Sunday, June 30, 2013

More Solyndras in the making

Obama is driving a green dagger into the heart of the American dream
By James Delingpole
When it comes to pinpointing the nadir of the Obama administration, future historians are going to suffer a serious case of option paralysis. Was it Benghazi? The NSA? His use of the IRS to harass the Tea party? The various scandals involving his black ops department, the EPA? Obamacare?
Personally, though, I think the one they will eventually plump for is Obama's Climate Action Plan of June 25 2013. The economy, after all, is everything. Without an economy you can't afford a domestic policy, let alone a foreign policy. So you'd think the very last thing any president would do as his country began to show the first vague signs of slow – and quite possibly illusory – recovery after a long recession would be to jeopardise it with a whole new raft of utterly pointless regulation and wasteful government expenditure. Why it would be like seeing a man drowning and, instead of throwing him a life line tossing him a lead weight.
But that's just what President Obama has done with today's Climate Action Plan whose gory details you can read here.
It promises another $2.7 billion for "Actionable Climate Science" (whatever that is) – almost all of which, we know from bitter previous experience, is going to end up in the sweaty palms of junk-science troughers in the tradition of Michael Mann and NASA's James Hansen rather than seekers-after-truth who genuinely care about the scientific method.
It promises to accelerate Clean Energy permitting: so that's going to make it harder for people to oppose the ruination of their local landscape, their favourite views, their health and their sleep with all the hideous new wind factories which will now spring up – at massive taxpayer expense – on federal owned land.
It promises to "expand and modernise the grid" – as it will have to do in order to enable it to cope with all that unreliable, erratic, mega-expansive "renewable" energy being pumped (or more often not pumped) into the system by all those lovely pointless solar panels and wind turbines.
It will promote "Clean Coal" using a technology – Carbon Capture and Sequestration – which has not been tested successfully anywhere in the world, which is massively expensive, monstrously energy-inefficient and potentially quite stupendously dangerous.
It will give still more power to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a hard-left political organisation swarming with deep-green ideologues fully committed to reducing living standards, killing consumer freedoms and hamstringing business with ever-more-stringent, scientifically-ill-founded environmental regulations based on nothing more than the "precautionary principle."
Oh, and of course, it will create lots of "green jobs." The kind that so far has cost the US taxpayer up to $2 million per job in subsidies.
And more Solyndras. There'll be plenty more of those, too.

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