Wednesday, January 29, 2014

How's That Global Warming Going For You?

It's a dead issue for the president:
President Obama came to office promising significant action to fight climate change, and Tuesday night’s State of the Union indicates this administration fully recognizes any action on that issue over the next three years will come not through legislation but through regulations and executive actions.
Rather than call for a “comprehensive energy and climate bill” as he did in 2010, Mr. Obama on Tuesday focused on much smaller goals and touted the controversial efforts of his Environmental Protection Agency to cut down on carbon emissions from power plants.
And after all I've heard about a "polar vortex", here's a little reminder of all those Democrats who tried to convince us that weather=climate:


Here's another fun video, just to annoy liberals:

Conclusions start at 8:45.

1 comment:

allen (in Michigan) said...

"It's a dead issue for the president:"

What I've been saying for a couple of years. Now it's getting hard to ignore the collapse of the politics of global warming politics.

The EU's is pulling back as an entity which is understandable because most, if not all, the member nations have pulled back individually. Japan, one of the big proponents of global warming politics hence the Kyoto Accords, has also dropped the pretense that it's going to try to live up to its obligations under the treaty although it's been evident for some time that policy didn't match their rhetoric. Obama's going to the regulatory/executive order route because even in the Democratic party there's no appetite for enacting global warming policy.

The question now, as far as I'm concerned, is how fast and far will global warming fall?

I'd like to see, at least, a zeroing out of all fuel ethanol-related policy. The subsidy ended at the end of 2013 but there's still the mandate that requires ethanol in gasoline and a tariff that keeps out cheap, foreign ethanol.

Another very obvious policy change would be zeroing out all electric vehicle subsidies.

As a competitor for gasoline-powered cars electric cars are a bust and that's the fault of the technology which may never successfully compete with gasoline but also of the infrastructure which is only capable of supporting a thin distribution of electric cars. Bringing the electrical grid up to a capacity to deal with millions of electric cars would require a multi-trillion dollar overhaul and that's not going to happen.

Number three on my "hit" parade are subsidies for solar/wind power. Both have had several decades to prove themselves commercially viable and, like hydrogen fusion, both seem no closer to commercial viability. The difference between the two, solar/wind and hydrogen fusion, is that every morning we all wake up to enjoy the benefits of hydrogen fusion so we know it works. Solar and wind are archaic forms of power that no amount of techno-tinkering is going to save from the history books.