ConservativeINC

T. Boone Pickens.

Just his name conjures images of gushing oil strikes and four-pound steaks. But maybe his name should bring up images of windmills and pork.

First the windmills - that’s his next big investment.

Here’s a couple of key questions and answers from Fast Company’s David Case (questions in bold, answers in normal type, and story can be found HERE):

Listening to all of your environmental ideas, it sounds like you’re the Al Gore of Texas Republicans.
Don’t connect me to Al Gore! A lot of what he says just doesn’t make sense. Texans know I’m environmentally directed in some ways. But I’m realistic about what’s going on. Industry people are comfortable with me. Gore talks about getting rid of the combustion engine. I don’t talk about that.

You recently announced plans to build the world’s largest wind farm, in the panhandle. Is that about money or the environment?
Money! First thing, it’s about money. Of course, I’m also a good environmentalist. I can pass the saliva test. But I’m not going to go do a 4,000-megawatt wind farm for the environment first and money second. I’d rather go give money someplace else. You’re talking about $10 billion.

What kind of return do you expect?
A minimum of 15%. It’ll probably be closer to 25%.

Tell me about the project.
It’s huge, the size of two nuclear plants in output, enough to power a million homes. More than 2,000 turbines, each between 2 and 3 megawatts. The first 1,000 megawatts will be ready by 2011, and 1,000 each year or two after that.

How important is wind to America’s future energy needs?
The United States today runs on 987,000 megawatts, and the demand is going to increase 150,000 megawatts in the next 10 years — 15%. We could supply most of that with wind from the Great Plains, from Texas to North Dakota, but we’ve got to set up corridors to the West Coast and to the East Coast.

So you’re an oil man who’s turning his back on oil?
Foreign oil is costing us $500 billion a year. In 10 years, $5 trillion goes out of the country. It’s nuts. It’s the greatest transfer of wealth from one area to another in the history of the world.

Take a stab at what we’ll be paying at the pump in five years.
Oh hell, that’s so far out. Maybe $6 to $8 a gallon.

Now the pork (with a side of hypocrisy):

What happens if Congress doesn’t extend the $20-per-megawatt-hour Production Tax Credit for wind — set to expire December 31? On a project this size, that’s an $80,000 deduction every hour at full capacity.
Then you’ve got a dead duck. It would be hard to go without a subsidy. But they’ll probably pass it.

You’ve advocated a higher gasoline tax. What do you think the tax ought to be?
I don’t have a formula. I’ve just said, if it were up to me, I’d raise the tax to kill demand. And the people who are going to be most hurt by it, give them a break on payroll taxes or something else.

Is ethanol part of the solution?
Ethanol is political. That’s what Bob Dole told me in 1989. He called me up and said, “Quit talking down ethanol. You need to understand something: There are 21 farm states, and that’s 42 senators. Those senators want ethanol.” He said, “Are you getting the picture?” And I said, “Yeah, it’s coming through pretty clear.” [Dole confirms that Pickens’s account is “probably accurate.”]

Not exactly an inspiring vision of Congress.
The leadership is absolutely, totally pissy in Congress — a real conglomeration of fruitcakes. I mean pitiful people.

So would you cut the ethanol subsidy?
No. Hell, I’d rather subsidize ethanol or cream soda than have the money going out of the country buying oil. If you subsidize ethanol, the technology will ultimately get better. Corn will not be the primary ethanol fuel. They’ll go to something cellulosic. People who are against it say, “It costs so much to buy ethanol.” It costs more to buy oil from the Middle East. You’re better off circulating money in the United States. Create jobs here.

This is something that has been developing in my mind for the last year or so. I have come to realize that businessmen, especially powerful ones like Mr. Pickens, aren’t capitalists. They are just actors trying to maximize their piece of the pie. And the quickest and most secure way to ensure that their piece of the pie grows is by cozying up with the government.

Mr. Pickens, in fact the whole “environmentalist” business sector, would probably not exist if it were not for our federal, state, and local governments. These governmental bodies force you and I to put solar panels on our roofs, subsidize wind and ethanol, and a myriad other things all in the name of being “green.”

If wind were truly a great investment then Mr. Pickens would not need tax credits in order to turn a profit. If all the subsidies, tax credits, regulations, and tariffs were stopped tomorrow our energy situation would change dramatically. But that’s all hypothetical and Mr. Pickens completely understands the real world.

He knows that there is no financial victory to be made from fighting the government. So he does what any logical player in our market should do, he plays the game. He, Al Gore, and every other environmentalist “businessman” play on our fears of a not-to-distant apocalypse unless we embrace wind or carbon credits or whatever else that is “green.”

As a businessman I admire Mr. Pickens. He has assessed the strategic situation and has positioned himself for profit. But our present strategic situation is stacked against our country’s long term viability.

Our government is responsible for spending an ever increasing amount of our GDP (federal, state, and local governments spent over 35% of our GDP in FY 2005). Our government has decided to spend our money on unproven technologies or at least on technologies that aren’t as efficient as what is already available (nuclear power, for example). And until that changes and our money is spent by US we are going to have to live with our government spending our money on technologies older than our country so that Mr. Pickens can make up to 25% on his “investment.” BigT

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[OPINION]

Oh the weather outside is frightful… Frightfully cold that is.

Maybe I’m being a little premature in saying that global warming, at least as the environmental alarmists make it out to seem, because maybe you carpooling to work once a week is what has saved the polar bears. But I doubt it.

The article points out that maybe, just maybe, fluctuations in Earth’s temperature are caused more buy the sun (go figure) than by CO2. Well, this news story will be buried or if it is covered then it will be so to point out how ridiculous right wingers (us) are being because we put so much weight into one year’s worth of a temperature anomaly.

But aren’t the environmental alarmists the ones who routinely point to record temperatures to prove climate change? Haven’t they tried to “prove” global warming by pointing to “weird” weather?

Why can’t we do the same thing? Temperatures went down, which wiped out 100 years of global warming. What happens if this trend continues? What happens if five years from now the global temperature is below the level it was 100 years ago? Are we still going to enact sweeping socialistic changes to our economy to stave off an illusionary doom?

My guess - forget that - I know that the left is going to continue to push their statist policies because they have nothing to do with global warming. Hell, they don’t even really care about the environment; they’re just using it as their reason d’etre for shoving communism down our throats. Anyways, here’s the article - enjoy!

Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here.  The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year’s time. For all four sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Source: dailytech.com via BigT

BigT

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For those of you who don’t know I am a Guest Editor on the crowd powered media site NowPublic. They do a very good job at promoting a balanced group of editors and the stories show that. One of my favorite writers goes by the moniker PEP and she wrote a story called Scientist Says: Global Cooling Coming, Stock Up on Fur Coats. It’s about this Russian scientist who says climate change isn’t being caused by man and that it is just part of a natural cycle.

Here’s the portion she included:

Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.

Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.

This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.

Culled from en.rian.ru

One person, named gaffri, left this comment:

One could argue whether it is a natural cyclus like an sinus curve or man made. There are almost an infinite number of contributing factors “pushing” the climate in this or that direction, making it almost impossible to pinpoint exactly the root cause.

I would to some extend agree that scientist shouldn’t paint a paranoid picture of devastation, death, rising sealevels and dying Polar bears and what have you..

I dont think that any scientist disagrees on the fact that we pollute more than ever furthermore with those “new economies” (China and India) growing rapidly politicians needs to inegrate enviromental thinking in their development.

I think if people like Al Gore and the Climate panel of those 2000 or so researchers, can raise an awarness of how we consume energy and treat the enviroment, then we have already reached some of the goals, regardless if the rise in sealevels, floodings, global dimming, melting icebergs and rising temperatures are man made or not.

When it comes down to the core its probably a combination of both…

There are a number of problems with his comment but I chose to leave this comment:

The problem with your thinking of (and I paraphrase here) “whether or not global warming is caused by man made pollution we should still do something about it” is that the things being proposed to combat man made pollution will result in world wide economic destruction.

The only way to quickly reduce CO2 levels and other man made pollutants would be to cut back production levels, which would damage the world’s economy. Personally, I think this situation is already materializing in the industrialized world already.

Due to environmental demagoguery America hasn’t built any new nuclear facilities recently, our environmental standards are at least partially responsible for why our manufacturing jobs have moved to China, and there are other examples.

But to tell you the truth, this sparring match was nothing compared to the one I had with my arch nemesis - moonwolf (I say “arch nemesis” jokingly because he is a good guy; he’s just wrong). Here’s what he had to say about the article PEP highlighted:

Interesting….

One lone Russian scientist stands up against tens of thousands of scientists globally and all the naysayers buy into it. If he was a political scientist saying the USA had overstepped its reach globally his opinion wouldn’t even be mentioned and if it was there would be a chorus of repudiation.

Ya gotta love scientific cherry-picking!

Here is a link to a simple little video that will, through sheer logic, put the silly ‘human or nature’ causal red herring, and the even more foolish ‘is it really happening or not?’ blind tunnel diversion where they belong.

The video is almost ten minutes long but the main gist of it is you have a box with four choices: global warming isn’t happening and we either do something or nothing and global warming is happening and we either do something or we do nothing. If global warming isn’t happening and we do something we will utterly destroy the world’s economy and if global warming isn’t happening and we do nothing then everything will go along as normal. Conversely, if global warming is happening and we do something we will still destroy the world’s economy but we will save the world and if global warming is happening and we do nothing we’re all going to die.

There are many faults with this logic; one fault being the fact that we’re already doing things for the environment’s sake and, as I said in my comment to gaffri, the world’s economy is already feeling it. But I said a lot more in my rebuttal to moonwolf’s comment; here it is:

Firstly, I watched the movie and I want my ten minutes back moonwolf! Just kidding.

It was an interesting argument that I first heard about four years ago from my freshman honors professor (college freshman, by the way). I personally have a problem with this argument for two reasons.

One: Two of the options lead to a hellacious economic depression. That will certainly lead to tens of millions of people dying because there are no jobs and no one is producing anything anymore. So, even if there is significant man made global warming and our actions in the future (miraculously) prevent the worse from happening, the world will be in an extremely chaotic state with dozens of failed states (if not more) and a global economic system that has collapsed.

Actually, I think this is why the left champions combating climate change so ferociously. All the solutions to man made climate change are about implementing the left’s socialistic policy changes. Gore recently came out saying that an individual response (i.e. you and I making changes) is no longer good enough and the only way we’re going to be saved is if the governments of the world band together and regulate global warming away.

To further illustrate this point, once one of the brightest lights in environmentalism as the youngest president of the Sierra Club, Adam Werbacht got mercilessly trounced by other environmentalists becaused he went to work for Wal Mart and promoted an individual response to global warming. He still thinks that man made global warming is a major problem and it needs to be responded to but the way in which he advocated a response just no longer cuts it.

The only thing I can figure is that the environmentalist movement is up in arms because his proposed response no longer involves a massive increase in the size and scope of government and a transformation of economies from capitalism to socialism.

Two: I would have to guess that a huge portion (if not the majority) of the people who believe man is causing global warming are atheists. “How does this have anything to do with what we’re talking about!?” I hear you screaming, moonwolf.

Well, the funny thing is that the same chart that is contained in your video is a major portion of every statistics/probability/econometrics class I’ve ever taken. And one of the examples that I’ve heard (twice, if I remember correctly) is one where the choice is between either believing in God or not believing in God.

Instead of having man made global warming you would have either “God exists” or “God doesn’t exist.” Instead of action being or not being taken you would have “believe in God” or “don’t believe in God.” Let’s first go through the scenarios where God doesn’t exist.

If you believe in Him and He doesn’t exist, well, nothing happens. You don’t go to Hell, you don’t go to Heaven, you don’t go anywhere. The same thing goes for not believing in His existence and Him not being real.

Things get interesting, as your video shows, when it turns out that God actually does exist. If you believed in Him and he does exist then you get EVERYTHING after you die. You go to Heaven, you experience the most wonderful joy possible, and everything is completely awesome.

But if he exists and you don’t believe in Him, well, then you get HELL. You will experience everlasting damnation in a fiery pit. The screams of the other damned will haunt you for eternity.

People have known about this last argument, the one about God, for a lot longer than they have known about the argument on the video you linked to and yet don’t succumb to the “sheer logic” contained in this little God argument.

The problem with your global warming argument and my God argument is that there is a lot more at work here then the arguments include. In both our cases the choices and the results are clear but they both exclude important information like probabilities and other variables.

For example, global warming might be partially caused by man but the majority of the change is natural. So any changes we make will only have a minimal affect on the Earth’s temperature. Similarly, God does exist but he forgives those who repent before him in the afterlife.

Both your belief in man made global warming and my belief in God is based on a number of different conclusions that we have both made. Stripping either down to an oversimplified argument, I believe, takes away from the importance of both issues.

A massive response to global warming shouldn’t be able to be proved in a ten minute argument with a whiteboard nor should belief in God be proved in the same way either. The only difference is that man made global warming believers are advocating destroying the world economy to save the planet while believers in God try to convert individuals to save their souls.

I’m glad NowPublic provides a forum for discussions like this. That’s why I regularly contribute and help edit the site. The really important thing to take from this is that the environmentalist movement is really all about advancing socialism/communism. They’re just doing it with a green coating. BigT

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