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Comments
I don't disagree with your political views in the least. I don't think the government belongs in anything that does not directly protect all of our citizens. Most of the money stolen, as you put it, goes to special interests and welfare programs for both the poor and the wealthy. While the middle class pays the bills. These little pittance tax credits are directed back at the middle class. The upper do not qualify as most get into AMT which does not allow Tax credit incentives. It is just another ploy to get votes for the Liberal politicians that push the programs. The way I look at them is it is a chance to get back a bit of what they stole from me in the first place.
Hopefully the whole Tax and Spend legislation under Cap n Trade has been dealt a fatal blow with Climategate and the Chaos in HopenChangen. At least for a few years.
I used less energy so fewer power plants had to be built. Less demand means more supply so rates don't go up as fast.
But I did move south. Boise is the banana belt compared to Anchorage. And I did a lot of energy stuff out of my own pocket too, but it's hard to justify some stuff since the payback can be too long. That's where the subsidies are handy. Like my newer water heater that was subsidized to the tune of $150.
Exxon was found to have overcharged consumers to benefit their shareholders, and that's why they were sued and settled by giving that money back to the states to weatherize homes. Exxon must have liked the idea - now they voluntarily use dividend money to train weatherization workers. Maybe they figure that saving energy saves them exploration costs.
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Forecasters warn of continued blizzards in Plains
MILWAUKEE (AP) - Residents in the nation's heartland were digging out after a blustery storm as meteorologists warned that blizzard conditions could continue across the northern Plains on Saturday.
The National Weather Service issued blizzard warnings for parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin through Saturday. The storm had already dumped significant snow across the region, including a record 14 inches in Oklahoma City and 11 inches in Duluth, Minn., on Thursday.
Slippery roads have been blamed for at least 21 deaths this week as the storm lumbered across the country from the Southwest.
Record Setting Snowfall Across Oklahoma, Most Interstates Closed
OKLAHOMA CITY -- Thousands of Oklahomans remain without power as a massive winter storm blew through the state bringing record setting snowfall to a large part of central Oklahoma. Will Rogers World Airport reported receiving about 14 inches of snow.
The Oklahoma Highway Patrol said roads remain slick and hazardous, and they discourage travel Friday.
All interstates in the Oklahoma City Metro were closed due to weather
So 2/3rds of the USA is having colder than normal weather. Most of Europe is covered in record snow and earlier than normal cold temps. How much of the globe has to be colder for the MM/GW Cult to admit they are wrong?
I wonder how many carbon-credits our governments will use up everytime they put those snow-plows on the road. I bet they don't get more than a few mpg. I don't think the heavy-duty PU's that private plow-drivers get very good mpg either. And you know that if we didn't need those heavy-duty PU's once-in-a-while for plowing, maybe a lot of people wouldn't buy them.
All-in-all cold weather and snow cost people a lot of money, and cause a lot of extra energy to be used. Anyone know what state has the lowest energy/capita usage? I would guess Hawaii.
“” Lots of landlords wouldn't do squat otherwise, even if there were other tax deductions available for improvements.”” :lemon:
It is a myth that landlords want dirty, run down, damaged, rat and roach infested apartments. How do you get a good tenant that will pay the rent and take care of the property if you don’t provide a decent place for them to begin with!??! I’ve seen pictures of horrible apartments, but the landlord doesn’t come into someone’s apartment to scrub the bathtub, flush the toilet, mop the floor, do the dishes, pick up and wash the dirty clothes, throw away the old newspapers and empty food containers!! Yet, the caption always infers that some terrible landlord is forcing the poor tenant to live in such conditions! Why don’t the tenants do some cleaning on their own, put out a mouse trap, or buy a broom!??!
I was a landlord of 16 apartments for 17 years. Each time we had a vacancy we went through it from front door to rear door, washing, vacuuming, moping, waxing, scrubbing, repairing, replacing, improving, and painting to bring it up to our high standards without a penny of government ‘help’! We then picked what we thought would be the very best tenants, and yet, even so, 99% of the time we would spend hours and hours to bring it back to rentable condition only a year later!
But it must be done! If you don’t, the people who will rent a low quality apartment are even lower quality themselves! So you lower the rent. Then you don’t have the money to take care of things properly. So the apartment is worse, you lower the rent, and the next tenant is even worser (more worse?, most worstest?)!! After a while you own a dump that is losing money, has trash tenants, and can’t even be sold! (Our apartments were bought for $315,000, and sold 17 years later for $740,000!! In between we had a nice middle class lifestyle with the apartments as our only source of income!)
So don’t spread the lie that landlords make money by NOT taking care of their property, and that tenants are poor innocent victims of greedy landlords who really want to own trash, and have their lousy tenants living in squalor!!
PS: Four months ago I put a new high efficiency water heater in my house, because the old one was 19 years old, and it was time to replace it. It cost $426.37, of which I paid $426.37 without any government handout!! See, you can DIY without other peoples’ money!!
Hope we all have a Happier New Year!!
.
And your experience is one reason I never wanted to be a landlord. I'm lazy and it's easier to invest in passive income stuff. But we digress.
Anybody get any books for Christmas?
Climate Cover-Up:The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (Christian Science Monitor)
And UPS is going hybrid. 200 down, 94800 trucks to go. (Green Car Advisor)
Oh, Kernick - good question. What I found was surprising:
Top 5 lowest per capita are NY, CA, FL, MA, and MD.
The data is a decade old though.
Science Beat
NY gets plenty cold. Interesting to note that New York has two grant programs that focus on low-income and multi-family energy efficiency improvements, plus a bunch of incentive and loan programs that focus on efficiency and renewables. (US DOE)
They forgot to mention the very popular Mercedes Sprinter diesel vans that UPS and FedEx has 1000s of. They should have no problem getting 18-22 MPG. And they can be converted to Biodiesel where ever it becomes available. There are Mercedes Sprinter Plug-in Hybrids, that have been in the field for several years. They go the first 20 miles on EV only.
PS
Your per capita chart makes it clear that NY and CA have run most of their industry out of the state.
Senators Vow to Renew Tax Credit for Biodiesel Industry 'Witout a Gap in Coverage'
Using biofuels for energy is more about energy-independence then it is about CO2 emissions. If you wanted to make the best use of land to absorb CO2 you wouldn't farm it for food or cut the crops for biofuels. You'd take all that land and plant forests that could would absorb CO2 and grow over the next 100 years. But then the farmers wouldn't like that.
I find it amusing that Grassley supports biofuel. Is that, ahem, a switch? If he was Senator Oily, would he be backing Haliburton? Senator Bacchus will have us burning corn alcohol in our cars.
This past summer:
On Tuesday, Exxon plans to announce an investment of $600 million in producing liquid transportation fuels from algae — organisms in water that range from pond scum to seaweed. The biofuel effort involves a partnership with Synthetic Genomics, a biotechnology company founded by the genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter.
Exxon is not known for investing in Pie in the Sky ventures. I would say it is closer than Hydrogen or practical ethanol. Only those far sighted individuals with diesel vehicles will be able to take advantage and know what it feels like to be totally carbon neutral.
There's a difference between wanting your share and giving away your nation so a few betrayers can profit, as the neocons have done. Neoconservatism is the most destructive force in American history.
Lower middle class is going to be a dream in future generations. And nothing will really be any more "green" than today...unless Soylent Green finally hits the market :shades:
I see there's a volcano in the Philippines that's being annoying...I wonder how many million cars worth of emissions it will expel.
Maryland's State Highway Administration has spent more than $27 million this year on snow removal, the bulk of that clearing away a massive pre-Christmas storm. But the agency's annual snow-removal budget is just $26 million.
If you live in Snow Country better get a big honkin 4X4 SUV.
Colorado officials recently notified residents in rural areas that they will let snow sit overnight on 2,800 miles of sparsely traveled state highways to cut down on overtime costs.
Better get rid of that Prius if you live in Colorado.
Elsewhere, however, officials say they have no choice. In Colorado Springs, Colo., for instance, the city will no longer plow residential streets unless at least six inches of snow has accumulated.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126204565585908219.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLTopStor- - ies
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2009/03/prospects-for-algal-biodiesel-dim.html
I don't think I misrepresent his judgement if I say that, according to him, the best biomass to liquid fuels path is via syngas.
So the only thing in favor of algae biodiesel now is this Exxon story, but I have to wonder how much of those 600 Million they will end up actually spending on this.
There are closed algal systems with the potential to produce 30,000+ gallons per acre out in the desert. I don't think British Columbia is an ideal location for growing algae.
According to Exxon, algae could yield more than 2,000 gallons of fuel per acre of production each year, compared with 650 gallons for palm trees and 450 gallons for sugar canes. Corn yields just 250 gallons per acre a year.
Exxon’s investment includes $300 million for in-house studies and “potentially more” than $300 million to Synthetic Genomics “if research and development milestones are successfully met,” Exxon said.
Right now we should not be subsidizing the production of any alternative fuel. That gives the public a false sense of the future. Until alternatives can compete they should be relegated to the laboratories. Ethanol is already a broken venture according to the same NY Times article.
American companies have only slowly been following suit. The Valero Energy Corporation, the country’s largest refiner, has acquired seven corn ethanol plants from VeraSun Energy, which went bankrupt last year.
VeraSun extorted Billions of our tax dollars then went bankrupt. It would be interesting to know how the corporate leaders made out. Sounds like the banking industry leaders.
Plan to turn farms into forest worries Obama official
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has ordered his staff to revise a computerized forecasting model that showed that climate legislation supported by President Obama would make planting trees more lucrative than producing food.
The latest Agriculture Department economic-impact study of the climate bill, which passed the House this summer, found that the legislation would profit farmers in the long term. But those profits would come mostly from higher crop prices as a result of the legislation's incentives to plant more forests and thus reduce the amount of land devoted to food-producing agriculture.
According to the economic model used by the department and the Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation would give landowners incentives to convert up to 59 million acres of farmland into forests over the next 40 years. The reason: Trees clean the air of heat-trapping gases better than farming does.
What about the Ethanol mandate that will take more farmland than we have available?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/29/forests-vs-food-study-worries-ag- riculture-chief/
from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574566124250205490.html
DECEMBER 1, 2009, 10:40 A.M. ET
Climategate: Follow the Money
Climate change researchers must believe in the reality of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.
Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change "consensus."
To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.00027% of Exxon's 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you'd hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.
Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.
Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.
Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.
Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.
None of these outfits is per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.
Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU's temperature database: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"
This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
You must have made this stuff up !!
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However, nothing should prevent any one of us to educate ourselves and seek the truth, whatever it might be. Sometimes it is hard due to the noise created by vested interests, but my faith in our society and its enduring values is unshakeable.
2021 Kia Soul LX 6-speed stick
Just think of all the greenhouse gases produced by making that plastic gizmo thanks to people too lazy to roll their own.:)
2021 Kia Soul LX 6-speed stick
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ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2009) — Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere.
To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data.
In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.
The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091230184221.htm
Will Copenhagen be Al Gore's last big Hoorah? Let's hope so.
"When there is universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act".
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Cold weather kills scores
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=126&art_id=nw20100101113458666C- 113855
Man's Death Is Fourth Related To Cold This Winter
http://cbs2chicago.com/wireapnewsil/Chicago.man.s.2.1400772.html
Britain facing one of the coldest winters in 100 years, experts predict
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/6921281/Britain-facing-one-of-the-cold- est-winters-in-100-years-experts-predict.html
Once in a generation cold snap forecast for NC
http://www2.wnct.com/nct/news/local/article/once_in_a_generation_cold_snap_forec- ast_for_nc/91554/
More Extreme, Widespread Cold to Grip the Plains
A blizzard will wind down across northern New England and the St. Lawrence Valley today. However, strong winds will whip across the entire Northeast.
Face-Numbing Winds to Continue in Northeast Long After Blizzard Winds Down
http://www.accuweather.com/news-top-headline.asp?partner=accuweather&traveler=0&- date=2010-01-02_17:05
U.S. East Coast Faces Deep Freeze; Florida Oranges Threatened
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=adEgGRWjmUdA
Summertime temps in Australia are well below normal as well. I call that GLOBAL COOLING.
There is no way modern man would be able to heat their houses for the winter in the northern 1/2 of the country. We have too many people to go back to try and burn wood alone, and many wouldn't be able to do that sort of work. Without fossil fuels for equipment to cut trees and such, imagine if modern people were expected to have oxen and horses to drag firewood to their houses.
Like many people who suffer through the cold in the north, I'll be heading much further south for retirement, where I hope the temperature ranges from 60F - 95F year-round.
I wish vehicles created some significant GW, as I'd encourage you all to go out and drive more and more. Pump up the GHG's PLEASE!
After a couple of smaller storms we had a Christmas Day blizzard that dumped over 14 inches of snow where I live, temps near 0 and 40/50 mph winds, snow drifts 3 to 4 feet (usually right on your driveway). It has snowed at least some almost every day since then.
We had a couple more inches of snow overnight with a low around -4. Right now it is up to a balmy 8 degrees. I don't think it has been above 20 degrees, at any time, since before Christmas. All the snow we got is still there and getting deeper. No melt at all.
The forecast for the coming week shows no relief in sight for the next 7 days. Highs around 13 and lows close to -13. A big snow storm is expected Tuesday, Weds, and Thursday.
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Sounds like another bad fire season down under: Australia Fire Destroys Almost 40 Homes (Reuters)
I don't really blame these guys for wanting free money. I just feel sorry for those who are gullible enough to actually believe this crap and aren't even getting paid !!
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No matter that the PB population has actually been increasing and not in any danger of going extinct.
I cite this as a perfect example of the outright lying practiced by the global warmers and environmental activists.
On a recent visit to my dentist, I noted that he had decorated his office with some polar bear photos. I remarked that they sure are beautiful animals and its a good thing their population seemed to be increasing lately. I leave it to your imagination to construct the rest of our conversation. He promised to do some research.
Regards, DQ (fighting for the truth one dentist at a time)
Convenient, eh? Easy to cover all the bases.
The WS Journal had a good polar bear story this week. Great quote - "A month ago I was down by my [hunting] camp and I saw five polar bears," says Harry Flaherty, chairman of the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, who lives in Iqaluit. "They were so fat, they could barely move."
1. Increased taxes
2. Increased unemployment
3. Increased utility bills
4. Increased automobile costs
5. Increased gasoline costs
6. Increased food costs
7. Increased bank account for Al Gore
The list is endless.
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Yes it is. This article tries to blame the failure in Copenhagen on the hundreds of children dying in Peru from the sub-zero temperatures and longer winters. It boggles the imagination that they can keep pushing their agenda of the planet warming as a direct result of people burning fossil fuel and raising cattle. So what is causing the record cold?
The AGWs have stated that we need to get rid of about half the population. So why are they spending money to save people's lives all over the planet?
"All the children here are sick, they all have breathing problems," he says. "The problem is there is too much cold, too much rain. We have had no time to recover from last winter before it has begun again. There is nothing I can do."
Climate change campaigners and development NGOs say that the failure of Copenhagen has signed the death warrant for hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest and that a quarter of a million children will die before world leaders meet again to try to thrash out another deal at the United Nations next climate change conference in Mexico in December. Among them may be these children of the high mountains.
Enduring prolonged sub-zero temperatures is a matter of course for Peru's indigenous mountain people, many of whom live at more than 3,000m above sea level. Scores die every year from the cold, but in recent years the number of people succumbing to the freezing temperatures has triggered talk of a national crisis.
This year the neighbouring district of Puno saw a severe spike in child mortality as the winter brought months of high winds and relentless ice storms. Government figures record that more than 300 children died in Puno in May last year from the cold; NGOs say that the figure was probably much higher.
Local government officers in Huancavelica could not provide figures for how many children died here last year, but admit that child mortality is rising in the region.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/03/peru-mountain-farmers-winter-cold
Hmmmm, I have literally hundreds of polar bear pictures. And they are very close to civilization. They are not fasting at all. As long as the Eskimos are allowed to kill Whales the polar bears will thrive and keep fat. We counted 27 on one whale carcass.
PS
Eskimos say they have been harvesting whales for 1000s of years. So that means the polar bears have been dining on the scraps for that length of time. The only thing that decimated the population was uncontrolled hunting of the Polar Bears up into the 1970s.
Siberian winds usher in record lows in Beijing
January 4, 2010
A FREEZING cold front swept over much of northern China on Sunday with snowstorms snarling traffic and air travel, while some of the coldest temperatures in decades were forecast for coming days.
Gale-force winds sweeping down from Siberia could result in temperatures as low as minus 16 degrees in the capital today, the Beijing meteorological station said.
Such temperatures are believed to be the coldest in the capital in 40 years
http://www.theage.com.au/world/siberian-winds-usher-in-record-lows-in-beijing-20- - 100103-lna6.html
Global Freezing
Meanwhile you can read:
1) how it's still mighty cold in Canada and the Arctic, and
2) how even in FL it is too cold during parts of the year.
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/storms/winter/2010-01-03-coldsnap_N.htm
I really don't see where these claims are of rising temperatures, unless the data is getting "adjusted". Oh I know the temperature is increasing "elsewhere", except "elsewhere" seems to be in another dimension.
Please don't tell me it's just weather, I know that. I hope those cows start passing gas very soon.
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It looks like 2009 was a hot year too.
"This year's average temperature for the entire world was also the fifth highest since 1850 at 14.44 degrees, and 2009 was the hottest year in history in most parts of South Asia and Central Africa."
Climate Change Spells Hot Year for Korea (Chosun Ilbo)
If the theory is right, you're in for more record settings, but they may be record highs as well as lows.