Planetary Ruin

President Barack Obama spoke up for the economic interests of the little guy in his State of the Union speech to Congress on January 24th.  On January 26th, the President spoke in Las Vegas about using taxpayer dollars to improve the economic well-being on one of those little guys in particular—Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens.  He urged voters to support the Pickens Payoff Plan (officially titled the NAT GAS Act), a bipartisan bill sponsored in the Senate by Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and in the House by Representative John Sullivan (R-Okla.).

The bill, H. R. 1380 in the House and S. 1863 in the Senate, would provide huge new subsidies to buyers and users of heavy duty trucks that use natural gas.  Pickens owns Clean Energy Fuels, which builds and runs natural gas service stations.  He also has major investments in a number of companies in the natural gas industry.  The value of these investments would probably increase by several billion dollars if the bill were enacted.

However, Pickens has been clear that he has spent $100 million “of his own money” to promote the Pickens Your Pocket legislation only out of love for his country.  “I’m sure not doing this for the money,” he told the New York Times last May.

Another little guy who would do well if this Boonedoggle becomes law is billionaire George Soros, who has recently invested heavily in a company that builds natural gas-powered trucks, according to a story in Big Government. This makes President Obama’s concern for the little guy truly bipartisan.  Pickens is one of the biggest donors to Republican candidates, while Soros is the biggest donor to left-wing groups.

One heartwarming aspect of this story has just come to light.  It seems that the White House doors are always wide open for visits by the little guys.  Politico reports that Pickens has visited the White House seven times since Obama became president. He was also a frequent visitor during the Bush years.

The Boonedoggle bill was introduced in the House last April and quickly gained 186 co-sponsors, including around 80 Republicans.   A number of free market and conservative groups sent a joint letter to Congress opposing the bill, which has convinced 19 Republicans to withdraw as co-sponsors.  This means that the Pickens Payoff Plan has very little chance of passing the House as a separate bill.  However, President Obama’s support could improve the chances that Senator Reid will be able to include it as a provision in a larger bill.  The most likely candidate is the bill extending a wide variety of other business tax breaks that will probably be taken up in the next month or two.

The Pickens Payoff Plan is just one of many brazen attempts to pick the pockets of American taxpayers.  Many similar schemes have been enacted that benefit corn ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, wind power, solar power, electric and hybrid vehicles, and a number of agricultural commodities.  What’s odd about President Obama signing on to this particular Boonedoggle now is that natural gas prices are now so low that no taxpayer subsidies are needed to encourage the switch from diesel to natural gas trucks.  Big companies are investing billions of dollars of their own money to build natural gas trucks and the infrastructure needed to fuel them.  Natural gas cars are probably only a few years away, as well.  It already makes economic sense, and therefore it is already starting to happen.

AlertNet: Whether rotating her crops, sowing seed from previous harvests or gathering rainwater, Susan Gama is pulling out all the stops in an attempt to keep her livelihood going. Subsistence farmers like Gama in this southern African nation are reverting to traditional farming knowledge and local experimentation to cope with the challenges of poor and unpredictable rainfall, which experts believe is linked to climate change. That is producing mixed results -- and considerable frustration for government...

New York Times: Weary of waiting for the authorities to alert residents to the city’s most pernicious air pollutant, citizen activists last May took matters here into their own hands: they bought their own $4,000 air-quality monitor and posted its daily readings on the Internet. That began a chain reaction. Volunteers in Shanghai and Guangzhou purchased monitors in December, followed by citizens in Wenzhou, who are selling oranges to finance their device. Wenzhou donated $50 to volunteers in Wuhan, 140 miles inland....

Associated Press: On the day the Deepwater Horizon sank, BP officials warned in an internal memo that if the well was not protected by the blow-out preventer at the drill site, crude oil could burst into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 3.4 million gallons a day, an amount a million gallons higher than what the government later believed spilled daily from the site. The email conversation, which BP agreed to release Friday as part of federal court proceedings, suggests BP managers recognized the potential of the...

Forbes: The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has long been understood to be not only antagonistic to the facts of climate science, but hostile. But in a remarkable example of their unabashed bias, on Friday they published an opinion piece that not only repeats many of the flawed and misleading arguments about climate science, but purports to be of special significance because it was signed by 16 “scientists.” Serious doubt has been cast on the actual expertise on climate science of the signers and...

New York Times: In yet another sign that New York has slowed efforts to green-light fracking of natural gas, officials at the state Department of Environmental Conservation canceled a meeting of a drilling advisory panel this week for a second time. Officials said they were delaying the meeting, which had been scheduled for Thursday, because the department`s staff was concentrating on sorting through more than 40,000 comments received on proposed state regulations and an environmental impact statement on high-volume...

Mongabay: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruled on Friday that palm oil-based biofuels will not meet the renewable fuels standard due to carbon emissions associated with deforestation, reports The Hill. According to a notice published Friday in the Federal Register, palm oil-based biodiesel fails to meet a requirement that renewable fuels offer a 20 percent reduction in emissions relative to conventional gasoline: Biodiesel and renewable diesel produced from palm oil have estimated lifecycle...

Mongabay: The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) has released a set of photos from a visit to a contested area of forest set to be converted for oil palm plantations in Indonesian Borneo. The pictures, taken this month, show an area of forest used by hundreds of villagers from the community of Muara Tae in East Kalimantan. The community, made up of indigenous Dayak Benuaq, is fiercely opposing efforts to seize and log the forest, arguing that oil palm plantations will destroy their livelihoods. "There...

President Obama’s record proves that he understands how to use time effectively, solely to his advantage.  His craft of circumventing issues of critical national interest is an art form, and his State of the Union address is no exception.  “This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy, a strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper and full of new jobs.”  His hypocritical declaration was salt to the fresh wound inflicted by his dismissal of the $7 billion privately funded TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline just prior to the SOTU.

The following day, it became clear at the Subcommittee on Energy and Power hearing on Rep. Lee Terry’s (R-NE) The North American Energy Access Act (H.R. 3548), that political “timing” was the basis for Obama’s pipeline rejection.  Kerri-Ann Jones, the Bureau of Oceans and International Environment Assistant Secretary of the State Department, was the witness who vouched for the State Dept’s recommendation that Obama kill the pipeline.  She said that the merit of the project did not cause the second rejection; it was the lack of time given to finish the reviewing process of a new route.  According to Jones, it normally takes 18-24 months to vet a project of this size; the KXL Pipeline, however, has now been under review for a total 40 months.

Solyndra, which disposed of $535 million of tax payer money, is the poster child of Obama’s hypocritical devotion to due diligence.  Before rushing Solyndra’s subsidy out the door, Obama’s DOE blatantly ignored countless red flags regarding the viability of their first green energy flagship of government funding.   When Solyndra went belly-up, laying off more than 1,100 workers, the Obama administration wanted to get the timing right.  Emails from the Argonaut Private Equity, an investment firm owned by Solyndra’s largest investor and Obama campaign donor George Kaiser, indicate that the DOE asked Solyndra to postpone the announcement of job layoffs until after the 2010 midterm elections.  How convenient.

The KXL Pipeline, a job creation project that has absolutely no cost to the taxpayer, has been delayed now solely based on political timing.  When the KXL Pipeline was first protested because of its prospective environmental effect on the Nebraska portion of the Ogallala Aquifer, TransCanada agreed to reroute the pipeline.  But unfortunately, an environmentalist pow-wow encircling the White House was enough applied pressure for the President to punt the pipeline decision until after the 2013 election.  When the 2 month payroll tax holiday attached a 60-day deadline for a pipeline decision, Obama rejected the pipeline on day 26.  All in the name of “due diligence.”

Washington Post: Plant hardiness zones, an indicator of the coldest winter temperature, have shifted north and northwest since 1990 around Washington, D.C. (USDA; Patterson Clark and Laris Karklis - The Washington Post) Planting zones are retreating north all over the country, but the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) won't state the obvious: the shift is a rock solid indicator of climate change. On Wednesday, the USDA released a new plant hardiness zone map, which contours the nation according to...