A nice little victory against the overbearing EPA. It’s about time those asshole tree hugging douche bags get reigned in. We need more decisions like this to go against the EPA’s overreaching and abuse.
In fact, if I were king for the day, the EPA would go away…
(Reuters) – The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that landowners can sue to challenge a federal government compliance order under the clean water law, a decision that sides with corporate groups and puts new limits on a key Environmental Protection Agency power.
The justices unanimously rejected the government’s position that individuals or companies must first fail to comply with an EPA order and face potentially costly enforcement action before a court can review the case.
The opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia was a victory for an Idaho couple who challenged a 2007 EPA order that required them to restore a wetland they had filled with dirt and rock as they began to build a new vacation home near Priest Lake. They were also told to stop construction on the home.
The couple, Chantell and Michael Sackett, denied their property had ever contained a wetland and complained they were being forced to comply with an order without a court hearing.
Their appeal drew support from the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Association of Home Builders and General Electric Co, a company that had made a similar challenge to the EPA compliance orders.
People are starting to worry that President Obama might be wobbling on his visionary “all of the above” program to bring on the green energy millennium, what with $5.00 gas in the Northeast states.
But don’t worry. Even though the administration will be changing its “optics” on energy by featuring the president reading his TelePrompTer in front of oil wells, the president is still on course, according to an Obama official.
In the coming days and weeks, the official said, Obama will continue a constant drumbeat where he touts his strategy — including his push for green energy — while responding to false attacks on issues about his record on domestic energy production.
This weekend, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Doc Hastings (R-WA) provided the weekly Republican address to the nation. The topic, lest we forget about one of the most pressing issues of the day, is the real “all of the above” energy policy America needs. (Significantly different from what Barack Obama is delivering thus far.) Below is the video and transcript of the remarks. Not only should you listen, but we should make sure that both the President and the rest of Congress tunes in.
Thanks. Just fucking thanks. The economy sucks. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is more expensive now because of the price of gas. The SCOAMF and his minions don’t want to solve our energy problems, they want to make it worse so they can push their debunked global warming agenda.
In the mean time, all Americans suffer.
Fire this piece of shit now. If Obama is reelected in November, this country will not recover from his policies.
COMMENTARY | President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu uttered the kind of Washington gaffe that consists of telling the truth when inconvenient. According to Politico, Chu admitted to a House committee that the administration is not interested in lowering gas prices.
Chu, along with the Obama administration, regards the spike in gas prices as a feature rather than a bug. High gas prices provide an incentive for alternate energy technology, a priority for the White House, and a decrease in reliance on oil for energy.
The Heritage Foundation points out that hammering the American consumer with high gas prices to make electric and hybrid cars more appealing is consistent with Obama administration policy and Chu’s philosophy. That explains the refusal to allow the building of the Keystone XL pipeline and to allow drilling in wide areas of the U.S. and offshore areas.
Alas for him, the hikes in gasoline prices are eclipsing his vaunted payroll tax cut.
The Washington politicians were in full self-congratulatory form recently when the Republicans and Democrats in Congress finally displayed a moment of bipartisanship and passed the payroll tax cut extension that keeps in place the two percentage point cut in the tax that funds Social Security.
It’s probably the dumbest tax to cut, given that Social Security ran $100 billion in the hole over just the past two years and the official projection from the Social Security and Medicare boards of trustees shows an ever-rising level of red ink: “After 2014, cash deficits are expected to grow rapidly as the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers.”
They wanted this to happen. Now, they aren’t going to do shit about it, no matter how much hemmin’ and hawin’ we do.
Sure would be nice if we had a media that actually did its fucking job and pounced all over the SCOAMF, kind of like they did for Bush, but I digress. I put gas in my car at $4.19 a gallon yesterday. It was $3.89 on the 24th, just one week it’s up $0.20. Half of that was in the last two days.
One of them wanted to see Americans paying $8 a gallon for gasoline. Another tried to block access to domestic oil reserves that could one day exceed those in Saudi Arabia. Another thinks global warming is a dire crisis justifying a massive crackdown on energy — decades after saying the same thing about global cooling. Yet another had a position in the one of the world’s top socialist organizations.
Meet the Obama administration’s energy team.
Forget everything you’ve heard about the president’s moderate picks on the economy, national security and other issues. When it comes to energy policy and related environmental concerns, this group is off-the-charts extreme. Too bad the issue will be a critical one over the next few years.
Consider Obama’s choice for energy secretary, Nobel prize-winning physicist Steven Chu. “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” The Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying last September. In most Western European nations, gas taxes alone come to around $4 a gallon and are designed to make the pump price so high that people are forced to drive a lot less. At the time of Chu’s comment, the “levels in Europe” were near $8 a gallon.
Ash Jogalekar (himself a scientist) reports at his website on a scientific editorial, “The Nonsense of Biofuels”, written by Hartmut Michel, who won the Nobel Prize for his own research into biophysics. The gist of Michel’s editorial (which is not accessible, Jogalekar’s link notwithstanding) is that there just isn’t enough efficiency in biophysical processes. Open it up for an extended quote from Jogalekar’s post.
All these hurdles lead to a rather drastic lowering of photosynthetic efficiency which gets watered down to a rather measly (but still staggeringly efficient by human standards) 4% or so.
Still not convinced eh? I am. CO2 is a gas, natural to the Earth. Plants eat that shit up. People and cars exhale that shit. More CO2, more plants, more food. Less starving people on the planet. Hmm, sounds like a good thing to me.
The sun heats up the Earth, sometimes a lot, sometimes not. The clouds cool the planet and recycle water through evaporation, which also cools the planet. Funny how that shit all works together to make a nice cozy planet to live on.
I know it’s a simple explanation, but it works.
At any rate, there are a couple converts from the green moron farm in Germany.
In fact, it seems as if it isn’t really much of a debate anymore.
First, let me be clear, the debate among scientists isn’t whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas or whether, even, it can cause warming, but instead on what real (if any) total effect it has overall on the climate. In other words, is there a saturation point where additional CO2 has little marginal effect, or does it build to a tipping point where the change is radical? Robust climate or delicate climate?
Evidence is building toward the robust climate theory, which would mean that while there may be more CO2 being emitted, it has little to no effect on the overall climate. That, of course, is contrary to the AGW crowd’s theory.
So, on to the latest high profile defections:
One of the fathers of Germany’s modern green movement, Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book together with geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning. Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”
Vahrenholt decided to do some digging. His colleague Dr. Lüning also gave him a copy of Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. He was horrified by the sloppiness and deception he found. Persuaded by Hoffmann & Campe, he and Lüning decided to write the book. Die kalte Sonne cites 800 sources and has over 80 charts and figures. It examines and summarizes the latest science.
With the global warming leftist cult coming out with their latest hissy fit seeking topurge ‘deniers’ among local weathermenI’d like to throw this out there:
TheAustralian Conservativepublished excerpts from Professor Ian Pilmer’s book How to Get Expelled From School:
Life [today] is far better than 100 years ago. We eat better, live longer, have better housing and have a richer life. Environmental ideologies are attractive and form part of personal growth. But, an ideology embraced without analysis of practical aspects is vacuous. Global warming is a fad. Once there are consequences that affect a comfortable life, then another issue will be found. And embraced again with passion. What is the next scare campaign? Ocean acidification? Biodiversity?
Climate change has been with us for the 4,500 million year history of planet Earth. This is what climate does. It always changes. Changes in our lifetime may be natural.
And also from the Australian Conservative:
If we have dangerous warming and the global temperature has increased by 0.8°C since the Little Ice Age, does this mean that the ideal temperature for life on Earth is that of the Little Ice Age?
During the Little Ice Age, people died like flies and it was really not a good time to be on Earth. Besides the cold, there were crop failures, famine, cannibalism and disease. As a child, you might have been on the menu. It was certainly not an ideal temperature then. However, a clever teacher would put you in your place and may suggest that the ideal temperature for an Eskimo is not the ideal temperature for someone living in the jungles of Borneo. You could then come back and suggest that this shows that humans can adapt to a great range of temperature so why worry about a warmer world.
The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.
The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.
Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.
When the story of the Department of Energy’s green loan program is written someday, the entire book will be contained in chapter 11:
After months of financial turmoil, an Energy Department-backed lithium ion battery company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The company, Ener1, received a $118 million grant from DOE in 2010 as part of the president’s stimulus package. The money, which went to Ener1 subsidiary EnerDel, aimed to promote renewable energy storage battery technology for electrical grid use.
But despite generous federal support for the company, Ener1 was racked by problems last year. In October, NASDAQ delisted the company due to non-compliance with Securities and Exchange Commission filing requirements. A month later, the company’s president, chief executive, and top financial officer were fired.
On Thursday, Ener1 announced it will initiate a pre-packaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan as part of an agreement to restructure the company’s debt obligations.
The problem? Something the government often fails to take into account when spending tons of other people’s money because they think it can be artificially created later on: Product demand
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