Undoing the Industrial Revolution

CTV News reports that former Vice-President Joe Biden has promised to end fossil fuel use.

Joe Biden is looking voters in the eye and promising to “end fossil fuel.”

The former vice-president and Democratic presidential candidate made the comment Friday after a New Hampshire environmental activist challenged him for accepting donations from the co-founder of liquified natural gas firm.

Biden denied the donor’s association to the fossil fuel industry before calling the young woman “kiddo” and taking her hand. He said, “I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”

The activist, 24-year-old Rebecca Beaulieu, later said she appreciated that Biden took her question seriously, but that he was not satisfied with Biden’s plan to eliminate net carbon emissions by 2050.

Essentially, Joe Biden and the other Democratic presidential candidates are promising to undo the Industrial Revolution. Our economy and civilization depend on the use of fossil fuels. There is simply no alternative to their use, except for nuclear power, which they’re also against if we want to maintain our current level of prosperity.

For most of history, the only available sources of power were human and animal muscles. These sources, supplemented by water and wind beginning in the Medieval Period do not provide much power. The amount of work that can be done with muscles, human and animal, is sharply limited. As a result, the great masses of people, in any society, lived in poverty, with barely enough to survive. Only a very tiny elite could live in any degree of comfort.

This situation only changed when humans learned to harness the power of fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels could unleash far more energy than could be obtained through the power of muscles, energy to power machines that could do more work and produce more wealth than would have been conceivable before. Unlike wind and water mills, which were only usable at particular times and places, factories powered by fossil fuels could be placed anywhere convenient. The resulting industrial and technological revolution, along with the development of free-market capitalism, something else the current crop of candidates is campaigning against, allowed a higher standard of living than could ever be possible previously. For the first time in history, ordinary people could live lives of comfort. The difference between rich and poor in the developed world is no longer one of kind, whether a person has enough to eat or sufficient shelter from the elements, but of degree, how nice that house, car or food. At the present time, we are living in a world in which the greatest health problems of the poor stem from having too much unhealthy food to eat. We may be within a generation of eliminating poverty worldwide, thanks to fossil fuels.

What if Joe Biden and the other Democrats have their way? What if the use of fossil fuels is severely curtailed here in the United States, and elsewhere in other to combat climate change? Could renewable sources of energy make up the difference? No, they could not. Renewable sources of energy; wind, water, and the rest simply do not provide enough energy to maintain our current use of power, not by orders of magnitude. Nonrenewable sources are only available in limited times and places, necessitating the storage or long-distance transmission of energy, which can be difficult and expensive. Nuclear power could make up the gap, but the people who want us to stop using fossil fuels also dislike nuclear power.

A world in which fossil fuel use was eliminated would be a world in which energy was much more expensive than it is at present. As a result, all the necessities of life would be much more expensive. It would be a poorer world, a world in which a small elite could live comfortably while the majority of the population would be struggling to survive. It would be a step back to the bad old days. Even if it were conceded that man-made climate change was the dire threat to humanity’s continued survival and well-being, a concession I am not willing to make, surely the cures proposed by the Democratic candidates are far worse than the problem. I do not believe that any crisis can be resolved by crippling the most productive and innovative economy in the world. It may not be the intention of those proposing such radical solutions to global warming to create a neo-feudal world of impoverished masses lorded over by a tiny elite, but that would be the inevitable result.

There will come a time when advancing technology will make the use of fossil fuels obsolete. This time will come only if people are free to innovate in a prosperous economy. It will not come by stifling innovation with overbearing government fiats in a crippled and impoverished economy. That is just what the Democratic candidates are proposing.

BFD

Jim Messina is imitating Joe Biden now. As well he might. After all, it is not every day that the President takes steps to destroy the national economy and raises energy prices for everybody.

David —

This is a BFD:

The New York Times is calling President Obama’s plan “the strongest action ever taken by an American president to tackle climate change” — he’s proposing new EPA standards to limit carbon pollution from existing power plants, the single biggest source of the pollution in the United States that causes climate change.

David, it should come as no surprise that polluters and groups that like things the way they are have already started fighting this with everything they’ve got. The best thing we can do is show just how many Americans believe this is the right thing to do.

Add your name right now — stand with President Obama and support aggressive action to fight climate change.

Announcements like this are why we all do this work. It’s proof that grassroots organizing really does pay off. Climate change activists have fought for years for EPA standards on carbon pollution — and this week President Obama is making it a reality.

This fight is about our future, but the effects of climate change are being felt right now — it’s linked to stronger weather, from more frequent and severe droughts to floods, storms, and wildfires.

It’s affecting public health, too. Over the past three decades, the percentage of Americans with asthma has more than doubled, and climate change is putting those Americans at greater risk of landing in the hospital. Over half of all Americans live in an area where air pollution levels are too often unhealthy to breathe.

But while we place limits on dangerous air pollution like mercury, arsenic, and lead, existing power plants have had no national restrictions on the amount of carbon pollution they can emit.

None at all — until now.

The President’s plan promises to cut carbon pollution from power plants for the first time, setting a new standard for action on climate change.

As I write this, powerful interests on the other side are lining up their dirty budgets to try to tear this down. They have plenty of allies in Congress that will try to stop us.

I’m asking everyone who cares about this fight to stand up and say so today — stand with President Obama and new carbon pollution standards:

http://my.barackobama.com/Support-Carbon-Pollution-Standards

Thanks,

Messina

Jim Messina
Chair
Organizing for Action

P.S. — We’ve all been fighting for big action to fight climate change — something that will really make a difference. This is it — add your name today and let’s fight for it.

I have said it before and I guess I will have to say it again and again. Mercury, arsenic and lead are pollutants that are hazardous to human health. Various industrial processes can greatly increase the amounts of these substances in the environment to concentrations far greater than they are normally found in nature.It makes sense to regulate the emissions of substances like mercury, lead or arsenic. Carbon dioxide is a compound that is a naturally occurring component of the Earth’s atmosphere. It is harmless to human health and indeed is necessary for life to exist on this planet. Since virtually every industrial process produces some carbon dioxide as does animal respiration, trying to regulate carbon dioxide emissions is pointless, unless you want to establish some sort of totalitarian control over every part of the economy or you want to reverse the industrial revolution.

Notice just how dishonest Jim Messina is being in this e-mail. He states that half of all Americans live in areas where the air is too unhealthy to breathe, never mind that our air has been getting cleaner, and cites increasing numbers of Americans with asthma. He is conflating actual air pollution with increasing levels of carbon dioxide. As I said, carbon dioxide is harmless, unless you are in an enclosed space without ventilation, or are unfortunate enough to encounter a large cloud of carbon dioxide that has been released by a volcano or stagnant lake. Either he is ignorant or he hopes you aren’t paying attention.

This is certainly a fight about our future. These new restrictions on power plants will almost certainly make many power plants more expensive to operate, if they are not shut down altogether which will translate into higher prices for electricity for all of us, which means higher prices for just about everything, and fewer jobs for everyone to pay the higher prices.

There’s that hope and change we were promised!

 

 

 

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White House Misfire?

Lexington Will history repeat itself?

I found this editorial by Michael Graham in the Boston Herald courtesy of Instapundit.

The position of pro-Second Amendment Americans is that gun ownership is part of the fundamental human right to self-defense, explicitly stated in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers due to an overarching political philosophy regarding the balance of power between the individual and the state.

The position of the anti-gun activists in the Obama administration is “guns are icky.”

The media consider them the intellectuals in this debate.

And so Fox News reports “White House In Gun Control Sprint.” President Obama wants to fast-track a stack of new gun laws before the lingering pain and horror of the Newtown, Conn., massacre fades.

According to the Washington Post, Obama’s task force has already blown past the return of the so-called “assault weapons” ban and a ban on high-capacity magazines. They’ve moved on to “regulations that would require universal background checks for firearm buyers, track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, strengthen mental health checks, and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors.”

I thought the point of this White House task force was to “prevent more tragedies” like Newtown, as the president said when he announced it. If so, please re-read the last paragraph. Am I missing something?

“Universal background checks” — whatever that means — might or might not be a good thing. They certainly sound reasonable to me. But how would they have prevented Adam Lanza from shooting up that elementary school? He took a rifle that belonged to his mother.

The same with “tracking the sale and movement” of guns. I’m not sure about the constitutionality of forcing me to report to the government when I pass down my father’s shotgun to my son one day, but once again — this prevents another Newtown … how?

And sure, I’m all for “strengthening mental health checks,” but unless you’re going to make your local gun store owner a licensed therapist, how does he stop a guy like Lanza — with no diagnosis of mental illness — from buying a gun?

Most laughable (and this is no laughing matter, which makes the White House’s position even more angering) is the “stiffened penalties for carrying guns near schools.”

So Joe Biden’s telling me that Lanza, overcome by his mental condition to the point that he’s murdered his mother and is headed to an elementary school on a killing spree, is going to stop 1,000 yards from the playground and think, “Hey — I don’t want Obama to take away my student loan subsidy. I better keep these guns away from school!”

These are the thoughtful, well-reasoned ideas from the Obama brain trust?

And we haven’t even mentioned the fact that gun laws are utterly meaningless to criminals, anyway. Don’t believe me? Ask the families of the 506 people fatally shot in Obama’s “gun-controlled” hometown of Chicago last year.

I’m not one of the knee-jerk pro-gun types who oppose all laws. I don’t think of gun ownership as the highest form of patriotism. Show me a law on law-abiding gun owners that will have a meaningful impact on gun violence, and I’m all ears.

But that’s not what the White House is offering. In the face of undeniable evidence that, for 20 years, gun ownership rates have gone up while gun deaths have plunged (the lowest since at least 1981, according to FactCheck.org), Obama’s pushing for a large-scale “punish-all-gun-owners” approach.

So much so that some Senate Democrats are already backing away from the task force’s work.

If the White House would stop playing on emotions for the sake of far-left politics, we could actually get something done about gun crime in the U.S.

I don’t quite agree with Mr. Graham. I do not think that the Obama administration has misfired at all.They know exactly what they are doing.

The long term goal of the Democrats has been to disarm the American people. I do not know whether this is because they consider guns to be icky or whether the conspiracy theorists are right and they want to inaugurate a one-world Socialist dictatorship and really it doesn’t matter. With that in mind and considering Obama’s ambition to be a transformative President who brings fundamental change to this country, it is unlikely that Obama is interested in compromising with anyone or in introducing the sort of do-nothing but pretend to do something policies like an assault rifle or high capacity magazine ban. Obama can take pride in the fact that he achieved the long standing Democratic goal of socializing health care in his first term and I don’t doubt that he would like to be the one who achieved comprehensive gun control in his second term.

What this means is that that President Obama is going to try to enact the most sweeping and draconian gun control measures that he can get away with. If he cannot get what he wants through legislative action, he is perfectly prepared to issue executive orders. Nor is Obama reluctant to get into a confrontation with gun rights groups such as the NRA. Indeed, he seems to be deliberately provoking gun owners. Obama has shown a preference for attacking and demonizing people who oppose his policies, rather than working with them in the past. Since he can count on the support of the main stream media in labeling his opponents as unreasonable extremists, he has a record of winning these confrontations and forcing his opponents to back down. In this way, Obama has often got everything he has wanted rather than having to settle for only a portion. Of course, this has embittered his opponents and cause more division and polarization in the country, but I don’t think Obama minds that at all.

I think, then, that we can expect sweeping and unprecedented gun control proposals to come out of Biden’s task force. We can expect continuing demonization of gun owners as crazed extremists in the media and the NRA getting the full Alinsky treatment. Don’t be too surprised if major retailers such as WalMart “voluntarily” remove objectionable firearms from their shelves. We are in for some interesting times ahead.

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Pay Raise for Biden and Congress

He got a raise.

It’s nice to know that Vice-President Joe Biden and Congress will be receiving well deserved pay raises for all the hard work they have been doing for us. I read about this in the Weekly Standard.

President Barack Obama issued an executive order to end the pay freeze on federal employees, in effect giving some federal workers a raise. One federal worker now to receive a pay increase is Vice President Joe Biden.

According to disclosure forms, Biden made a cool $225,521 last year. After the pay increase, he’ll now make $231,900 per year.

Members of Congress, from the House and Senate, also will receive a little bump, as their annual salary will go from $174,000 to 174,900. Leadership in Congress, including the speaker of the House, will likewise get an increase.

Here’s the list of new wages, as attached to President Obama’s executive order:

I don’t now. Personally, I think that at some point you have made enough money and when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody. Maybe the president will spread some of his wealth around to me.

By the way, have you ever noticed that the people who rail about the wealthy the most seem to be among the wealthiest themselves?

Related articles

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Laughing at the Issues

It didn’t take long for the RNC to come up with a ad showcasing Joe Biden’s inappropriate laughter during the the debate.

I wonder what drugs Biden was taking before the debate. I could use a good laugh myself.

If there are any undecideds reading this, ask yourself, do you really want to take the risk of having this clown becoming President?

I love the twitter reactions. Here is my favorite comment.

I’m not a gambler, but I would play poker with Biden. In the mean time, he should get that smirk off his face, bc he’s not winning.

 

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Doogie Howser Vs. Mr. Wilson

I watched the Vice-Presidential debate last night and it was interesting. Paul Ryan turned out to be knowledgeable, well spoken, sincere, and young. For the first time in my life, there is a candidate for the highest office in the land who seems younger than me. I know Ryan can’t be much younger than me and still qualify as a Vice-Presidential candidate and a quick check on Wikipedia shows that he is about a year younger than I am, still he came across as almost boyish. I half expected his voice to crack. Still, for all his youth he carried himself with dignity.

If Paul Ryan was the boy wonder, than Joe Biden was Mr. Wilson, that cantankerous old man who is always yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. He was rude and disrespectful, continually interrupting Ryan and even the moderator. At first, while Ryan was speaking, Biden kept grinning and even laughing, even when the topic was as serious as Iran’s possible acquisition of nuclear weapons. He all but called Ryan a liar several times. As the debate went on Biden became less jolly and more angry, shouting all of his answers and generally behaving like a jackass. Strangely, Ryan remained calm and poised and did his best to get his points across. That couldn’t have been easy for him.

Who won this debate? I am not sure. I think Ryan did the better job but I am prejudiced, not just because Ryan is the Republican, but also because I think Biden acted like a bullying jerk. I do not like bullying jerks.

I imagine that the more devoted Democrats think that Biden did a terrific job. No doubt, they are boasting to one another that Biden stood up to Ryan’s lies, he kept attacking him, etc. But then, these are the sort of people who think that it is appropriate to tell a 12 year-old boy his parents should have aborted him because they have a Romney sign in their yard, or to tweet about assassinating Mitt Romney. I am not sure sure how Biden’s behavior will be seen by more normal people. It would seem that Biden hasn’t impressed the people of Iowa.

The Vice-Presidential debate probably won’t change the dynamics of the race much. After all, no one really pays much attention to the Vice-President. I do think that Biden’s debate behavior reflects very badly upon him. It is obvious that he has no respect for the dignity of the office he holds, nor with his generally buffoonish demeanor,  can he ever be taken seriously as a leader. If Obama is reelected, he had better be extra careful with his health and safety. Speaking of Obama, Joe Biden’s behavior also reflects badly on the one who picked him as his running mate. I hope that Obama does not draw the wrong lesson from yesterday evening’s debate and decide that he needs to be aggressive. Obama should be more assertive than he was in the first debate and he needs to take the debates more seriously, but if he attempts to be a bullying jerk, like Biden, it will cost him.

 

 

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Straight Talking Joe Biden

The Vice-Presidential debate is this evening and I am sure it will be fun to watch. Meanwhile, I received the latest update from the Truth Team regarding all of the lies that Paul Ryan has been saying. I think they believe that if they say liar often enough, people will start to believe it. We’ll see.

David —

Over the course of his career, Joe Biden has always said exactly what he means, and people know they can count on the Vice President to be straight with them.

You can’t say the same about Paul Ryan.

Out on the campaign trail, Ryan has followed Mitt Romney’s lead — making a habit of misrepresenting or flat-out denying his unpopular, extreme positions, while distorting President Obama’s record. Both Romney and Ryan know that if they’re honest with the American people about their proposals and their records, it’ll hurt their chances to win the election.

Actually, that is sort of the problem with Joe Biden. He really does say whatever happens to be on his mind and he seems to lack the filter most of us have that keeps us from saying stupid or inappropriate comments.

 

I do hope that Paul Ryan is not underestimating Biden. Granted, that would be hard to do, but we really don’t need to be overconfident at this stage in the game. For that matter, I hope that no one is showing Romney and Ryan the latest polls. They need to campaign as though they are five points behind.

 

 

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Run Joe Run!

There has been some talk that Obama should drop Joe Biden from the ticket and select a new running mate. Biden still has many supporters, though, who want him to stay on. The trouble is they are Republicans.

 

I say Biden in 2016!

 

 

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Biden Just Not That Bright

 

I love Rudy Giuliani‘s reaction to Vice-President Joe Biden‘s most recent idiotic remark.

It is interesting how Democrats call Republicans like Reagan, Bush, or Palin idiots, and yet people on their side like Biden or Al Gore routinely do or say the most idiotic things imaginable.

I honestly don’t know why Obama picked Biden as his running mate. He obviously is not up to the job of President. A senator from a solidly blue state like Delaware with only three electoral votes hardly helped him win the election. Insurance against impeachment or assassination perhaps?

Also, as a historical point, it was the Republicans who were the anti-slavery party. If there was anyone who wanted to put African-Americans back in chains it would have been the post-Reconstruction Southern Democrats.

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Tea Party Terrorists

I guess the golden age of civility is over. The latest meme coming from the Democrats is the the Tea Partiers are terrorists and hostage takers who brought the economy to the edge of ruin with their stubborn and unreasonable insistence that the government actually start to balance the budget.

First we have Joe Biden.

Biden, driven by his Democratic allies’ misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: “They have acted like terrorists.”

Biden’s office initially declined to comment about what the vice president said inside the closed-door session, but after POLITICO published the remarks, spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff said: “The word was used by several members of Congress. The vice president does not believe it’s an appropriate term in political discourse.”

He didn’t say it. He only agreed when other Democrats said it.

Biden was agreeing with a line of argument made by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) at a two-hour, closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting.

“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

Considering that we are $14 trillion in debt and rising, I would certainly wish it were impossible to spend any more money.

John Kerry not only thinks Tea Partiers are terrorist but also that the media shouldn’t cover them.

“And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.”

“It doesn’t deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what’s real, of who’s accountable, of who is not accountable, of who’s real, who isn’t, who’s serious, who isn’t?”

It’s too bad we don’t have enlightened individuals to decide what should be covered and what shouldn’t. I suppose this would be a lot easier if the government owned all the newspapers and radio and television stations, like in China. I am sure the Chinese aren’t bothered by a lot of coverage of anti-government protests.

What bothers me about this name calling is that these are the same sort of people who wasted no time blaming Sarah Palin for the Tucson shooting, based on a map on her website. Now, what do you do with terrorists and hostage takers? Well, you shoot them. Does that mean that the next time some SEIU thug beats someone up at a Tea Party rally I can blame the Democrats for their intemperate remarks that produce a climate of hate?