Green Frauds

When it really comes down to it, Mark Udall's sole claim to fame and thus his sole claim to the US Senate Seat is that he is an environmentalist. Some, including this author would call him an environmentalist extremist, and the whole movement a fraud.

Yes, the movement has lofty goals. It just lacks common sense.

During the Vietnam war, an army major was quoted as saying "In order to save this village we had to burn it." That quote was instrumental in undermining support for that war, as it should have been.

The modern Mark Udall equivalent would be "In order to save the forests from logging, we had to let the beetles and wildfires destroy it." Unsurprisingly, the msm has been slow to see the comparison, the fraud, the absolute attack on the public interest.

Someone read about our quest to discover the true costs of wind and solar power and forwarded us the information that they had, including a link to a very interesting Business Week article titled "Little Green Lies."

Does anyone recall their middle ages history when the Catholic Church was selling "indulgences?" Some green entrepreneurs are now selling indulgences to corporations like the Aspen Skiing Company. They call them "carbon offsets." The article makes it quite plain that these indulgences just transfer money from one company to another with absolutely no impact on the environment.

It has a link to another Business Week article "Another Inconvenient Truth."

Done carefully, offsets can have a positive effect and raise ecological awareness. But a close look at several transactions—including those involving the Oscar presenters, Vail Resorts, and the Seattle power company—reveals that some deals amount to little more than feel-good hype. When traced to their source, these dubious offsets often encourage climate protection that would have happened regardless of the buying and selling of paper certificates. One danger of largely symbolic deals is that they may divert attention and resources from more expensive and effective measures.

And, of course, that links to still another Business Week article "Ethanol: Too Much Hype and Corn."

The Mark Udall's of the world would do well to take a good hard look in the mirror before deciding that they know best about the environment. Almost all of what they are proposing and pushing is backfiring and backfiring badly.

Will Voters Remember At The Polls?

In ten months the voters will be going to the polls. It will be interesting to see if they can connect the dots between what Mark Udall and Bill Ritter have been doing and how it impacts their daily quality of life.

Take food prices. They are going up sharply. The Boulder Camera reports on food price inflation without identifying Mark Udall, Bill Ritter, or the Sierra Club as in any way responsible:

In the western United States, the costs were even higher. With a recorded 6.4 percent gain in December 2007 and a 4.7 percent increase for the full year, the region, which includes Colorado, boasted the largest increases among the four U.S. Census areas for those periods...

One of the major underlying factors is the rising cost of fuel. The energy needed to produce, transfer and store food items is coming at a bigger price tag, he says.

"At the same time, some of the raw product costs -- particularly for the costs of manufacturing, wholesale ingredient prices -- were up substantially," he says. "The retail end of it kind of held the line as much as they could."

And then there's the demand for ethanol.

"You've got these government mandates that we're supposed to be producing so much corn," said Jeff Thredgold, a regional economist for Vectra Bank Colorado. "What it has done is push corn prices dramatically higher, which has an impact."

The higher prices of corn, a key ingredient in feed and a variety of foods, have carried forward to products such as tortillas, cornbread, beef and poultry.

Democrats count on the votes of people who live on a fixed income. That voting block is eventually going to get wise to the fact that Mark Udall and Bill Ritter are paying their extreme environmentalist agenda on the backs of the poor through higher food and fuel prices, higher property taxes, and higher utility bills. Will they remember at the polls?

The Curse of E-85

This week, The Gazette had an E85 editorial:

To appreciate this fuel, one has to adopt compassion for wealthy beneficiaries of corporate welfare. Alternatively, one must believe all of the following: 1. We’re threatened by global warming; 2. human activity causes global warming; and 3. ethanol results in a net carbon emissions decrease that will reduce the problem.

Belief number three requires a wild imagination or wishful thinking, considering the fact American ethanol is made mostly from corn. Just to harvest this low-energy crop requires behemoth diesel-burning combines. Unlike high-energy crude — often transported through more eco-friendly pipelines — low energy corn must be shipped for processing by diesel-powered trucks or trains. In a 2005 issue of the journal Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences, University of California-Berkeley geo-engineering Prof. Tad Patzek showed that up to six times more energy is used to make ethanol than the final product contains.

The damage doesn't stop there:

The conundrum rests partly in the fact that most small-business owners live by the natural rules of a free and fair market, while others don’t have to. Jack the price of a penne pasta dish too high, and customers won’t buy it. Conversely, if an entrepreneur wants to build a multi-million dollar plant to refine ethanol that nobody needs, he can do so without fear. The federal government [ prodded by Mark Udall and Ken Salazar ] will pay him to sell a product that makes little sense, and in this case, the ripple effect inflates food costs.

How much does it inflate food costs? Mark Udall, Bill Ritter, Ken Salazar, and John Salazar don't believe that 4.5% inflation is enough. To them, it is just another excuse for more income redistribution:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in December that 2007 saw the largest increase in food prices since 1990. The agency expects prices to rise at least another 3 percent this year. Products made with wheat and soybean oil are expected to inflate so much that the cost of home cooking will increase 4.5 percent. We can logically expect the price of corn fed beef to continue soaring.

On Kittens and Grooming

When a kitten is taken from its mother before it learns to groom itself, it never learns to groom itself.

Mark Udall is in need of a comb. This isn't the first time we made that observation. It is said that you dress for the job you want. Our garbage men show up with combed hair more often than Mark Udall does, and they only come once a week.

Today's fashion statement picture was in the Grand Junction Sentinel.

The accompanying article has an interesting quote in it that is very likely another lie from the Mark Udall camp:

“This is solely about bolstering the base,” [ Mike ] Melanson said. “This is indicative of what we’ve been seeing in our research that Bob Schaffer has been having problems in his own base and this is about trying to scare Republicans back into the fold.”

Udall's minions are telling the left wing blogosphere in response to the latest poll showing a toss-up that their internal polls always showed the race to be close. Ok, Melanson, which is it? It reminds one of Mark Udall's Cornfusion, where he told three different audiences what they wanted to hear about corn ethanol.

Renewable Science Uncertain

Al Gore claims that the science is settled, but is it?

Using biofuel instead of gasoline in cars is generally considered to cut carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to global warming, although some scientists say greenhouse gases released during the production of biofuel could offset those gains.

And new studies question the impact on water quality.

More scientists are looking at the entire corn-to-fuel life-cycle of ethanol production and trying to assess the impacts. Researchers at the National Research Council are concerned that growing more corn for ethanol production could harm local water quality, according to a new report released in October

From MIT:

“Agricultural shifts to growing corn and expanding biofuel crops into regions with little agriculture, especially dry areas, could change current irrigation practices and greatly increase pressure on water resources in many parts of the United States,” the committee said in its report. “The amount of rainfall and other hydroclimate conditions from region to region causes significant variations in the water requirement for the same crop.”

The report also urged big agriculture to adopt new technologies that can increase crop yield while conserving water and reducing negative environmental impacts, such as soil erosion and runoff pollution.“We must recognize that the current state of the U.S. agroecosystem is not sustainable,” said Entekhabi, an hydrologist who studies land-atmosphere processes and is director of MIT's Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering.

“The use of energy-intensive and industrially produced fertilizers and pesticides are finding their way into water and food supplies for humans and animals. Soil erosion and loss of soil fertility is continuing unabated. U.S. agriculture needs to shift to more ecologically sound and sustainable conditions.”

Udall Committing a Crime Against Humanity?

Cornfusion isn't the only problem with corn ethanol:

A U.N. expert on Friday called the growing practice of converting food crops into biofuel "a crime against humanity,'' saying it is creating food shortages and price jumps that cause millions of poor people to go hungry...

The world price of wheat doubled in one year and the price of corn quadrupled, leaving poor countries, especially in Africa, unable to pay for the imported food needed to feed their people, he said. And poor people in those countries are unable to pay the soaring prices for the food that does come in, he added.

''So it's a crime against humanity'' to devote agricultural land to biofuel production, Ziegler said a news conference. ''What has to be stopped is ... the growing catastrophe of the massacre (by) hunger in the world,'' he said.

OK, it is time to put some names to these perps. Who would have guessed that Mark Udall, Ed Perlmutter, Ken Salizar, John Salazar, Bill Ritter and Diana DeGette would stoop to commit a crime against humanity-against the poor in Africa and South America?

One wonders if, when they go to the dock to answer for their crimes, they will use that famous and unsuccessful defense used in Nuremberg "We were just following orders - this time, the orders of the environmentalist lobby."

[ Jean ] Ziegler, a sociology professor at the University of Geneva and the University of the Sorbonne in Paris, presented a report Thursday to the U.N. General Assembly's human rights committee saying a five-year moratorium on biofuel production would allow time for new technologies for using agricultural byproducts instead of food itself.

Fouling up the Planet by the Numbers

In what was obviously a warning to Bill Ritter and Mark Udall without mentioning either by name, the Rocky Mountain News said the following about corn ethanol:

"This dramatic expansion has substantial implications for already strained water and grassland resources in the Ogallala Aquifer region [eastern Colorado]," the report states, calculating the additional withdrawal of water from the most depleted parts of the aquifer at 59 billion to 120 billion gallons per year - comparable to the amount of water consumed by Denver Water Board customers in a year. Another potential consequence, it warns, is the loss of fragile grasslands...

Lawmakers need to recognize that alternative fuel programs come with a price that is not always obvious, and could create larger problems than the ones they're intended to cure.

Isn't it interesting that the same Mark Udall who has done so much to kill off Colorado's forests might also eventually take the blame for permanently turning eastern Colorado into a dust bowl? And he has done all of this while claiming to be an "environmentalist!"

Even the NYT is (was) Cornfused

Today the Gazette had a short editorial (scroll to the bottom) on the insane rush to biofuels and mentioned a recent NYT editorial on the subject.

We’ve been warning for a couple years that American politicians need to be enrolled, en masse, in an Ethanolics Anonymous 12-step program, because massive government support for the corn- and plant-based gasoline alternative would raise food prices and have uncertain environmental benefits. But we know a few readers won’t believe anything unless they read it in the editorial pages of the left-leaning New York Times, so we refer them to Wednesday’s edition, in which the gray lady finally awakens to ethanol’s adverse impacts

Mark Udall has shown himself to be "nimble" on this issue-"enthusiastic" to farmers, "skeptical" to energy executives, and calling it "a bridge" when CSU scientists criticize it-and now we know why. The Grey Lady isn't saying nice things about corn ethanol any more.

So far, Americans haven’t really caught on to what is happening to the price of products such as soybean or corn-based foodstuffs. But that may change if and when this rush to all fuels allegedly more environmentally friendly affects the price of beer...

Where will this all stop? Actually, it has barely even begun; most ethanol and bio-fuel production is merely in the planning stages, or under construction (as in the case of refineries to produce this stuff), and years from coming on-stream. At what point might it dawn on people that the “cure” for reducing our dependence on foreign oil is worse than the original disease?

Udall is Still Cornfused

A month ago, we wrote an essay about Mark Udall's Cornfusion. Today, a report in the Durango Herald that was generally uncritical of Udall described this exchange at a meeting called to tout renewable energy:

The one question Udall seemed to stumble on concerned the downsides of corn-based ethanol, an alternative fuel that has been criticized for taking almost as much energy to produce as it produces. However, corn ethanol is strongly supported by agricultural interests and politically influential Iowa voters.

Ali Sabeti, a retired senior adviser of the World Bank who lives in Durango, asked Udall how long it would take Washington to end subsidies for corn ethanol.

"If anybody wants to help me out with this question, I'd appreciate your help," Udall joked. The congressman recovered quickly, saying the government should promote research into cellulosic ethanol to provide a greater balance.

Would it be too much to ask Mark Udall to be consistent when he talks about corn ethanol? When he talks to knowledgeable energy executives, as he did in Durango, he is skeptical. When he talks to farmers, he is enthusiastic. When scientists at CSU criticize it, he calls it a "bridge."

He is a green extremist whose positions don't make sense, even to him. Regardless, he wants to shove the Colorado economy into an uncertain future of his own design.

Energy Questions for Mark Udall

The left is already complaining that Udall is working with Musgrave. They hope to beat her in 2008 and think Udall's cooperation doesn't help their cause. The two recently held a joint forum that will doubtless stir comments in the left wing blogosphere. Even so, the subject was of more interest than the format.

We have energy questions for Mark Udall:

If the lack of water resources is a serious problem in Colorado, and it is, why are we providing incentives to grow a crop that will gulp water when it is turned into biofuel? Do you plan to ship the corn to another state with more water and ship the fuel back? Has anyone really thought this one through?

Wind farms in Colorado are a great idea! Have you talked to Ted Kennedy about why he hates the thought of wind farms outside Martha's Vinyard? Better yet, sponsor a bill that provides Federal funds and a mandate for farms in both places and see how many of your environmentalist left friends in Congress vote for it.

Wouldn't Colorado provide more energy independence by developing gas wells on 350 acres of the Roan Plateau at a time?