FSP's Strawman is Burning...

But my argument remains.

Over the weekend, I pointed out to FSP contributor Eric Luedtke, that his support for the current energy bill wending its way through Congress, makes him a shill for corporate interests.
That is, his cheerleading for global warming alarmist policies advances the interests of corporate rent seekers like General Electric and British Petroleum, who are heavily invested in alternative energy like wind and solar power. Wind and solar power is very expensive to generate and the supply is small. Consequently, this would drive up energy costs, (along with carbon taxes and cap and trade schemes) and result in great profits for GE and BP.

The delicious irony here is that Eric and his fellow travelers at FSP rail against greedy corporations in the name of working/middle class folks. In fact, the Democrat party itself now bows to the myriad progressive special interest groups that currently constitute its base. My Red Maryland colleague Brian Griffiths made a great argument about this very issue here.

Needless to say my argument stirred the FSP crowd into high dudgeon, which is natural for them because they go apoplectic when anyone dares to disagree with them. After all they on the side of all that is right and good in the world so anyone who disagrees with them operates under a false consciousness

The FSP reaction was typical of leftist arguments, or rather what they try to pass off as arguments.

Here is Luedtke’s response:

Always glad to hear from a member of the "I'll make absolutely baseless claims against anything I disagree with" department. I didn't respond to any of what you wrote......because I have no interest in wasting my time engaging with you.

Glad to know Eric has the courage of his convictions.

Isaac Smith, whose writing style I happen to like, accused me of arguing in bad faith, then promptly accused me of having positions I never had and arguments I never made.

Well at least Eric and Isaac didn’t say I seemed “butch” as their erudite colleague “lefty” did.

Not once did they ever try to MAKE AN ARGUMENT against what I wrote.

This is why I am excited that Brian issued a challenge to FSP to debate the issues.

Help Goldman Sachs, Go Green

Quite often, well more like always, liberal media outlets portray the defeat of green policy prescriptions as victories of greedy, well-heeled corporate interests over noble environmentalists. Not True.

In fact, it is competing corporate interests, who fight these battles. On one side, you have the “green” rent seeking corporations (GE and British Petroleum) along with their environmentalist allies supporting Kyoto and other alarmist policies. On the other side, you have corporations, like utilities, fighting these green regulatory schemes because the ramifications would severely harm their businesses.

Timothy P. Carney, in Washington Examiner explicates this for us using the latest energy bill wending its way through congress. Here are the relevant passages of an piece well worth the full read.

Prospects aren’t good for enactment of major energy legislation aimed at “greening” America’s power and transportation sectors, and much of the media are portraying it as a win for big business over environmental groups.

That explanation is half right: The energy bill’s problems are largely due to opposition by utility companies, but the lobbying effort on the other side has been equally driven by big business seeking profits.

One particularly controversial provision in the Democrats’ current energy bill would require all utility companies to buy 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar, but excluding hydroelectric dams and nuclear.

Similar laws, called renewable portfolio standards (RPS), exist in many states, but not the South, and Southern senators have led the charge against a federal RPS. Many media outlets have pointed out the relevant fact that Southern Co., a huge firm that generates, distributes and sells electricity, has spent millions lobbying against the mandate.

When these same press accounts look for balance, they usually pit these industry objections opposite the arguments of environmentalists. More helpful and revealing would be to contrast the utilities’ anti-regulation arguments with the pro-regulation arguments of the solar and wind industries, which are no mom and pop outfits. Indeed, Goldman Sachs is among the pro-RPS lobbyists looking to cash in on its investments in wind and solar…

Solar and wind companies on the other side somehow avoid the same sort of media scrutiny. They are not as powerful as the big utilities — which partly explains why they are losing this current battle — but they certainly are not disinterested observers.

The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) has high-priced real estate in downtown D.C. a block from the White House and the Council on Environmental Quality and not far from the Environmental Protection Agency. The company’s home page this week calls on visitors to lobby for solar tax credits in the energy bill.

At a recent press conference, SEIA President Rhone Resch praised the Democrats’ energy bill and its renewable mandates. Resch conceded that his industry’s recent boom “was spurred by the federal tax incentives for both residential and commercial solar in the 2005 energy bill.” Resch said, “We’re looking to get the federal government to expand their support for solar energy…”

Goldman Sachs has also lined up on the “green” side of this debate. The firm has invested $1.5 billion in ethanol, wind and solar. In June, the company publicly laid out the five factors that could drive the renewable-fuels industry.

No. 1 was enacting more RPSs. No. 2 was enforcing existing RPSs. Nos. 3, 4 and 5 also depended on government action in the form of carbon dioxide caps. This year, Goldman retains six lobbying firms that lobby Washington on energy issues.

If Congress rejects federal mandates on renewable power, utilities like Southern Co. will have played a central role, but let’s not forget that their true rivals were not tree huggers, but fellow capitalists like Goldman Sachs and the solar energy industry.

I mention this because you can now view the full report (more on this later) of the Maryland Commission on Climate Change’s policy recommendations, which calls for enhancing Maryland’s RPS and carbon caps.

GE: We Bring Higher Energy Costs To Life

Corporate rent seeking is a staple of global warming alarmism. When any company touts its green credentials, a good bit of skepticism is in order. For example, BP Solar, which has a solar plant in Frederick, has substantial financial interests at stake in the recommendations of the Maryland Climate Change Commission. One of those recommendations will be to encourage renewable energy sources like ta da solar energy.

However the big player in the global warming rent seeking game is General Electric. GE swooped in and gobbled up all of Enron's alternative energy interests, after the company went belly up. Enron was the chief corporate lobbyist on the Clinton administration to sign the Kyoto protocol.

Why? Because the Kyoto protocols, if implemented in the United States the restrictions on so called "dirty" sources of energy would have positioned Enron to be the supplier of the "clean" but scarce and expensive-to-produce sources of energy.

The game is the same, but GE is just the new big dog. Darren Bakst a colleague of Paul Chesser at the John Locke Foundation explicates how GE plays the game.

I find it interesting that NBC, a subsidiary of General Electric, is all of a sudden pushing green awareness. Their attempts at going green reached amusing levels recently when they broadcast their Sunday night football show without any lights.

They also dedicated a full week to “Green Week” integrating green doctrine into their programs (interesting that the writers and producers didn’t complain about corporate interference).
I doubt it is just a coincidence that General Electric (GE) is heavily invested in wind energy and alternative sources of energy. From a recent GE press release:

With a 500% increase in wind turbine production since 2004, GE expects its wind business revenues to exceed $4 billion this year. Over the past two years, GE has supplied wind turbines representing more than 50% of the new wind capacity across the U.S.

The alarmists that want to criticize anyone that dares speak against extreme action to mitigate global warming, always seek to tie the “skeptics” to big special interests (e.g. coal, oil, etc.). This is an easy way to avoid discussing any of the substance of the issues.

There is a slight problem though for the alarmists. They have big special interests on their side. GE is just one of the many rent seekers trying to make money off of excessive energy regulation, such as renewable portfolio standards that mandate the purchase of alternative energy.

Even the Nobel Prize Winner himself, Al Gore, appears to have a a lot to gain from global warming extremism. Gore is a new partner in a venture capital firm with a lot of investments in alternative energy.

Except from a recent Newsweek article: If Gore’s profit-sharing deal is anything like the firm’s other 23 partners, he’s also in line to collect tens of millions of dollars a year. That’s because partners carve up 30 percent of the profits if and when the alternative energy start-ups that KP supports go public or are sold.

Instead of talking about “big oil,” or coal, the special interests that should be talked about are the ones that are pushing government regulation to impose significantly higher costs on the public, including the poor, all in the name of extra profits.

Where is the media when it comes to doing some original research instead of repeating the same old tired cliches? “Big evil corporation uses influence to hurt the poor and benefit the rich”–that usually would be a story the media would cover in a second. However, when it comes to the environment, it doesn’t matter what the “evil corporations” do as long as they can articulate some environmental excuse.

GE: They bring good things to life, if you are a GE shareholder. If you are poor, they bring high energy prices to life.

How's That New Minimum Wage Working Out For You?

A friend of mine, whose name and employer shall remain anonymous, informed me that a major state agency rejected all bids on a contract renewal because all bidders based their pricing on the new living wage law ($11.30/hour) and the agency did not have sufficient funding to allow for the price increase. This contract was for a service the state out-sources regularly (i.e. cleaning, landscaping, security, waste removal etc...) not a one-time purchase. Apparently, the current contractor has or will receive an extension on the existing contract, which the contractor won, predicated on a minimum wage of $6.15/hour.

If the state did not allow for the new living wage in its' purchasing, why didn't they put it into effect on July 1 when the new fiscal year begins? October 1st the official enactment date of the law, has no significance (other than being five weeks before the last election...coincidence, I think not). The law’s fiscal note forecasts net expenditures exceeding revenue by $292,000 over the next four years. For the edification of Andrew Kujan, the fiscal note states:

Small Business Effect: Large firms are more able than small firms to absorb the cost of increased wages without passing on the full cost to the State because small businesses are less able to take advantage of economies of scale to reduce costs. Often, small firms do not have a large enough client base over which to spread the increased costs. Therefore, the living wage could put them at a competitive disadvantage in bidding for State contracts.

Furthermore, it is quite cheeky for a state agency to arbitrarily decide when they will abide by their own mandate.

Imagine a private computer services business who informs the Comptroller's Office that they did not budget for a 20% sales tax increase when negotiating its 2008 contracts. Therefore, it is unable to collect or pay these monies until its fiscal year ends and can re-negotiate its contracts.

On a side note, if you take the value of all the state's service contracts in the Baltimore/Washington corridor where the new living wage law applies and increase them by 84% (the difference of $6.15 vs. $11.30/hour) how much of our purported $1.5 billion 'structural deficit' can be accounted for?

And So It Begins...

The Great Global Warming Swindle comes to Maryland.

The Maryland Climate Change Commission, which is run by an avowed alarmist advocacy group and shares a financial benefactor with Governor O'Malley, is meeting in Bethesda today:

Saying there's no time to delay bold steps to prevent global warming, a Maryland commission on climate change is poised to propose the nation's toughest carbon cap when the legislature returns next month.The commission will call climate change an immediate threat to the state.The report will suggest a law requiring carbon emissions to go down 25 percent by 2020, and 90 percent by 2050.If adopted, the goal would be the nation's most ambitious law to reduce emissions of carbon, a greenhouse gas element that contributes to global warming. New Jersey, California and Florida have set goals of reducing carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050.The commission was established by Gov. Martin O'Malley, and its suggestions are expected to underlie the governor's stated plan of making Maryland a leader in addressing climate change.

Neither the MCCC page on the Maryland Department of the Environment website, nor the cookie cutter MCCC page run by Center for Climate Strategies, the aforementioned advocacy group, announced the meeting, which is supposed to be open to the public. Then again this is to
be expected, given that MCCC Working Group Chair Tad Aburn won't release official
public documents to... the public.

The polcies and legislation the MCCC (as puppeted by CCS) will propose are already available, you can read the draft reports here. The policy recommendations will be similar to the same CCS recommendations in Arizona, New Mexico, South Carolina, Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, and Vermont.

Needless to say the policy recommendations will mean higher energy costs for consumers, constraints on economic growth, and more government intervention into our daily lives.

In fact, the Maryland Public Service Commission, you know the folks O'Malley appointed to save us from BGE rate increases, today recommended similar polices to the MCCC proposals, like demand side management and public benefits fees/user fees.

Ironically Jay Hancock noted that the PSC determined that:
"The wind option our consultants modeled does not provide net economic benefits in either the short- or long-term. Wind does, however, represent a source of clean, carbon-free power."

Where as MCCC/CCS recommends "investments" in wind power and other clean energy, which similarly lack any economic value for Marylanders.

Missing Man Formation

On Buffalo's first possession yesterday The Redskins' defense honored Sean Taylor by playing only 10 leaving his position open. Nicely done.

The Skins lost yet again 17-16 handing over their fifth second half lead this season and 15th since 2004.

More on Maryland's Climate Secrecy

I apologize in advance for the length of this post. There is just too much information to convey. However, please bear with me, as I will show you how Governor O’Malley has outsourced Maryland’s climate policy to a global warming alarmist advocacy group. Should Maryland adopt the policies formulated by this group, the results would mean more increases in our energy costs, dire consequences for the state’s economy, and curtailment of our individual freedoms.

Recently, The Examiner and Op/Ed contributor Paul Chesser, of the John Locke Foundation wrote about Governor O'Malley's creation of the Maryland Commission on Climate Change and its secretive dealings with the consulting group Center for Climate Strategies. CCS is one arm of the green-oriented political advocacy group The Pennsylvania Environmental Council Inc (PEC).

Chesser revealed that Tad Aburn, Director of MDE’s Air & Radiation Management Administration, and chair of the commission's Greenhouse Gas & Carbon Mitigation Working Group refused to release documents, which by law, should be publicly available. The lead of the Scientific and Technical Working Group is Don Boesch, who I took to task here for advocating the same policies as CCS recommends for other states, and soon will for Maryland.

The Examiner questioned whether any of CCS' financial backers are campaign contributors to the governor. I did a quick search of the MSBE campaign database and found that one company, Gannett Fleming did indeed contribute to Martin O'Malley, to the tune of $12,000. Gannett Fleming is a construction and engineering firm who just happens to specialize in green building projects that CCS recommends to its clients.

PEC created CCS and its sister organization Enterprising Environmental Solutions Inc. (ESSI) as a means to influence state governments to reduce carbon emissions within their borders. Even with PEC’s blatant advocacy mission, CCS bills itself as an independent, non-advocacy consulting group.

CCS operates by offering its “services” to state governments at barely any cost. They can do this because deep-pocketed liberal donors and avowed advocacy groups like the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, Heinz Foundation and Ted Turner Foundation fund CCS. RFB alone gave ESSI $1.4 million. RFB also gave the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN), also an advocacy group, $275,000.

However, CCAN board member Cindy Parker is also a member of the MCC Greenhouse Gas & Carbon Mitigation Working Group. Can you say conflict of interest!
Parker is a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. You may remember I mentioned her in my post about Johns Hopkins’ rent-seeking Enron impersonation in order to rake in more grant money. Parker is not the only example of the people who compose this working group who have substantial political and financial interests at stake in MCCC policy recommendations. There is John Szallay of BP Solar. BP Solar, with a plant in Frederick, is heavily invested in solar energy. Should Maryland adopt CCS recommendations, this would make BP Solar the controller of one of the major sources of electricity in the state.

The FAQ on the CCS website is illuminating. The word “consensus” appears nine times, and CCS’ definition of consensus is similar to O’Malley’s Orwellian distortion of the term. No wonder he is outsourcing state policy making to them.

Once states initiate the process, CCS controls it totally. CCS performs economic and cost-benefit analyses of any proposed policy implementations. However, The Beacon Hill Institute noted three serious flaws in CCS’ analytical methodology, which calls said policy proposals into question:

• first, CCS fails to quantify benefits in a way that they can be meaningfully compared to costs;
• second, when estimating economic impacts, CCS often misinterprets costs to be
benefits; and
• third, the estimates of costs leave out important factors, causing CCS to understate the true costs of its recommendations;

The Center for Climate Strategies fails to do one of the most basic calculations included in any responsible cost-benefit study: it does not quantify both benefits and costs in dollar terms so that they can be compared. CCS sometimes confuses costs for benefits. Furthermore, there are serious omissions in their estimates of program costs. CCS asks us to believe that there really is a free lunch in their recommendations, and that implementing their policies would actually not have any net cost, despite the fact that private, self-interested individuals are not grasping these opportunities on their own. One has to conclude, given such flaws in their methodology, that CCS overestimates cost savings and underestimates the costs that will be incurred.

Beacon Hill revealed these methodological flaws in its study of CCS’ Arizona Climate Action Plan, which CCS touts as its model program. The Arizona plan is similar to the plan the North Carolina Climate Action Plan Advisory Group (CAPAG) is now finalizing.

The North Carolina Plan, going by other states that have adopted or in the process of adopting CCS recommendations, will be the model for Maryland. The recommendations will include policies with drastic implications for the economy, tax payers and individual liberty. CCS recommendations are broken down into five economic sectors. I will note some CCS policy recommendations for each sector:

1. Residential Commercial Industrial Sectors (RCI).
Utility funded “demand side management” programs. According to Appendix E of the report, “through the rate-making process, utilities and the North Carolina Utilities Commission will develop a mechanism to include the cost of DSM programs in the respective utility’s rate base, or provide for a separate surcharge that utility customers pay.”

Expanded energy efficiency funds, (aka public benefits charge/systems benefits charge). This is a user fee assessed to utility customers based on their usage at any given time. The money incurred from this charge is then given to a third party to conduct energy efficiency programming. In other words, Big Daddy government is going to impose rules that will raise your energy costs to fund an advocacy group to tell you when and how much energy you should use in your home.

Education (Consumer, Primary/Secondary, Post-Secondary/Specialist, College and University Programs). In a word… indoctrination. More class room viewing of An Inconvenient Truth.

2. Energy Supply.
Renewable energy incentives for wind and solar energy. These are essentially inducements for customers to buy wind and solar energy. Is it really any coincidence that BP and General Electric, the largest “green” energy corporations are heavily invested in wind and solar energy generation. As I noted earlier an official from BP Solar sit on the GHG & Carbon Mitigation Working Group here in Maryland.

3. Transportation and Land Use.
Land Development Planning, i.e., implement Smart Growth policies. Vehicle emissions surcharge, i.e. a carbon tax on your SUV.

4. Agricultural, Forestry and Waste.
Ethanol subsidies, tax breaks for biofuel production, and land preservation. Calling David Sutherland!

5. Cross Cutting Issues.
Mandatory reporting of GHG and carbon emissions, and GHG registries. And to top it all off tax payer funded outreach programs to spread the secular religion of global warming.

CCS is currently working in 16 states. Notice the same website format for Arizona, New Mexico, South Carolina, Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, and Vermont.

I recommend perusing the Appendices for each section of the report to see the nitty gritty details of these recommendations. Also, note that many of their data citations come from blatantly alarmist sources.

Here in Maryland the aforementioned Green House Gas & Carbon Mitigation Group has already had five meetings. At the latest meeting, held on Nov 30, 2007 from 10AM to 4PM, perfectly convenient for the working public to attend, they drew up draft policy proposals, take a look at the PDFs for the five economic sectors, they are the same as the final North Carolina report.

Aside from the alarmist policy proposals, the MCCC reports are telling for what they do not reveal: how the sausage was made? We don’t know and we won’t because Tad Aburn will not release documents, which by law, are public domain. We have no way of knowing anything else, other than the alarmist policies stated in CCS' cookie-cutter reports.

Through the MCCC and CCS Governor O’Malley has:

-Outsourced formulation of state climate policy to a blatant advocacy group (with ties to a campaign contributor positioned to take advantage of CCS policy recommendations) and alarmist funding sources;

-Loaded the commission’s working groups with people who have substantial political and financial stakes in implementing CCS policy recommendations, creating serious conflicts of interests and ethical questions;

-Appointed a commission chair (Tad Aburn), who refuses to obey Maryland’s Public Information Act, by not releasing public documents concerning CCS’s contract with the state, and its relationship to the formation of the MCCC. Aburn himself, ordered the Maryland Department of Environment compliance officer to withhold the documents. This is a delicious irony since O’Malley’s father-in-law, former Attorney General Joe Curran, wrote the book on the PIA;

-Set the stage to siginificantly increase the energy costs of working families, further dampen the state's economy, and curtail indivdual liberties.

I am sending a formal request to the MDE asking all documents related to CCS.
You can do the same by sending a request letter to:

Ms. Laramie Daniel
PIA Liaison
Air & Radiation Management Administration
Maryland Department of the Environment
1800 Washington Blvd.
Baltimore, MD 21230