Somewhat Reasonable

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In a feeble attempt to rebut my arguments as to why the EPA must be stopped in its pernicious efforts to over regulate and stifle what little economic growth our country currently exhibits, one of my critics recently pointed to the Stern Review as a definitive work linking the effects of purported man-made climate change to future global economic cataclysm.

On one level, one should first dispel the belief in the underlying premise that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is in fact occurring. By way of any number of studies from highly accredited scientists, the facts show that the causal linkage between CO2 and temperature change is tenuous at best (if anything, temperature increases precede increases in C02). In fact, given the last 16 years of continued growth in CO2 levels without a corresponding increase in global temperatures, the alarmist community is starting to become … well, I guess you could say, alarmed.

Their global circulation models held up as the consummate forecasting tools are currently being challenged as the current flat-lining trend in global temperatures threatens to pierce the lower end of the model-predicted temperature ranges. This issue was highlighted in a recent piece in The Economist [“A Sensitive Matter,” March 30, 2013] as the United Kingdom (and frankly much of Europe) emerged from a brutal winter that brought record cold and snowfall. Without going into a detailed discussion on the underlying science, it should suffice to say that other variables such as solar cycles, multi-year atmospheric oscillations and other factors in the climate equation should be given greater attention relative to the impact of the trace gas CO2.

Refocusing our attention on the Stern Review, one needs to first understand the backdrop for this study before assessing its legitimacy or lack thereof. In short, the 700-page study was commissioned by British government in July 2005 and released in October 2006.  The study was, at the time, revered by many who worshipped at the altar of the IPCC (the United Nations’ backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and Gaia-embracing environmentalists.

Unfortunately for this crowd, the flaws revealed in the study, even by many fellow AGW believers, largely undermine its credibility. Its author, Nicholas Stern, was an economist with solid academic credentials. Nonetheless, his study calling for significant and prompt spending for CO2 remediation to prevent the damaging effects (his opinion) of climate change did not hold up under scrutiny by his peers.

One fellow environmentalist, Robert Mendelsohn, noted several flaws within the study, most notable among these being:  1) the questionable use of a low 1.4% discount rate that inflated the present value of societal damages from climate change , 2) the ignorance of offsets to the costs of climate change through human adaptation, 3) the blind extrapolation of existing trends in weather and the forecast of increased  extreme weather event occurrences  and  4) the understatement of the negative impacts of remediation costs.

A number of other flaws have been cited in various studies critiquing the Stern Review, though one of the most glaring critiques came from environmental economist Richard Tol who stated the following: “If a student of mine were to hand in this report as a Masters thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood I would give him a ‘D’ for diligence; but more likely I would give him an ‘F’ for fail. There is a whole range of very basic economics mistakes that somebody who claims to be a Professor of Economics simply should not make…”

Back in the post-Katrina period when the alarmist community had many believing that 2005 had established the new standard for hurricane occurrence (there were 28 named storms that year in the Atlantic Basin), the Stern Review seemed to carry great appeal. But in 2013, after sixteen years of flat trends in global temperatures, it has become increasingly apparent that other factors besides CO2 levels are at work in determining climate trends.

Perhaps it is time that the OECD countries, many drowning in debt with flagging economies and unemployment levels making new highs, reconsider the wasteful spending on carbon credits, uneconomic green technologies and other remediation measures. I would also like to recommend to my detractors that they spend a few years updating their understanding of climate change science, and then come back to the debate when they are better prepared.

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Last week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid successfully pushed to the Senate floor a major online tax bill originally titled the Marketplace Fairness Act, bypassing the committee process. The proposal, which passed the Senate with a vote of 69 to 24, expands the ability of state governments to force out-of-state retailers to collect sales taxes for online and mail-order sales, even if the seller has no physical presence in the state.

If the bill passes the House and is signed by President Obama, it would give states a vast new power over retailers outside their borders, including the imposition of auditing requirements. States would be allowed to create their own unique definitions of how and when items are taxed, increasing confusion for out-of-state sellers.

Proponents of the bill have recently begun an effort to sway Republican votes by distributing material outlining support of the bill from several conservative legislators and commentators. In fact, outside of a small group of conservative legislators, the majority of support for the Marketplace Fairness Act comes primarily from legislators seeking new tax revenue or interest groups using the government to undermine their competition by imposing a tax on their online competitors.

The Marketplace Fairness Act violates the key tax principle requiring a physical presence to impose a tax and is inconsistent with conservative tax values.

The Heartland Institute has compiled a list of legislators, journalists, and think tank leaders across the conservative and libertarian spectrum that strongly oppose the Marketplace Fairness Act. It is available online here: http://heartland.org/no-net-tax.

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Heartland‘s James Taylor speaks with Willie Soon, physicist at the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Solar scientist Willie Soon explains how the sun continues to be the primary driver of global temperatures.  Dr. Soon also emphasizes he is more than happy to debate alarmists who have the courage to engage in open and honest public debate.

[Subscribe to the Heartland Daily Podcast free at this link.]

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Heartland‘s Steve Stanek speaks with Roy Cordato, Vice President for Research and resident scholar at the John Locke Foundation.

Time and time again, businesses and industries looking for government handouts have produced studies that predict big paybacks. Roy Cordato of the John Locke Foundation says there’s a great reason to take these studies with a shaker or two of salt: They look only at benefits and ignore the high costs of such handouts.

[Subscribe to the Heartland Daily Podcast free at this link.]

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During the 2008 campaign, when candidate Obama was seeking our votes, he pledged in Dover, New Hampshire on Sept. 12, 2008:

“I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

During a nationally televised Vice-Presidential debate in St. Louis on Oct. 3, 2008, candidate Biden repeated the pledge:

“No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama’s plan will see one single penny of their tax raised whether it’s their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax.”

Once elected, in an address to a joint session of Congress on Feb. 24, 2009, President Obama restated the promise yet again:

“If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime.”

But now before the Senate is the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act, which would authorize each state to force sellers in other states to collect and pay sales taxes on anything they sell over the Internet to anyone in any other state. The seller may operate exclusively in Hawaii, and not own or operate any property, or employ any workers, in any other state. But it would be liable for the sales taxes in every one of the other 49 states for anything it sells over the Internet in any of those states.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Quill Corporation v. North Dakota in 1992 that a state could not impose any sales tax obligations on sellers that did not own or operate any property or employ any workers within the state. Enacting taxes on out of state businesses would violate the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which was originally enacted precisely to prevent states from passing protectionist tax and regulatory burdens on out of state businesses. But the states can get around that ruling if the Congress passes authorization for them to impose sales taxes on out of state businesses, under the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.

The problem for Obama, Biden and the Democrats who ran on their platform is that folks in families who earn less than $250,000 a year buy stuff over the Internet too. And Obama, Biden and associated Democrats pledged that these families would not “see any form of tax increase,” nor “one single penny of their tax raised,” (not “any tax”), nor see any of their taxes increased “a single dime.” Voting for and signing a bill authorizing states to impose their sales taxes on internet sales would be the most brazen violation of the Obama/Biden/Democrat no tax increase pledges to the middle class, working people and the poor. And, no, that is not an existing tax that people already owe, because the Supreme Court ruled in Quill that they don’t already owe it.

I immediately knew that these promises were just “calculated deception” to fool gullible voters, as soon as I heard them. The Democrat Party is the party of taxes, as we have seen since 2008. And after they were elected, sure enough, Obama, Biden and Democrat associates happily began raising taxes on the middle class, working people, and the poor in violation of their pledge.

One of the first acts under the new Obama/Biden Administration, and its totally Democrat controlled Congress, was to raise the cigarette tax by 62 cents. Memo to Democrats: people who make less than $250,000 a year buy cigarettes too. They were promised that none of their taxes in any form would be raised a single dime, or even a single penny.

Then the hyperpartisan Obamacare bill imposed 7 new taxes that also applied to people making less than $250,000 a year, including new taxes on health insurance, health savings accounts, medical devices, and itemized health services. Indeed, the Obamacare Individual Mandate requiring all citizens to buy the expensive health insurance Obamacare requires is itself effectively a tax on the middle class, enforced by a tax penalty on the middle class, working people and the poor who do not comply. Obamacare is consequently another brazen violation of the Obama/Biden tax pledge.

Politicians break their promises all the time. But when their promise is so central to their election campaigns, brazenly violating it should be subject to serious consequences. When President George H.W. Bush violated his famous 1988 Republican Convention pledge, “Read my lips, no new taxes,” he was summarily voted out of office with just 38% of the vote, and quite rightly so. Personally, I would favor removing Obama/Biden from office for violating their tax pledge which was central both to their 2008 and 2012 campaigns. If we don’t hold politicians accountable for what they say to get elected, then we will not have a real democracy.

The original Quill decision was wise because state politicians would face no consequences for the tax burdens they place on out of state businesses. Neither the businesses nor their employees would be in any position to hold them democratically accountable. As famed anti-tax activist Grover Norquist told Stuart Varney of the Fox Business Network on April 25, “There are tremendous abuses that would flow from politicians taxing businesses that can’t even vote against them. That’s why the politicians at the state level love this! It’s ‘free money!’ they think. But by opening it up, the voters in their states will get mugged by 49 tax collectors in the other states.”

Internet sales taxes would consequently be a modern form of Taxation without Representation. Remember, the American people once fought a Revolution against that.

We don’t want the 50 states engaging in protectionist mercantilism against each other. The founders saw how unworkable that was under the Articles of Confederation that preceded the Constitution. The free and open national market established by the Constitution has been central to world leading American prosperity ever since.

And once interstate taxation is opened up for sales taxes, the state and local governments will be back to Congress asking for authority to impose income taxes across state lines, where the real money is. New York City has its own city income tax, and it is jealous of the income earned by residents of New Jersey and Connecticut within the city that they take back home. New York state will join the city when it goes to Congress to ask for authority to impose income taxes on residents of the neighboring states.

We see the same in the District of Columbia, which long has lusted for income tax authority over residents of Virginia and Maryland that work within the District. And what about residents of New Hampshire that go to work in Boston, or the residents of any of the 9 no state income tax states that go to work in any of the surrounding states?

Currently, the states are subject to tax competition to keep their taxes competitive. But interstate state taxation would create a competition in taxing non-residents in other states more and more. Taxation without Representation would consequently grow and grow. This is literally un-American.

Moreover, subjecting the Internet to state and local sales taxes would impose the tax burdens of over 9,600 jurisdictions nationwide, with widely varying sales tax regimes. How can any business, especially small businesses, possibly comply with all of those varying requirements, definitions (particularly what is subject to the sales tax and what not in each jurisdiction), and interpretations, not to mention varying rates. Internet sellers all across America, including the smallest kitchen table operations, would also be subject to audits from each of these 9,600 jurisdictions. The days of mom and pop enterprises starting out on the Internet would be over.

The main argument for the Internet sales tax is supposed to be fairness. Not fair we hear for businesses that operate stores, warehouses, and offices within a state to be subject to the state sales tax, while their entirely out of state competitors that sell into the state over the Internet are not. Those out of state competitors would have an unfair competitive advantage.

But those out of state competitors do not use and enjoy the in state government services that in state stores, warehouses, and offices do. The physical in state businesses all benefit from the state and local police, jails, courts, fire departments, roads and highways for their customers to get to and from the stores, and all the other state and local government services that keep their geographic areas and neighborhoods up and running. That is why these physical in state businesses should be paying their taxes and cooperate in collecting them. Out of state businesses not only do not use these services, they cannot even participate in the state and local elections that determine tax burdens, and even the quality of those services. It is the Taxation Without Representation of Internet sales taxes what would be unfair.

Moreover, sales over the Internet are subject to another cost that sales at physical in state stores do not bear. Internet sales are subject to shipping costs that are usually higher than the sales tax that does not have to be paid. So there is really no unfair competitive advantage.

Ultimately, this fairness argument can backfire. While the federal government can authorize state and local sales taxes on interstate sales, it does not have the power to authorize that on international sales. So instead of equalizing sales taxation of physical in state companies with Internet companies, it may redistribute more sales to tax free, foreign, Internet sellers beyond the reach of Congress or the states.

The Internet has flourished as a generally tax free zone. Even the physical in state stores sell on the Internet too, both within the state, and across all 50 states, and even beyond. The booming Internet has consequently been an enormous boon to our entire economy. We should keep it that way.

[First published at Forbes]

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The interminable war on drilling, fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline has taken some bizarre turns. Now it’s getting worse, as opponents grow more desperate, and the moon again grows full.

Deepwater drilling, 3-dimension and 4-D seismic (the ability to visualize 3-D over many years), deep horizon horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, and other technological marvels have obliterated environmentalist claims that the United States and the world are running out of oil and gas – and therefore we need to switch to subsidized, land-hungry, job-killing wind turbines, solar panels and biofuels.

Thanks to free enterprise innovation on state and public lands – and no thanks to President Obama, who has made nearly the entire federal onshore and offshore estate off limits to leasing and drilling – U.S. oil and natural gas production has set an all-time record. The world is on the verge of doing so, as well.

Long-running geopolitics have been turned upside down, as OPEC, Russia and other oil superpowers wonder what hit them. Plastic and chemical manufacturers, steel makers, bus and fleet vehicle operators, and now long-haul truckers are already cashing in on the natural gas bonanza. So are electric utilities, especially with EPA continuing its war on coal, with more unnecessary heavy-handed air and water rules.

Global warming/climate change hysteria is also foundering on the rocks of reality. Average global temperatures haven’t risen in 16 years, seas aren’t rising any faster than 100 years ago, and storms, floods and droughts are no more frequent or severe than over multi-decade trends during the past century.

Evidence and reality simply are not cooperating with IPCC and Mann-made climate models. “Trust the computer models!” the alarmists plead. “If reality doesn’t comport with our predictions, reality is wrong.”

The U.S. State Department has (yet again) said the Keystone XL pipeline poses few environmental problems and should be approved, to bring Canadian oil sands petroleum to Texas refineries – creating thousands of construction and permanent jobs, and billions in economic growth and government revenue.

Unacceptable! rants the Environmental Protection Agency. “State underestimated KXL’s potential impact on global warming and needs to do its studies all over again,” says EPA. Never mind that oil sands production would add a minuscule 0.06% to US greenhouse gas emissions and an undetectable 0.00001º C per year to computer-modeled global warming, according to the Congressional Research Service. Do it over, until you get the answers we want, demand EPA and environmentalist ideologues.

Some 70% of Americans and 60% of Canadians support Keystone – and energy security (and jobs) outrank greenhouse gas reduction as a national priority by a 2-1 margin among Americans – says Canadian pollster Nik Nanos.

However, haters of hydrocarbons, modern living standards, free enterprise and personal liberty are not ready to surrender. They’ve launched a blitzkrieg flanking attack. This time they are outraged that some Keystone oil could be refined into diesel and other products and exported! to Europe or Asia – while some frack-based natural gas might be converted to LNG and likewise exported! around the globe.

Well, yes. When U..S refiners transform crude oil into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, asphalt, waxes and petrochemicals, they ship some of these products overseas. Since Americans use less diesel than refineries manufacture (some parts of each barrel of crude can be converted only into diesel), refiners also export their excess diesel to Europe, which uses more diesel than gasoline, and Europeans ship their surplus gasoline to the USA, mostly to East Coast consumers. It’s a win-win arrangement that will be buttressed and safeguarded by Keystone pipeline transport of Canadian oil.

And yes, Cheniere Energy and other companies want to ship liquefied natural gas to foreign markets. It’s hardly surprising that anti-fracking activists would seize on this as yet another excuse for opposing this game-changing technology. It is hardly remarkable that Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) and other far-Left legislators would sponsor bills to block LNG exports.

What is shocking is that Dow and Huntsman Chemical, Alcoa Aluminum, Nucor Steel and other companies are joining the no-export campaign. They have convinced themselves that such exports will hurt their own selfish economic interests – and for PR reasons have packaged that notion into assertions that exporting any U.S. natural gas is against America’s and the public’s economic interests. Nonsense.

America has barely begun to tap its vast shale gas and conventional natural gas deposits. It has not yet touched its methane hydrates. Together, these deposits will likely last a century or more. In addition, other countries are racing to develop their own conventional, shale and hydrate deposits – while still others will eventually recognize the folly of keeping their own deposits off limits. All this will gradually reduce demand for U.S. natural gas exports, slow and prolong extraction, and keep gas prices low.

This interplay will also help ensure that more factories and power plants in more countries burn natural gas, thereby replacing coal and providing the economic wherewithal to enable China, India and other nations to install modern pollution abatement technologies on their now dirty power plants. That will greatly improve air quality and human health in countless cities, while reducing carbon dioxide emissions and reducing consternation among steadily dwindling numbers of climate alarmists.

American oil and gas development – and exports – will also provide an opportunity for our nation to “give back” to the world community for all the petroleum that our anti-leasing, anti-drilling policies have caused us to take from the world’s petroleum supplies for decades. All this activity will also spur further innovation in technologies to unlock still more energy. It will spur job creation, economic growth and government tax and royalty revenue collection here in the United States … and abroad.

Some 23 million Americans are still unemployed or underemployed; 128 million are dependent on various government programs, including 47 million on food stamps; and the United States is more than $16 trillion in debt. Unemployment in the construction trades is 14.7 percent. Black unemployment was 12.7% when President Bush left office; it soared to 16.7% by September 2011 under President Obama, and remains stuck at 14% today for black adults – and an astronomical 43% for black teenagers!

Drilling, fracking and exports can reverse these horrendous, intolerable, unnecessary statistics.

Misguided industrialists should stop railing against exports. They would do themselves and our nation far more good by putting their lobbyists and public relations staffs to work demanding an end to leasing, drilling and fracking bans that continue to dominate eco-liberal thinking, U.S. energy policy (especially under the current administration).

Of 1.8 billion acres on our nation’s Outer Continental Shelf, only 36 to 43 million acres are under lease. That’s barely 2% of the OCS. Offshore territory equal to 78% of the entire U.S. landmass (Alaska plus the Lower 48) is off limits! Even the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill cannot justify that.

Onshore, it’s just as bad. As of 1994, over 410 million federally controlled acres were effectively off limits to exploration and development. That’s 62% of the nation’s public lands – an area nearly equal to Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined. The situation has gotten progressively worse, with millions more acres – and vast energy, mineral and economic bounties – locked up in wilderness, park, preserve, wildlife refuge, wilderness study, Antiquities Act and other restrictive land use designations, or simply made unavailable by bureaucratic fiat or foot-dragging.

Drilling opponents claim to be protecting the environment. In reality, they simply detest hydrocarbons, modern living standards, free enterprise and personal liberty. Commonsense policies will rejuvenate our economy, put Americans back to work, and help fund government programs that Messrs. Obama and Reid profess to care so much about – while safeguarding ecological values we all cherish.

[First Published on CFACT.org]

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Last month, Earth Day came and went. Perhaps you missed hearing about it. For 2013, the theme was “The Face of Climate Change.” Other than a change in the Post Office cancellation mark on your letters from the usual wavy lines, to the four stick-like wind turbines and a sun symbol, there was little note of what was once an event celebrated by 20 million Americans. Tim Wagner, Utah representative for the Sierra Club’s Our Wild America Campaign, groused: “Media coverage of global warming has virtually disappeared.”

According to EarthDayCentral.com, one of the goals of Earth Day is to help you “Discover what you can do to save the environment.”

Perhaps, people no longer see the need for planetary salvation.

The Christian Science Monitor offered an Earth Day 2013 report card on global warming. The author starts with: “When Earth Day observances first began in 1970, Cleveland had recently doused a pollutant-fueled fire on a section of the Cuyahoga River. Cities were often shrouded in thick blankets of smog. And large portions of Lake Erie were so fouled by industrial, farm, and sewage runoff that sections of the 241-mile-long lake were pronounced dead.” And later, he reports: “Since that first Earth Day, the air over major cities is cleaner. Lake Erie is healthier. So is the Cuyahoga River, which groups in Cleveland would like to turn into a centerpiece of urban life. The improvements have come with ‘yes, but…’ as other environmental challenges have elbowed their way to the fore. But for the most part, tools are in place to deal with them.”

As Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, explains, the ‘80s ushered in the age of environmental extremism. The basic issues, for which he and Greenpeace fought, had largely been accomplished, and the general public was in agreement with the primary message. In order for the environmentalists to remain employed, they had to adopt ever more extreme positions. Moore says: “What happened is environmental extremism. They’ve abandoned science and logic altogether.” Their message today is “anti:” anti-human, anti-science, anti-technology, anti-trade and globalization, anti-business and capitalism, and ultimately, anti-civilization.

Moore’s view helps understand how the environmental movement has gone from trying to save the planet to killing the US economy.

The American economy has some basic problems. We need more well-paid jobs, increased revenue, and our trade balance is out of whack. Each of these issues could be easily addressed, but environmentalists are doing everything they can to kill potential solutions. Three such examples are coal mining and exporting; natural gas extraction and conversion to liquefied natural gas (LNG) that can then be exported; and the Keystone pipeline—all of which face extreme opposition from environmentalists.

COAL

The US has the world’s largest economically recoverable coal resources—with more than one-fourth of the world’s reserves. Unfortunately, our policies have stymied growth in the mining industry. Bill Bissett, President of Kentucky Coal Association, told me: “Our industry is accustomed to market fluctuations and competition with other fuel sources, but having a federal government place additional regulations on one geographic region (Eastern KY and WV) and one industry (coal mining) is absolutely unfair.”

Last month, environmental groups (including the Sierra Club and Greenpeace) sent a letter to newly-confirmed Interior Secretary Sally Jewell calling for a moratorium on the leasing of federal lands for coal mining in the Powder River Basin (PRB) of Montana and Wyoming—which accounts for about forty percent of US coal reserves. The results of a recent lease sale in Wyoming, offers insight regarding the economic importance of leasing these federal lands for coal mining. Peabody Coal paid nearly $800 million to the US Government for the rights to expand an existing coal mine and maintain their current workforce. The $800 million was a “bonus payment” and gives them the right to lease the coal and pay 12.5% of the sales price as a royalty. According to data from the Bureau of Land Management, 13 active coal mines in the Wyoming portion of the PRB alone, employ more than 6800 workers.

While, as Bissett addressed, policy under this administration has harshly singled out coal and the coal miners for punishment, coal’s low cost and abundance continues to make it a highly preferential fuel for power generation in developing countries like China and India. And, as I’ve previously written, even Europe is increasing its use of coal for electricity generation, as they’ve discovered the prohibitively high cost of renewables. In 2011, exports to European and Asian markets represented 76% of total US coal exports—up 31% compared to 2010.

Currently, US coal is easily shipped to Europe from ports on the east coast, but the US is missing out on the important Asian market—now being met by more expensive Australian competitors—due to infrastructure opposition from environmental groups. In the Los Angeles Times (LAT), Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and a legend in the world of climate activism, wrote: “Those exports can’t really take off, however, unless West Coast ports dramatically expand their deepwater loading capacity. … Environmentalists are trying desperately to block the port expansion.” Addressing the situation, the Wall Street Journal states: “there are now no major coal exporting facilities on the US West Coast. Washington State, with its proximity to coal-rich Wyoming and Montana, is seen as the best place to start.” PRB coal is being shipped to China and India through Vancouver. Additionally, the countries’ needs are being filled by Australian and Indonesian coal—so environmentalists’ fears that shipping US coal will undermine “everything we’ve accomplished,” as Sierra Club spokesman David Graham-Caso says, are wrong. The coal is being shipped and used—but the US is losing out on the jobs (which would be mostly union jobs), the revenue, and the benefit to the trade deficit. The LAT/McKibben piece cites KC Golden, policy director of Seattle’s Climate Solutions group: “Can you imagine standing at the mouth of the Columbia River, watching ships sail in from Asia carrying solar panels and electric car batteries and plasma TVs, passing ships from America carrying coal?” Worse, can you imagine all those goods coming in—manufactured using Australian coal-fueled electricity, and nothing going out? That’s what we have now.

A report from the Energy Policy Research Foundation states: “US production will merely replace higher cost production. … Neither net world coal combustion nor GHG emissions will change as a result of an expansion of US coal exports.” The report concludes:  “The higher net value received is in effect a wealth transfer from foreign consumers to US producers and the national economy. This net gain to the national economy shows up in higher returns to invested capital, greater employment opportunities from expanded investment, higher revenues to state, local and federal governments, and higher lease values on coal reserves from federal and state lands.”

But environmental groups don’t want this “net economic gain to the national economy.” Apparently, they’d prefer that we continue to borrow from China’s Australian coal-fueled economy.

LNG

LNG faces a similar problem. Natural gas was once the favored choice of environmentalists—until privately funded hydraulic fracturing (or high pressure drilling) advancements made it plentiful and, consequently cheap. The low-cost fuel snatched away the fossil fuel-free dream that seemed to be almost within reach. Now environmentalists oppose natural gas as well. The Sierra Club’s Beyond Natural Gas site claims: “Increasing reliance on natural gas displaces the market for clean energy.”

Many countries want US natural gas. Unlike coal, natural gas cannot just be put on a ship and sent to the awaiting customer. It must first be liquefied—hence the term LNG. The liquefaction process requires costly facilities, which, for economic reasons, need a large customer base—many with which the US does not have free trade agreements (though the Energy Department can permit them, provided it determines that such ventures are consistent with the public interest). The International Business Times, on March 1, 2013, reports that: “As of this date, 17 applications for multibillion-dollar facilities to turn the commodity into liquefied natural gas, or LNG, for export are under review by the Energy Department.” Let’s hope they don’t take as many years and as many reviews as the Keystone pipeline.

LNG exports could have a tremendous positive impact on the US economy. A recent IHS global insight report concluded that LNG exports would “result in the creation of over 100,000 direct, indirect, and economy wide jobs and have an immediate economic impact resulting in $3.6 to $5.2 billion in potential annual revenues.”

And, LNG exporting would not only create jobs and increase revenue, it would also reduce trade deficits. A just-released report from the Rio Grande Foundation states: “The United States currently runs a $6 billion trade deficit with Japan. That nation is particularly eager to import LNG from the US due to the nuclear accident at Fukushima.”

Once again, environmentalists oppose jobs, revenue, and trade-deficit reduction. Earlier this year, more than 40 groups and individuals took out a half page ad in the New York Times that said: “Exporting Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to overseas markets will mean more drilling and fracking on US land, which are dirty and dangerous practices.”

KEYSTONE

Like coal mining and export, natural gas extraction, liquefaction, and export, the Keystone pipeline would create thousands of union jobs and increased service employment in supporting communities; benefit local and state economies, and provide additional revenues to the federal coffers; and help balance the trade deficit, as some of the refined product would be exported. But once again, environmental opposition has targeted the pipeline—causing delay after delay that has now postponed the economic benefit of the pipeline.

Last week, Russ Girling, TransCanada, CEO, said: “I believe that those that are fundamentally opposed to our pipeline are getting louder and more shrill as we move towards a decision.” He announced that the potential start date must be moved from the previously planned late 2014 or early 2015 to late 2015.

The Keystone pipeline saga is the same song, another verse.

These are just three current examples of how the influence of environmental organizations is driving policy in the name of planetary salvation that is, in reality, resulting in economic devastation that could lead to humanity’s ultimate starvation. Environmental motivations are less about saving the planet and more about killing the global economy—while enriching themselves taxpayers’ expense.

 [First Published at TownHall.com]

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I want to make just one observation based on Avik Roy’s outstanding write-up of the Oregon Medicaid project.

Most of the commentary has been shocked that there was no statistically significant improvement in health measures between people who were enrolled in Medicaid and those who were not.

I want to focus on a different issue, one that I have been hammering on in these pages ― that ObamaCare is unlikely to increase the number of people with insurance.

Before we even get to the outcomes question is the issue of whether very many people want to have insurance coverage, even when it is totally free.

Oregon had a limited amount of money with which to expand Medicaid, so it held a “lottery” for those who were potentially eligible. Roy writes −

Of the 35,169 Oregonians who “won” the lottery to gain enrollment in Medicaid, only about 30 percent actually enrolled. Indeed, only 60 percent of those who were selected bothered to fill out the forms necessary to sign up for the benefits — which tells you a bit about how uninsured Oregonians perceive the Medicaid program.

Yet the Oregon Medicaid program is far better than most –

In Oregon, Medicaid pays primary care physicians approximately 62 percent of what private insurers pay. That compares to the national average of 52 percent; a number of large blue states pay less than 40 percent. Because Oregon’s Medicaid program pays more, the state’s Medicaid beneficiaries have relatively better access to doctors. While 21 percent of Oregon physicians won’t take new Medicaid patients ― an unacceptably high number — the national average is even worse: 31 percent.

Importantly, Philip Klein reports that those who did enroll did not reduce their use of hospital emergency rooms –

Another interesting finding was that though medical spending increased among Medicaid enrollees due to more prescription drug usage and doctors’ visits, the study “did not find significant changes in visits to the emergency department or hospital admissions.” This undercuts another favorite talking point of liberals, which is that expanding insurance actually saves money by reducing costly emergency room visits.

So, first, people had to express some interest to be enrolled in the lottery. Then, if they made it through the lottery, they had to fill out enrollment forms. Then, they had to actually enroll. Yet only 30% of the lottery winners bothered to complete the process. And some of these numbers were undoubtedly people who had been getting coverage from their employers but decided that free coverage with no cost-sharing was a better deal than what they got on the job.

So, once again, even if ObamaCare is perfectly implemented on time and within budget, it is unlikely to have any positive effect on the numbers of uninsured ― the entire reason it was enacted.

Why is this? Because policy makers never actually listened to the uninsured to find out why they rejected what was available. Policy makers never treated them as an untapped market that did not care for the existing products. Policy makers decided that they should enroll whether they liked it or not. But these dogs just don’t like the dog food.

[First Posted on John Goodman's Health Policy Blog]

TweetThe United States Global Change Research Program released a large Internet Newsletter about activities protecting the public from catastrophic events due to carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.  The Newsletter had this heading:Thirteen Agencies, One Vision:  Empower the Nation with Global Science Change Science

After recovering from my swelling of pride about our government’s concern for public welfare, I thought this was written by Dr. Joseph Goebbels–but he is dead.

Anyway, a contribution from NOAA to this Newsletter follows.  They state Spring of 2013 will have above-average temperatures for most of the United States.  I am sitting in Atlanta, Georgia May 4, still waiting the arrival of Spring.  Most temperatures since March 21 have been temperature we would expect early March.  Predictions for the next half-dozen days are more of the same.

How has your 2013 Spring been behaving?  Lots of sun and warm temperatures?  Billions are being spent annually by activities proudly described in this newsletter.  It appears sequestration is none-existent when it comes to climate change advocacy propaganda pursued by the Thirteen agencies.

Maybe in times of a government approaching bankruptcy, we should eliminate climate change advocacy and concentrate on what really needs to be done like protecting our borders, stop terrorists from harassing our citizens, building and repairing roads, fix Social Security and Medicare, etc.

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The spectacle of San Jose State climate science professors wanting to burn a book that questions their alarmist dogma is getting some traction. Steve Goreham, author of the “offending” book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism, was on the Sean Hannity Radio Show Thursday to talk about this book.

Steve, a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, was also interviewed by Dennis Miller for a spot that will air soon.

Listen to the interview with Hannity in the player above.

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The EU blinked. It’s obvious the EU does not want a high-profile political confrontation with Google over a search monopoly abuse enforcement action.

Last May, when the Competition authorities announced they had a preliminary Statement of Objections for four monopoly abuses against Google, the EU competition authority trumpeted their preference for a settlement over enforcement action in this case, i.e. ruling Google a search monopoly guilty of monopoly abuse that warranted a material fine. In extending their public deadlines for Google three times, and then tentatively accepting the immaterial search concessions Google proposed, it is obvious the EU bent over backwards to avoid politically confronting Google.

The EU economy is still reeling from the financial crisis and the resultant austerity measures. The EU needs economic growth. And the proposed U.S.-EU Free Trade Agreement offers the potential for more economic growth. Apparently the EU’s continuing economic weakness, has the EU competition authorities wary of facing Google’s potential political charges of EU protectionism and hostility to innovation, if the EU were to rule Google a monopoly guilty of monopoly abuses. Apparently the EU is also wary of getting the U.S.-EU Free Trade Agreement off on the wrong foot by angering one of the Administration’s closest corporate allies.

And evidently, Google has been throwing its exceptional political weight around behind-the-scenes to secure special treatment and exceptions from the EU.

Importantly, Google’s growing sovereign-like political power has serious implications for the EU decision-making well beyond competition policy.

So what are the problems with politically enabling Google?

First, the EU undercuts its sovereign enforcement authority to protect EU consumers by giving the world’s #1 multi-national corporate bad-actor lenient and special treatment.

Google is the world’s #1 antitrust offender. Google has been found to violate antitrust law in ten different ways in the last five years; and Google is, or has been, under antitrust investigation in nine different countries, in addition to the EU’s investigations of Google’s abuse of search/search advertising dominance, abuse of standards essential patents, and Google-Android’s anti-competitive practices.

Google is Europe’s #1 privacy problem. EU data protection authorities and the six largest EU nations are struggling with how to enforce Google’s defiance of their opposition to Google’s new privacy policy that offers no-opt-out or meaningful transparency into how Google uses private data. EU nations have had repeated privacy problems with: Google’s Street View photos without permission and no opt-out; again with Google Street View WiSpy data collections without anyone’s knowledge or consent; again when Google was found by the FCC to have not told the truth about how many Googlers were involved in the WiSpy collections; and yet again when Google did not destroy the WiSpy data as they had promised.

Google is Europe’s #1 tax evader. Google is the most aggressive multi-national tax evader in the EU, paying only a 2.4% tax rate.

Google is Europe’s #1 corporate IP infringer. Germany and France formally opposed the Google Book Settlement as mass copyright infringement and anti-competitive. Google settled a Google News infringement suit against Belgian newspapers and another with French newspapers. Other EU nations continue to call for payment for Google News use of their newspaper content. Even one of the EU-Google antitrust remedies is for Google to stop scraping others content and monetizing it as their own, but it requires no restitution for this anti-competitive infringement.

Google Android is #1 in security vulnerability for malware. With a dominant share of the mobile operating system market Google has put gaining rapid share of Android above basic security protection for EU and other consumers. This obvious consumer harm should prompt the EU to formally open a Google-Android antitrust investigation.

Second, the EU decision leaves European consumers and businesses largely at the mercy of the most powerful and economically-pervasive predatory monopoly in EU history.

All other EU antitrust investigations involved primarily one industry or sector, usually technology. The Google case is unique in that the discriminatory problem of monopoly search/search-advertising self-dealing cuts across the consumer economy from shopping to news, maps, travel, restaurants, content, social, finance, video, mobile – most of the consumer online economy.

Remarkably Google, with its ingeniously-narrowing and self-serving remedy settlement, has tricked the EU into tacitly accepting and legitimizing a consumer-wide monopoly that abuses its dominance in contravention to EU law. Simply, the EU decision benefits Google greatly by locking in the Google monopoly status quo with no admission of any wrongdoing despite the EU’s findings.

By signaling its hostility to any changes from market testing in order to protect its political settlement with Google, the EU competition authorities do not appreciate the loud signals they are sending to consumers, competitors and Google: that Google’s ill-gotten monopoly is OK; that the EU views the Google dominated market as superior to a more competitive one; and that the EU has little interest in further investigating Google monopoly search abuse.

More remarkably, the Google proposed remedies that would end the EU’s ongoing investigation of this market would leave oversight of 90+% of the consumer online economy in the hands of one Google-recommended, Google-paid monitor.

It is especially ironic that a company accused of abusing its vertical-monopoly, conflicted-roles of online ad cop, prosecutor, judge and jury, is being allowed to pick the potential pool of Google monitor-cops that the EU will choose from.

Even more remarkably, the EU competition authorities have de facto delegated to the Google monopoly  to: 1) fairly organize Europe’s culture(s), commerce, news, and political information going forward, and 2) to not pick online winners and losers by being an “honest” monopoly broker for Europe’s online economy.

This is a lot of blind trust to give a digital information monopoly, with a long antitrust rap sheet and that famously bragged “Google is the biggest kingmaker on this earth.” It is an especially great amount of special trust, given that EU competition law considers monopolies and abuse of dominance to be illegal.

Third, the EU will be proactively enabling Google’s well-known “culture of unaccountability,” by proactively preferring to allow Google to avoid admitting any wrongdoing or taking any public responsibility for breaking EU law.

Apparently, the EU politically decided to mimic the FTC’s no-fault, no-deterrent enforcement approach that allows Google to settle charges of law-breaking with no admission or acceptance of corporate responsibility for illegal behavior. For a brand-dependent firm like Google, the opportunity to skirt any real brand-accountability with the public for breaking the law is a huge gift to Google.

Making matters worse, the EU politically chose to accept Google’s “labeling” remedy so it would not suffer any political criticism for regulating Google’s ever-changing search ranking algorithm or stifling Google’s innovation. As a result, the EU is only entrenching Google’s monopoly not creating the opportunity for more competition.

The bad joke here that the EU competition authorities apparently don’t get is that Google does not consider its offered remedy of adjusting its presentation of search results to be “labeling” — they see the other side of the coin, that the adjustments are Google branding and marketing opportunities.

Google knows that its dominant brand, coupled with the natural propensity of ~a third of users to always click on the top result (usually taken by a Google-owned product) will mean that many users will view Google’s new “labels” as appealing Google branding. Google knows down to the micro-shade of blue and the exact positioning/font/display/framing of every result what presentation changes result in what change in consumer behavior.

Given the EU’s reluctance to require the Google search monopoly to treat competitors as they treat themselves, by requiring a normal monopoly non-discrimination obligation, it is hard to see how the Google’s proposed “labeling” ruse will have any material impact on Google’s dominant revenue model.

Conclusion

If the EU competition authorities accept the Google-proposed remedies to address narrow aspects of Google’s monopoly and abuses of dominance, and shut down the EU’s investigation, the settlement will de facto legalize and legitimize Google’s remaining untouched monopoly power, with only one Google-recommended/paid EU-outsourced policeman on the beat.

Is Google too powerful to prosecute? Apparently that is the current political conclusion of the EU competition authorities. Google is increasingly the de facto Internet sovereign by controlling: 87% of global search advertising; almost half of all global online advertising; nearly half of the Internet’s video viewers; and two-thirds of the world’s smart phone users.

Given Google’s 90+% market share in Europe, and given tough EU competition law, EU competition authorities could have issued a Statement of Objections, declared Google a monopoly that abused its dominance in four ways, fined Google up to 10% of revenues for monopoly abuses, and mandated much more effective sanctions to mitigate the anti-competitive effects of Google’s monopoly abuses.

The fact is that the EU made a political decision to work with Google and do what Google could accept and would not publicly criticize. Obviously EU competition authorities were much more worried about what Google would say than what anyone else would say.

Sadly, this expedient EU political decision to protect Google from EU law and the consequences of its own actions has ominous implications for future EU-Google enforcement decisions concerning: competition, data protection, property rights and consumer protection laws.

[First published at The Precursor Blog, as part of the Google Unaccountability Series]

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Washington state is conservative, except for Seattle, which delivers the entire state’s electoral votes for the most left-wing plausible candidate every four years.

The same is true of Oregon, except for Portland. Pennsylvania has been described as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between. But Philadelphia sometimes delivers more votes for the Democrats than the city’s population, and the entire state’s electoral votes for leftism as well. And where would California be politically without San Francisco and Los Angeles?

In fact, the result of the 2012 presidential election was changed by allowing urban areas with a 90% liberal/left vote to determine the electoral vote outcome for entire states, rather than just for their areas. But that can and should be changed.

Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which establishes the Electoral College for selecting Presidents, provides that the electors shall be chosen by each state “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct …” The legislatures of Maine and Nebraska have used that clause to provide that the electors in their states shall be determined by majority vote in each congressional district, rather than by the majority vote statewide.

So if a state has three congressional districts, and the Democrat candidate for president wins the majority in two of them, and the Republican candidate wins the majority in one of them, then the state’s electoral votes go two for the Democrat and one for the Republican, rather than all for the Democrat as under the current statewide majority system. California has 53 congressional districts, 38 of them held by Democrats and 15 held by Republicans. Under congressional district majority voting for presidential electors, the Republican candidate for president would likely gain at least 15 electoral votes from California. Under the current statewide majority system, all of the state’s electoral votes would go to the Democrat. .

If congressional district majority voting were adopted in Washington state, the people of Seattle would determine the presidential electoral vote from Seattle, not from the entire state. In Oregon, the people of Portland would determine the presidential electoral vote only for Portland, not for the rest of the state as well. In Pennsylvania, the people of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh would choose the presidential electoral from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, not from Alabama as well.

That would be true democracy. People should be able to vote for the presidential electors from their areas, not elsewhere throughout a state. Under the current system, millions and millions of Americans are disenfranchised by the current winner-take-all statewide electoral vote determination. For example, those in Maryland outside of Baltimore have no say at all in the presidential election, because the voters in Baltimore that almost uniformly vote Democrat and liberal/left will always determine the state majority. Under a congressional district selection method, by contrast, Maryland residents outside of Baltimore would be empowered to effectively vote for president too. The same is true for people in Illinois outside of Chicago. Or New York outside of New York City. Or California outside of San Francisco and Los Angeles. And elsewhere across the country.

Why should people in these politically and ideologically intolerant urban areas determine who the presidential electors are for people outside their urban areas? There is no good reason.

Each state currently has a number of electoral votes equal to the number of congressional districts in the state plus two more for the senators.  All go today to the candidate who wins the majority vote in the state.  But under congressional district majority elector selection, those two additional electoral votes for each state should go to whoever wins the majority of congressional districts in the state. Every citizen of every state would then have an equal say of who wins the state’s electoral votes.

If just the six states of Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which now have Republican legislatures and governors, had switched for 2012 to choosing presidential electors by congressional district majorities, rather than by statewide majorities, Mitt Romney rather than Barack Obama would be president today. In California, the change can be made by public vote through the Initiative process. That would have produced more electoral votes for the Republican ticket in 2012 as well.

That change has a chance to win by public vote in California, and be adopted in other less Republican areas elsewhere as well, because the people there, and all across America, are tired of the presidential campaigns only being held in a handful of “battleground” states. If the presidential electors are chosen by congressional district majorities instead of statewide majorities, presidential campaigns would again be conducted nationwide, reopening our democracy to everyone.

There is no opportunity for Democrat-controlled states to retaliate by switching to congressional district majority voting as well. Democrat-controlled states would likely produce a Democrat statewide majority in presidential elections. But the electoral vote from any Republican congressional district in such states would probably go for the Republican presidential candidate under congressional district majority voting. That would produce some electoral votes for the Republican candidate in such Democrat-controlled states, while the Republican candidate would receive no electoral votes from those states under the current statewide majority voting system. The switch to determining presidential electoral votes by congressional district would always on net favor Republicans because it would take away the power of the more uniform Democrat vote concentrated in urban areas to determine the presidential vote for their entire states, rather than just for their own urban areas.

Another benefit of the change is that it would also mean the end of voter fraud, or at least a much more limited impact from such fraud. No point in pumping up the vote in Philadelphia if it can only affect the presidential electoral vote from Philadelphia, which is never in doubt any way. Chicago could no longer pull out the election for Kennedy over Nixon, by producing whatever votes are required for that at the last second. This too would greatly improve our democracy, with a truer vote.

Legislation providing for such reform more broadly has already begun to be introduced. Two years ago in Pennsylvania, the Republican state senate president, Robert Pileggi, introduced such a bill with the governor’s support. Progress stalled because Republicans were overconfident that they would take all of the state’s electoral votes from Obama in 2012.

Virginia state senator Charles W. Carrico, Sr., from southwest Virginia, has introduced similar legislation more recently, saying voters in his district were discouraged they had no say in presidential elections because of Northern Virginia’s growing dominance.  Such grassroots reform efforts have also popped up in Florida and Michigan.

For all of the above reasons, switching to determination of presidential electoral votes by congressional district majorities rather than the current statewide majorities would be a good government reform that should be promoted by the grassroots across the entire country.

[First published at the American Spectator]

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Original caption from the San Jose State website: “This week we received a deluge of free books from the Heartland Institute. The book is entitled ‘The Mad, Mad, Made World of Climatism’. Shown above, Drs. Bridger and Clements test the flammability of the book.”

On April 24 while introducing John Lott at our latest Authors Series event, I mentioned to the audience that The Heartland Institute had distributed 100,000 copies of Steve Goreham’s book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism. Some of the global warming alarmists who received the book did not appreciate the gift, and told me so in nasty emails.

“Too bad,” I said, to laughs. “Maybe they could burn the book to keep warm in this record cold spring, which might be a sign of the coming global cooling.”

I was just joking. I didn’t know I was psychic.

I’d like to say that the picture for this post says it all — and it certainly proves in one image the thesis of Goreham’s book — but let’s break it down.

The man holding the book is Craig Clements, associate professor at the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at San Jose State University. The woman holding the match is Alison Bridger, the chair of the department. Surely, these two educators — who are paid by the poor taxpayers of California — posted this picture on the department’s website a copule of days ago to get a laugh.

No doubt bellies were jiggling aplenty among the faculty … until the pic got shared around. The post and photo were taken down Thursday, but the Internet is forever. Heartland friend Anthony Watts has thwarted this Soviet-style attempt at “disappearing” an inconvenient photo, saving a classic from “the Fahrenheit 451 department” for posterity.

For crying out loud, I thought Al Gore was a PR nightmare for the climate alarmist side with his crazy rants. But two public university climate scientists think it’s a good idea to post a picture of themselves getting ready to burn a book filled with what they consider to be apostasy? How open-minded. How liberal. How disgusting. But the joke — as sick as it is — turns out to be on those who pose as the intellectual betters of you and me.

The Heartland Institute has produced and promoted a immense amount of research that questions the dogma of man-caused catastrophic climate change — which is why The Economist magazine calls Heartland “the world’s most prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change.”

Heartland has hosted eight international conferences on climate change attended by thousands — and always open to a public examination of the science with folks who think like Bridger and Clements, with (sadly) too few takers. In 2009, we published the 800-plus page Climate Change Reconsidered, which is filled with scientific research that questions alarmist dogma. In 2011, we published the 400-plus page Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, filled with more of the same. A new edition of Climate Change Reconsidered is scheduled for publication this fall, with another on the way in 2014. And that is just scratching the surface of what is out there in the scientific community to rebut the hypothesis — which is looking shakier by the month — that man is causing an out-of-control warming of the planet.

Heartland must be having an impact if the leftist reflex to seeing our latest project — the wide distribution of a book that boils down a lot of this research for a layman audience — is to pull out the book of matches. Thanks for making Goreham’s point, professors! The enviro-left in academia has “progressed” from ignoring all this non-alarmist evidence, to trying to dismiss it, to failing at that, to refusing to debate, to fudging data and blackballing contrarian evidence, to committing crimes against The Heartland Institute, to now showing the world that putting a match to evidence from the “other side” is a reasonable reaction. Pathetic. We are witnessing the death throes of a cult in real time, and it ain’t pretty.

Yeah, the pic was a gag. But it matters that such a gag was an instinctual, casual reaction to Goreham’s book — and one that had to be (unsuccessfully) thrown into the memory hole. The upshot: Goreham was interviewed by Sean Hannity and Dennis Miller this week about his book and the affliction known as “climatism” that appears to be entering its desperate phase. Those interviews, to an audience of millions, will be shared in this space soon.

Listen to me talk to Steve Goreham about his book at the Heartland Daily Podcast. And listen to Goreham on Sean Hannity’s radio show on Thursday.

UPDATE: Read more about this at Watts Up With That, Tom Nelson, SPPI, PJ Media, Armchair General, Religious Atrocities, The College Fix, FreedomWorks, and FreeRepublic. The comments at Watts Up With That are 200-plus and counting … and a lot of them are quite witty.

UPDATE: A commenter over at Watts Up With That, Bob Shapiro, emailed Dorothy Poole, chief of staff to the president of San Jose State University. and he got a reply:

“Thank you for sharing your concerns. The Department of Meteorology and Climate Science has removed the material in question from its website, and regrets what was clearly an ill-conceived attempt at satire. Please be assured the university does not condone book burning for any reason.”

Well, that clears things up. Book burning at SJSU: Bad. Satire: Not taught at SJSU. Ill-conceived smugness: Encouraged until embarrassing  Glad that’s clear now.

UPDATE: This story was picked up by Fox News, and Human Events.

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Heartland‘s Joy Pullman speaks with James Guthrie, former State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Nevada Department of Education.

My mother always told me to get good grades and become a doctor or a lawyer, but she never mentioned teaching.  Perhaps teaching should belong in that upper echelon of high-paying jobs as well.  If we want the best and brightest teaching our children, we have to compensate them.   If we don’t, they’ll find another profession.

Nevada’s  education system is on a downward spiral, says former state Superintendent James Guthrie. He recommends one dramatic change: Paying top teachers $200,000 per year.  Dr. Guthrie joins the podcast to discuss his proposal, which he  published recently in a Nevada Policy Research Institute paper. We talk about why Nevada has so many rotten teachers, how to pay the best a lot more without  increasing the budget, and how anti-elitism is a barrier to getting kids a good education.

[Subscribe to the Heartland Daily Podcast free at this link.]

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 James Taylor, Senior Fellow at The Heartland Institute, wrote a response to the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee’s (NCADAC) 2013 Draft National Climate Assessment, which tackles many important climate-related questions but consistently reaches overly pessimistic conclusions.

The Draft National Climate Assessment presents many asserted climatic change impacts – some real, some contradicted by the weight of scientific evidence – and paints a picture of a nation and world severely and negatively affected by human-induced climate change. By contrast, the weight of scientific evidence suggests only modest recent climate change by historical standards.

Importantly, the weight of scientific evidence suggests the Draft Assessment overstates asserted recent harms and overlooks the fact that recent climatic changes are creating net benefits to plants, animals, and human welfare rather than net harm.

The full commentary cites more than 400 pages of scientific evidence, and can be downloaded here.

 

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General Electric Co.’s decision to cut off financing for a few dozen gun retailers will impose “an insignificant and immaterial” effect on  GE’s balance sheet, but the gun gambit provides this most politically attuned corporation in America an opportunity to thump its breast in another display of  corporate sanctimony.

GE told the Wall Street Journal last week that  fewer than 75 retailers nationwide — small shops selling primarily guns and  ammunition — will have to find other capital sources to finance customers’ gun  purchases. Meanwhile, GE will continue to provide credit to gun buyers at  Wal-Mart Stores — the nation’s biggest retailer of guns and ammunition — Dick’s Sporting Goods and other retailers with extensive lines of firearms and related  equipment.

It’s just this kind of ploy that inflames passions of  gun-rights advocates who see GE’s maneuver as another example of corporate elites pre-empting citizens’ decisions on what is best for them and their  families.

To be sure, GE has legitimate emotional reasons for its  decision. GE Capital is based close to Newtown, Conn., the site of the shooting  that took the lives of 26 children and educators in December, and GE exec Peter Lanza is the father of Adam Lanza, the shooter who killed those people.

‘CIVIC VIRTUE’

But we’ve seen GE clothed in civic virtue before, motivated by nothing more  than crony capitalism. In 2010, GE Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt was front-and-center among CEOs recruited by President Barack Obama to proclaim that the chafing between big business and big government had been soothed. Soon  after, amid much fanfare, Mr. Immelt was named head of the President’s Council of Jobs &  Competitiveness, which never met with the president and evaporated  after four meetings and a boilerplate  report.

GE was out beating the drum in 2011 for another Obama agenda item,  cap-and-trade, a system to limit man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. And  what better example of civic probity to save the world from the effects of  global warming than to provide federal subsidies for GE’s wind turbines and solar panels?

By May 2011, even Mr. Immelt realized he over-hyped the  dangers of climate change and over-promised the benefits of green technology. He told an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of  Technology, “If I had one thing to do over again, I would not have  talked so much about green. Even though I believe in global warming and I  believe in the science . . . it just took on a connotation that was too elitist.  It was too precious, and it let opponents think that if you had a green  initiative, you didn’t care about jobs.”

But sometimes GE just can’t help  itself when it comes to deciding what’s best for consumers, as when it pushed  effectively for a federal ban on its own GE-brand incandescent light bulbs and  to substitute more-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs (100-watt  incandescents were restricted in 2011, 75-watt bulbs were phased out in January  and restrictions on 60-watt bulbs take effect next year). Not to worry. GE-brand  CFL bulbs are in production — in China.

GE’s decision to cut off  financing for gun shops will do nothing to keep guns out of the hands of  criminals, the mentally ill and others who would do harm in this country — few  of whom buy weaponry on credit in the first place. Given GE’s history of playing  the finger puppet for liberal causes, its determination to hinder gun ownership  at some retailers but not at others is suspect at best. At worst, it’s another  display of corporate elitism.

[First published by Crain's Chicago Business]

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Heartland‘s Joy Pullman speaks with Greg Forster,  Senior Fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

Opponents frequently claim that school choice does not benefit participants, it hurts public schools, costs taxpayers, facilitates segregation and even undermines democracy. What does the research say? Greg Forster, a senior fellow with the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice joins the School Reform News Podcast to discuss the research on school vouchers.

[Subscribe to the Heartland Daily Podcast free at this link.]

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Trofim Lysenko became the Director of the Soviet Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the 1930s under Josef Stalin.  He was an advocate of the theory that characteristics acquired by plants during their lives could be inherited by later generations stemming from the changed plants, which sharply contradicted Mendelian genetics.  As a result, Lysenko became a fierce critic of theories of the then rising modern genetics.

Under Lysenko’s view, for example, grafting branches of one plant species onto another could create new plant hybrids that would be perpetuated by the descendants of the grafted plant.  Or modifications made to seeds would be inherited by later generations stemming from that seed.  Or that plucking all the leaves off of a plant would cause descendants of the plant to be leafless.

Lysenkoism was “politically correct” (a term invented by Lenin) because it was consistent with certain broader Marxist doctrines.  Marxists wanted to believe that heredity had a limited role even among humans, and that human characteristics changed by living under socialism would be inherited by subsequent generations of humans.  Thus would be created the selfless new Soviet man.

Also Lysenko himself arose from a peasant background and developed his theories from practical applications rather than controlled scientific experiments.  This fit the Marxist propaganda of the time holding that brilliant industrial innovations would arise from the working classes through practical applications.  Lysenko’s theories also seemed to address in a quick and timely manner the widespread Soviet famines of the time arising from the forced collectivization of agriculture, rather than the much slower changes from scientific experimentation and genetic heredity.

Lysenko was consequently embraced and lionized by the Soviet media propaganda machine.  Scientists who promoted Lysenkoism with faked data and destroyed counterevidence were favored with government funding and official recognition and award.  Lysenko and his followers and media acolytes responded to critics by impugning their motives, and denouncing them as bourgeois fascists resisting the advance of the new modern Marxism.

The V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences announced on August 7, 1948 that thenceforth Lysenkoism would be taught as the only correct theory.  All Soviet scientists were required to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenkoism.  Ultimately, Soviet geneticists resisting Lysenkoism were imprisoned and even executed.  Lysenkoism was abandoned for the correct modern science of Mendelian genetics only as late as 1964.

The Theory of Man Caused Catastrophic Global Warming 

This same practice of Lysenkoism has long been under way in western science in regard to the politically correct theory of man caused, catastrophic, global warming.  That theory serves the political fashions of the day in promoting vastly increased government powers and control over the private economy.  Advocates of the theory are lionized in the dominant Democrat party controlled media in the U.S., and in leftist controlled media in other countries.  Critics of the theory are denounced as “deniers,” and even still bourgeois fascists, with their motives impugned.

Those who promote the theory are favored with billions from government grants and neo-Marxist environmentalist largesse, and official recognition and award.  Faked and tampered data and evidence has arisen in favor of the politically correct theory.  Is not man-caused, catastrophic global warming now the only theory allowed to be taught in schools in the West?

Those in positions of scientific authority in the West who have collaborated with this new Lysenkoism because they felt they must be politically correct, and/or because of the money, publicity, and recognition to be gained, have disgraced themselves and the integrity of their institutions, organizations and publications.

The United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is supposed to represent the best science of the U.S. government on the issue of global warming.  In January, the USGCRP released the draft of its Third National Climate Assessment Report.  The first duty of the government scientists at the USGCRP is to produce a complete picture of the science of the issue of global warming, which is what the taxpayers are paying them for.  But it didn’t take long for the Cato Institute to do the job of the USGCRP with a devastating line by line rebuttal, The Missing Science from the Draft National Assessment on Climate Change, Center for the Study of Science, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, 2012, by Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger, Robert C. Balling, Mary J. Hutzler & Craig D. Idso.

Check it out for yourself if you dare.  Both publications are written to be accessible by intelligent laymen.  See which one involves climate science and which one involves political science.

All the climate alarmist organizations simply rubber stamp the irregular Assessment Reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  None of them do any original science on the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.  But the United Nations is a proven, corrupt, power grabbing institution.  The science of their Assessment Reports has been thoroughly rebutted by the hundreds of pages of science in Climate Change Reconsidered, and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, both written by dozens of scientists with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, and published by the Heartland Institute, the international headquarters of the skeptics of the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.

Again, check it out for yourself.  You don’t have to read every one of the well over a thousand pages of careful science in both volumes to see at least that there is a real scientific debate.

The editors of the once respected journals of Science and Nature have abandoned science for Lysenkoism on this issue as well.  They have become as political as the editorial pages of the New York Times.  They claim their published papers are peer reviewed, but those reviews are conducted on the friends and family plan when it comes to the subject of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.  There can be no peer review at all when authors refuse to release their data and computer codes for public inspection and attempted reconstruction of reported results by other scientists.  They have been forced to backtrack on recent publications relying on novel, dubious, statistical methodologies not in accordance with established methodologies of complex statistical analysis.

Formerly respected scientific bodies in the U.S. and other western countries have been commandeered by political activist Lysenkoists seizing leadership positions.  They then proceed with politically correct pronouncements on the issue of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming heedless of the views of the membership of actual scientists.  Most of what you see and hear from alarmists regarding global warming can be most accurately described as play acting on the meme of settled science.  The above noted publications demonstrate beyond the point where reasonable people can differ that no actual scientist can claim that the science of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming has been settled or that there is a settled “consensus” that rules out reasonable dissent.

Indeed, 31,487 U.S. scientists (including 9,000 Ph.Ds) with degrees in atmospheric Earth sciences, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science have signed a statement that reads: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” See here.  Some consensus.

Real science, of course, is not a matter of “consensus,” but of reason, with skepticism at its core.

The Decline and Fall of the Theory of Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming

The alarmist claims of the UN’s IPCC are ultimately based not on scientific observations, but on unvalidated climate models and their projections of future global temperatures on assumptions of continued increases in carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the burning and use of fossil fuels.  The alarmists are increasingly in panic because the past projections of the models are increasingly divergent from the accumulating actual temperature records.  Those models are not real science, but made up science.  And no way we are abandoning the industrial revolution as the Sierra Club is hoping based on model fantasies and fairy tales.

The Economist magazine, formerly in lockstep with the Lysenkoists, shocked them with a skeptical article in March that began with this lede:

“OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, ‘the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade. . . .’”

Reality is not complying with the alarmism of the UN’s global warming models, just as it refused to do for Trofim Lysenko.  Remember all that hysteria about melting polar ice caps and the disappearing ice floes for the cute polar bears?  As of the end of March, the Antarctic ice cap was nearly one fourth larger than the average for the last 30 years.  The Arctic ice cap had grown back to within 3% of its 30 year average.  (The formerly declining Arctic ice was due to cyclically warm ocean currents).  Global sea ice was greater than in March, 1980, more than 30 years ago, and also above the average since then.

Remember the alarm about the rising sea level?  Yeah, that has been rising, as it has been since the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago.  Just exactly as it has been, at the same rate.  And anyone you know that has been scared by this alarmist propaganda has been successfully played by whatever media the fool has been relying on.

Murderous recent winters in Europe are killing as well belief in alarmist global warming on the continent.  University of Oklahoma Professor and geophysicist David Deming reported in a recent column,

“The United Kingdom had the coldest March weather in 50 years, and there were more than a thousand record low temperatures in the United States. The Irish meteorological office reported that March “temperatures were the lowest on record nearly everywhere.” Spring snowfall in Europe was also high. In Moscow, the snow depth was the highest in 134 years of observation. In Kiev, authorities had to bring in military vehicles to clear snow from the streets.”

In the Northern Hemisphere, Deming adds, “Snow cover last December was the greatest since satellite monitoring began in 1966.”  That reflects similarly bitter cold winters in North America as well.  Despite claims by global warming Lysenkoists that soon children “won’t know what snow is,” on February 6, 2010, a blizzard covered the northeastern U.S. with 20 to 35 inches of snow.  Three days later another 10 to 20 inches were added.

These developments should have been expected from known indisputable facts.  Carbon dioxide is a natural substance essential to the survival of all life on the planet.  It is effectively oxygen for plants, and without plants there would be no food for animals to survive.  Because of the increased atmospheric CO2 agricultural output is already increasing.

CO2 is also a trace gas in the atmosphere, representing only 0.038% of the total atmosphere, up only 0.008% since 1945.  That tiny proportion of the atmosphere is supposed to produce catastrophic global warming that will end all life on the planet?  The historical proxy record shows CO2 concentrations in the distant history of the earth much, much greater than today.  Yet life survived, and flourished.  Moreover, the basic science of global warming is that the temperature increasing effect of increased CO2 concentrations declines as those concentrations increase.  So stop worrying and enjoy the agricultural abundance in your grocery store.

A tip off regarding reality should have been apparent from the dodgy propaganda involved in changing the labeling of the problem from “global warming” to “climate change.”  Of course, Earth has been experiencing climate change since the first sunrise on the planet.  We are not going to abandon the workers’ paradise of capitalism because climate change will continue.

Another tip off should have been the effective admission by global warming alarmists that they cannot defend their position in public debate.  The day the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming died can be dated from the time that one leading alarmist was foolish enough to debate James Taylor of the Heartland Institute, a video of which can be found on the Heartland website at Heartland.org.

Still another tip off should have been the practice of the alarmist new Lysenkoists to respond to dissenting science with ad hominem attacks.  That apparently reflects poor public schooling that never taught that an ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy, as Aristotle taught more than 2,000 years ago.  My how western science has fallen.

The basic science shows that global temperatures are just not very sensitive to CO2 itself.  Even alarmists will concede that.  Where they get their alarm is with the modeling assumption that the CO2 induced temperature increases will produce positive feedbacks that will sharply increase the overall resulting warming.  The better recent science indicates, however, that instead of positive feedbacks, the naturally stable Earth would enjoy negative feedbacks restoring long term equilibrium and stability to global temperatures.

Then there is the man caused, global warming, fingerprint that the U.N.’s models all showed would result in a hot spot of particularly large temperature increases in the upper troposphere above the tropics.  But the incorruptible, satellite monitored, atmospheric temperature record shows no hot spot.  That is further confirmed by modern weather balloons measuring atmospheric temperatures above the tropics.  No hotspot.  No fingerprint.  No catastrophic, man caused global warming.  QED.

The revival of western science requires that the new Lysenkoism be discredited.  That is going to require quite some work, given the extent of the infestation.

[First published at Forbes]

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Every private sector company spends every waking second (and many sleeping ones) trying to get new customers.  It’s a relentless pursuit of improvement.  Of their goods and services, customer service, marketing – whatever angles they can find to gain a better market share.

Then there’s the government – which stinks on ice at just about everything it tries to do.  And perhaps nothing better demonstrates this all-encompassing incompetence than the instances when the Feds complain about getting more customers.  What the private sector tirelessly seeks – the government looks to avoid like the plague.  For whom the private sector seeks always to do more – the government always angles to do less.

The examples of this government-customer-aversion are myriad.  We’ll look at just two – Social Security and Medicare.

The government has for both programs dedicated, conscripted revenue streams.  Every American with a job has grafted from every paycheck 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare.  But (for the most part) only Americans age 65 and over can collect on either program.  Which should mean they both will be flush with cash in perpetuity.  Instead:

Social Security Funding Shortfall Hits $134 Trillion Over Next 75 Years

Medicare’s Deficit 7 Times Social Security’s

The Baby Boomers – from whom the government has been collecting money for decades – are retiring.  The Feds are woefully unequipped to handle it – because they have all along been woefully unequipped to handle it.

The government has had more than sixty years to build equity in Social Security, and forty-plus to do so in Medicare – and they are both instead on the verge of cataclysmic insolvency.  So the government is looking to:

Cut payments to their customers – us:

Obama Cuts Social Security and Medicare by Much More Than the GOP

Make it harder for us to get our money:

Obama on Social Security: Raise Retirement Age or Cut Social Security Benefits?

And say that if you actually made some real money (and thus paid more into Social Security and Medicare) – the government won’t give you back the coin it took:

Should Social Security and Medicare Be Means-Tested?

Social Security and Medicare are (really pathetic) retirement programs.  How does the private sector do with retirement programs?

There are, of course, a wide array of companies offering a wide array of retirement plans – versus the government monopoly model.  These companies aren’t each hundreds of trillions of dollars in debt – almost all are instead doing extraordinarily well.

They aren’t looking for ways to shirk and shed customers – they are looking to add them.  By offering better plans, rates and services.  (And running great ads – who doesn’t love the E*Trade baby?)

All so that when you retire, these private companies can return to you much, much more – not less.  And let you choose when you hang it up – not have the government decide for you, then keep moving the finish line further and further away.  And let you have your money – plus decades of dividends and compound interest – no matter how much other money you’ve made.

In almost all things, the government “business” model is a Social Security-Medicare-esque unmitigated disaster.  So of course the Feds are now expanding into the Internet.

Stimulus Bill Includes $7.2 Billion for Broadband

And how’s that going?

The Internet ‘Stimulus’-Just as Destructive as the Rest of the ‘Stimulus’

Yet Another Terrible Internet ‘Stimulus’ Project

Update: The Utter Failure of Government ‘Stimulus’

Has the government learned its lesson?  What do you think?

Universal Service Fund (USF) Reform: Expanding (Government) Broadband Internet

FCC Expands USF-to-Broadband Transition

In 2010, the Universal Service Fund (USF) provided communities with close to $8 billion in telecommunications funding.  Since 1999, the fund has distributed $71.7 billion dollars.

The government utterly imploded with $7 billion in Internet coin – and rather than bowing out gracefully, is looking to spend tens of billions more in the same failed fashion.

And when the money dries up – we’re $17 trillion is debt, after all – you and your Internet access will get the Social Security-Medicare treatment.

Your service will drastically and inexorably diminish – and the government will look for any way possible to be rid of you.

When it comes to the Web – let’s not become yet another ridiculously underserved forced-government-customer class.

[First published at Red State]

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With nearly a year’s worth of exclusive reporting on Obama’s green-energy crony-corruption scandal, you might think we’ve covered them all—but the hits just keep on coming. This week Fisker is in the news due to its failure to meet a Monday payment on their Department of Energy (DOE) loan, with $10 million due, and Wednesday’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing: “Green Energy Oversight: Examining the Department of Energy’s Bad Bet on Fisker Automotive.”

Along with researcher Christine Lakatos, who writes The Green Corruption Files, I’ve addressed Fisker before. In last week’s column, I harkened back to an October 2012 report we did on 2009 stimulus-funded projects that were in trouble. We highlighted two companies on that list: Suntech and SoloPower. Suntech was recently put into bankruptcy and, about SoloPower, we said: “SoloPower’s power is waning.” On April 22, the Oregonian’s headline read: “SoloPower moves to power down Portland factory, gut remaining workforce.”

Fisker, the stimulus-funded company making $100,000+ electric cars in Finland, was also on that October 2012 list. At the time, I wrote: “Though the company has balked at Solyndra comparisons, Fisker may well be on ‘death’s door.’”

Despite defaulting “on loans or investment conditions at least four separate times” and squandering more than $1.3 billion in investment capital and government loan money, the company’s founder and former CEO, Henrik Fisker (Fisker left the company in March over  “disagreements with management”), in testimony before the House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday, argued that the company was still viable. In both the opening and closing of his testimony, Fisker used the following statement regarding the company that bears his name: “Fisker still has the potential to build on these achievements if the company can secure financial and strategic resources.”

While Fisker’s testimony indicates that he is proud of the company’s “many notable achievements,” Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), declared in his opening statements: “Fisker should have never received taxpayer money; it was rated CCC+…it was a junk grade investment.”  So why did Fisker get the loan in the first place and continue to receive funding even after it “missed a crucial production target?”

While Wednesday’s hearing didn’t reveal any smoking gun, and Fisker claimed: “I am not aware and do not believe that any improper political influence was used in connection with the company’s loan application or subsequent negotiations with the Department of Energy,” experience in reporting on the various stimulus-funded loan guarantee programs, grants and tax credits indicates otherwise.

True, unlike many of the other stories, no one from the Fisker organization itself served on Obama’s (now-disbanded) Jobs Council, nor is there an obvious connection such as a former DOE staffer sitting on the board. But, surprise, there are political connections nonetheless.

In the case of Fisker, the cronyism comes first in the form of the venture capital firm with private investments that needed government funds to make their 2008 investment good. The company in question? Kliener Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB)—which, according to New York magazine, “has both former Vice President Al Gore and John Doerr, a very big-ticket Obama donor, on its board of directors.” Doerr has had roles inside the Obama White House since early 2009, from jobs, to economics, to crafting the energy sector of the 2009-Recovery Act, from which his firm—KPCB—has been rewarded handsomely. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), in 2008, reported that the Fisker deal was “one of the first deals in which former Vice President Al Gore provided advice for Kleiner.” KPCB’s Managing Partner, Ray Lane, told the WSJ that their investment was more than $10 million and was “one of our bigger investments.”

In an earlier report, I said: “Doerr jumped on the Climate Change bandwagon in 2005 and credits Al Gore for his ‘environmental awakening’—though his conversion may have been more financial than spiritual, as he saw green-energy as the ‘mother of all markets’ and ‘the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century.’”

Despite a green-energy push from the White House, these funds haven’t “delivered the returns expected on the timeline expected for most venture capitalists.” In fact, Doerr admitted in a November 2009 speech that the government funding saved them: “If we’d been able to foresee the crash of the market, we wouldn’t probably have launched a green initiative, because these ventures really need capital. The only way in which we were lucky, I think, is that the government stepped in, particularly the Department of Energy. Led by this great administration that put in place these loan guarantees.”

Clearly the Fisker “investment” wasn’t going as well as KCBP expected. In Wednesday’s hearing, a 2009 email from Bernhard Koehler, Fisker cofounder and COO was addressed. In it, he pressured someone inside the DOE, regarding the need for the taxpayer-funded loan, because they couldn’t meet payroll.

The Fisker loan had three specific strikes against it: it had a dismal credit rating—a “junk bond” CCC+; it was initially rejected by the credit review board; and the loan was twice the value of the collateral. While the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) program received 150 applications, only 5 were awarded loans—and all had some political connections or ramifications: Fisker—$529 million; Ford—$5.907 billion, Nissan—$1.448 billion; Tesla—$465 million; and The Vehicle Production Group, LLC—$50 million.

Companies without connections didn’t get approved. In November, I reported on XP Technologies, one of those companies whose loan application was rejected. Alleging that “criminal activities did take place by DOE staff and affiliates,” XP Technologies has filed a lawsuit concerning the DOE’s denial. Following the publication of my column on XP Technologies, another applicant, who also didn’t have any political connections, contacted me. This applicant acknowledged that he really didn’t know the system and, therefore, looking back, wasn’t surprised that his application was denied. However, he told me that he received no help or encouragement from the DOE; they did nothing to make it easier for him. It was like they weren’t really interested in anyone but the favored few. Accepting applications was, perhaps, just for cover.

Fisker’s $529 million loan was approved in September 2009, and the first tranche was funded May 2010. But it took a lot of finagling to get there.

Vice President Biden stepped in to move the loan along—we don’t know why, but we know he did. (We also know more about other green-energy projects in which Biden was involved.) In August 2009, Fisker visited in Delaware a GM factory, which was scheduled to be shut down. According to a 2009 WSJ report, once politicians in the state got wind of Fisker’s possible interest, they ratcheted up the pressure. Saving the plant, according to officials involved in the decision, “gave fresh urgency to the DOE’s quest for Fisker.” However, by August, the December 2008 application still wasn’t approved. “Delaware’s governor and congressional delegation began peppering U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu with calls on Fisker’s behalf. They also had repeated discussions with Vice President Biden and his staff.” Five days after Governor Merkell had a September meeting with Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, “Chu announced the government had signed a provisional agreement” for Fisker’s loan. Part of the deal included, not just the $529 million DOE loan, but also $21 million in grants and loans from the State of Delaware.

On October 27, 2009, Biden toured Fisker’s Delaware plant to tout the DOE’s Loan Program. ABC News reported: “Standing in a shuttered General Motors plant in Wilmington, DE, Vice President Biden proclaimed that a half-billion-dollar Department of Energy loan would transform the idled site into a production line for electric cars.  Biden heralded the Energy Department’s $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company, called Fisker, as a bright, new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs,” and stated: “This is seed money that will return back to the American consumer in billions and billions and billions of dollars in good, new jobs.”

Referencing Delaware’s involvement, the state’s chief of economic development, Alan Levin said: “We had in the vice president a secret weapon.”

In addition to Doerr and Gore championing the Fisker Project, and the Biden “secret weapon,” Fisker had a few other friends in high places. The National Legal and Policy Center reports that Fisker was receiving advice regarding their loan application from Debevoise & Plimpton LLC, a law firm with a history of donating to President Obama and other Democrats—which taxpayers also funded. Too bad XP technologies, and other applicants without connections, didn’t know to hire Debevoise & Plimpton.

Now, we all know that Fisker never made one car in Delaware—or anywhere in the US. The Delaware plant is “absolutely empty.” We know that Fisker lost $557,000 on each flashy sports car it sold and has laid off most of its employees. And we know that Fisker will likely be the next taxpayer-funded green-energy project to go bankrupt.

While we do not know all the political connections that got Fisker a free ride to make flashy cars in Finland, we do know there is crony-corruption. As the WSJ reports: “The Obama Energy Department is keeping tight rein on documents, so we don’t know.” We just don’t know.

[First published at TownHall]