To this end, communitarians generally support social security programs, public works programs, and laws limiting such things as pollution.
A common objection is that by providing such rights, communitarians violate the negative rights of the citizens; rights to not have something done for you. For example, taxation to pay for such programs as described above dispossesses individuals of property. Proponents of positive rights, by attributing the protection of negative rights to the society rather than the government, respond that individuals would not have any rights in the absence of societies—a central tenet of communitarianism—and thus have a personal responsibility to give something back to it.
I digress in a small part -but make no mistake in that in many cases, the emphasis is always that the individual Rights must be subsumed to the need of the Collective. With these watermelon environmentalists, there will be more and more emphasis that we need to give up stuff and Rights “for the common good” – at and by their command. The problem is that ” the needs for the Common Good”, just like the vaunted “social contract” that Leftists accuse Conservatives of violating, there is never a sheet of paper that lay out what the “Common Good”‘s needs are, or the boundaries vis-a-vis our Individual rights. All there is seems to be a never ending, vaporous commentary of “we more, you less”. How do you defend yourself against what is basically vaporware? (er, easy: start asking them the hard questions of “what?”, starting writing them down, and don’t take “no” when they say “er, later – we have to go over this other stuff” or “I’ll get back to you”.
Thus, this fits in both with Van Jones as an environmentalist and with the Granite State Future Plan / Sustainable Communities Initiative posts I’ve been putting up lately. So, back to the review – I haven’t even made it to Chapter 1 yet – the Prologue is 35 pages long. In it, two things struck me:
About what? “Of course, President Obma had no intention of closing America’s coal mines.” (page xxvii). Just one big lie through that nice big smile he has!
Obama’s war on coal is netting some unusual suspects as supporters. New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte, who indicates that she has a history of preventing outside meddling with policy of this nature, voted against a resolution that would have overturned the EPA’s utility MACT rule.
Continuing New Hampshire’s tradition of protecting the state’s environment through commonsense policies, U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) announced today that she voted against a Senate measure that would weaken national Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for power plants aimed at reducing emissions of toxic air pollutants such as mercury, arsenic and metals.
There are a lot of things that are bad for us, and even if you agree that the DC should do something, there are other factors to consider–unless you happen to be a stooge for the Democrat party and the Green movement in which case adding to the bureaucracy is always job number one.
This rule will add costs and threaten the coal industry, which just happens to be at the top of President Obama kill list. It will probably result in job cuts to that sector, increase energy costs for everyone, and add more hoops and administrative costs, all borne by rate payers, in the midst of a stagnant economy, and for what?
So, where is all that electricity going to come for Obama’s million electric cars?
The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.
Legislation? What the heck does our Monarch Obama wants to do with that?