posted October 05, 2011 01:03 PM            

Yep, sure enough.

Btw, bypassing Congress to impose EPA regulations...Cap and Trade...without congressional approval was/is O'Bomber way forward to skyrockey rate payers electricity bills.

November 2012 can't come too soon. If I were a demoscat congressional member, a member of O'Bomber's administration, an employee of the EPA or a staffer on a congressional demoscat's staff; I'd start updating my resume...now.

Electric Bills About To Spike
Oct 5, 2011 12:14 AM EDT
Laura Colarusso

Utilities across the country need more money for grid updates and pollution controls, and are passing the huge bill on to consumers.

Already weary of high gas prices and 9.1 percent unemployment, many Americans are about to get another kick in the wallet thanks to large increases in their electricity bills.

From Alaska to Georgia and Wyoming to Florida, utilities are seeking permission to pass on hundreds of millions of dollars in new charges to customers to help upgrade aging infrastructure and build new or retrofitted power plants that comply with tougher environmental regulations, a Daily Beast review of regulatory filings has found.

The influx of requests, many still pending before state regulators, has left energy experts convinced that electricity prices will be on the rise for the foreseeable future as the industry struggles to modernize its aging infrastructure.

“They desperately need to upgrade,” says Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor and Clinton-era energy secretary who once famously called America a superpower with a Third World power grid. “You’re seeing rate hikes everywhere because this is a widespread, national problem.”

The pending rate hikes are bad news for poor and elderly Americans on tight budgets, as Congress and the White House begin making cuts to programs that help people cope with their utility bills. One program in particular, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, was slashed during the budget negotiations earlier this year, and is slated for even deeper reductions this fall.

During the budget battle, Congress cut $500 million from the program to bring this year’s total to $4.7 billion, down from a high of $5.1 billion in 2010. For next year, the Obama administration requested only $2.6 billion, leaving states with roughly half the assistance they’ve had in the past. The White House rationale relies on the assumption that energy prices will decline, but regulatory filings have indicated the opposite trend is in store.

In the latest round of budget negotiations, House Republicans have suggested adding $822 million on top of Obama’s request for next year, but the gap could still result in rationing.

Already this summer, Illinois cut back on its energy-assistance grants, forcing seniors and poor families to forego air conditioning during the sizzling August heat. And governors of cold-weather states such as Michigan’s Rick Synder and Maine’s Paul LePage—both Republicans—are fighting the drop in funding, warning that people could freeze. Northeastern Democrats are equally concerned by the president’s proposed cuts.

“During these tough economic times, it is critical that we both fully fund LIHEAP and ensure that states have timely access to the funding they need,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-CT, says. “These changes could prevent states from being able to respond quickly to severe cold weather and leave the most vulnerable Americans out in the cold.”

The Beast’s review of regulatory filings found at least 16 utilities covering 6.1 million customers are seeking rate hikes of 5 percent or more. Almost half of those want increases of 10 percent or more.

And several more utilities already have received approval for large increases.

For instance, close to three million customers in parts of Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia that get their electricity from American Electric Power have seen their rates increase between 48 and 88 percent over the last few years. Those rates are expected to rise an additional 10 to 35 percent in the next three years. The reason? AEP officials are quick to blame environmental regulations that they say are going to cost the company $8 billion in compliance and upgrades.

AEP, which operates in 11 states, says it is raising rates because it needs the cash to upgrade its infrastructure. The company plans to retire five coal plants—which amount to 6,000 megawatts of generation— and build at least two natural gas plants by the end of this decade.

“None of this is cheap,” says Mike Morris, AEP’s chief executive officer. Morris predicts that rolling brownouts also could loom on the horizon because the current system can’t keep up with demand, which is expected to grow by 44 percent by 2035.

Electricity rates were static for most of the 1990s and early 2000s. According to the Energy Information Administration, the average residential customer saw his or her bill increase just seven-tenths of a cent per kilowatt between 1998 and 2004. Between 2005 and 2010, the average price spiked about 2.5 cents and then flattened out over last year as natural gas prices dropped, EIA says.

Dozens of factors affect rate increases, but one of the biggest is that much of the transmission system was built at a time when the radio was still the main form of entertainment. The power grid simply can’t keep up with modern demand as more people use more appliances, computers, and gadgets.

In addition, more than half the states have imposed new clean-energy standards that require utilities to feed in renewable sources. Older systems can’t handle variable power sources such as wind and solar, and therefore require significant upgrades. Throw in pollution controls now required by federal regulations, and utilities are facing billions in upgrade costs that they are eager to pass on to customers.

In Wyoming, the roughly 135,000 households and businesses that get their electricity from Rocky Mountain Power will see their bills go up twice this year alone. In April, rates increased an average of 2 percent to cover increased fuel costs. The second increase took effect at the end of September –an average 8 percent rate hike—to fund infrastructure upgrades.

In South Carolina, Duke Energy has requested a 17 percent increase in residential rates to pay for new power plants and environmental compliance measures. Alaska Electric Light and Power got a 24 percent residential rate hike to deal with inflation and to build a new hydro project.

The pending rate hikes are bad news for poor and elderly Americans on tight budgets.

Customers in Richardson’s home state of New Mexico were looking at a 21 percent hike for infrastructure upgrades, but the state utility commission capped it at 9 percent.

And in Florida, Gulf Power has requested a 10 percent increase—the company’s first request in a decade—to pay for new power lines and other infrastructure. The public service commission won’t rule on the case until early next year, but approved an interim 4 percent price hike for the company’s 376,000 customers.

The industry is at the beginning of what analysts at the Edison Electric Institute, the association of shareholder-owned electric companies, describe as a long-term transition to a lower-carbon industry. Coal is on the way out for many power plants, and natural gas, solar, and wind power are being phased in.

“It’s a relatively recent phenomenon that’s happening because a good portion of the coal plants in use today are at or near the end of their useful lives,” EEI’s Jim Owens explains. Though the specific upgrades will vary among utilities, there is no doubt the costs will be passed on to consumers who will have to shoulder most of the burden despite the economic difficulties they face.

Utilities also are facing more stringent environmental regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency is considering a variety of new rules that would affect electricity generation, essentially forcing utility companies to shutter their coal plants or invest hundreds of millions in scrubbers that remove toxins from the air. Many of these proposed changes are court-ordered and required under the Clean Air Act.

In July, the agency finalized its Cross-State Air Pollution Rule in an effort to cut sulfur-dioxide and nitrogen-oxide emissions after the Bush administration’s plan was thrown out by a judge. Earlier this year, the EPA proposed national standards for mercury pollution from power plants. It’s also working on a controversial plan to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

The EPA has been a convenient punching bag for electricity companies, which have been arguing that onerous regulation is pushing up prices and giving electricity companies too little time to shutter older plants. But, the administration has listened, at least in part, to their concerns. In early September, President Obama gave a two-year reprieve to utilities on tougher ozone regulations because of fears the rules might harm the fragile economy.

And, a report in August by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service countered some of industry’s claims of gloom and doom. That report noted most of the plants that will be affected are coal-fired facilities that are more than 40 years old—many of which are already being closed or have been upgraded to deal with toxic emissions.

posted October 11, 2011 10:42 AM            

What did anyone think would be the result when O'Bomber's EPA is forcing the shutdown of about 70 gigawatts of electricity from coal fired electric producing plants? Coal fired electric plants produce about 50% of the electricity for the United States.

And, all this to counter a problem which doesn't exist...except in the befuddled minds of O'Bomber and his nutty anti-civilization pals in the so called "green groups".

posted November 13, 2011 11:38 AM            

So, the deal is that O'Bomber gives away taxpayer cash to anyone with their hand out...to develop so called clean energy which will cost at least twice what coal, gas and nuclear energy costs AND then, the recipients of theis crony Socialism cash get to produce much higher cost energy, sell it to existing utility companies AND, those utility companies get to pass along the higher cost of this crony Socialism scheme to their rate-payers.

"I will skyrocket your electricity rates!"

Yep!

Oh, and one more thing. You're supposed to cheer O'Bomber and his Socialist pals after screwing you two ways.

First screw, O'Bomber puts you on the hook for all that crony Socialism cash to his pals AND....

Screw two, O'Bomber makes sure you pay off like slot machines to his Socialist buds in the form of much higher electricity rates.

Who says you can't have your cake and eat it too!

A Gold Rush of Subsidies in Clean Energy Search
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
The California Valley Solar Ranch under construction near Santa Margarita.
By ERIC LIPTON and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
Published: November 11, 2011

WASHINGTON — Halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, on a former cattle ranch and gypsum mine, NRG Energy is building an engineering marvel: a compound of nearly a million solar panels that will produce enough electricity to power about 100,000 homes.

The project is also a marvel in another, less obvious way: Taxpayers and ratepayers are providing subsidies worth almost as much as the entire $1.6 billion cost of the project. Similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and wind-power electric plants since 2009.

The government support — which includes loan guarantees, cash grants and contracts that require electric customers to pay higher rates — largely eliminated the risk to the private investors and almost guaranteed them large profits for years to come. The beneficiaries include financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, conglomerates like General Electric, utilities like Exelon and NRG — even Google.

A great deal of attention has been focused on Solyndra, a start-up that received $528 million in federal loans to develop cutting-edge solar technology before it went bankrupt, but nearly 90 percent of the $16 billion in clean-energy loans guaranteed by the federal government since 2009 went to subsidize these lower-risk power plants, which in many cases were backed by big companies with vast resources.

When the Obama administration and Congress expanded the clean-energy incentives in 2009, a gold-rush mentality took over.

As NRG’s chief executive, David W. Crane, put it to Wall Street analysts early this year, the government’s largess was a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and “we intend to do as much of this business as we can get our hands on.” NRG, along with partners, ultimately secured $5.2 billion in federal loan guarantees plus hundreds of millions in other subsidies for four large solar projects.

“I have never seen anything that I have had to do in my 20 years in the power industry that involved less risk than these projects,” he said in a recent interview. “It is just filling the desert with panels.”

From 2007 to 2010, federal subsidies jumped to $14.7 billion from $5.1 billion, according to a recent study.

Most of the surge came from the economic stimulus bill, which was passed in 2009 and financed an Energy Department loan guarantee program and a separate Treasury Department grant program that were promoted as important in creating green jobs.

States like California sweetened the pot by offering their own tax breaks and by approving long-term power-purchase contracts that, while promoting clean energy, will also require ratepayers to pay billions of dollars more for electricity for as long as two decades. The federal loan guarantee program expired on Sept. 30. The Treasury grant program is scheduled to expire at the end of December, although the energy industry is lobbying Congress to extend it. But other subsidies will remain.

The windfall for the industry over the last three years raises questions of whether the Obama administration and state governments went too far in their support of solar and wind power projects, some of which would have been built anyway, according to the companies involved.

Obama administration officials argue that the incentives, which began on a large scale late in the Bush administration but were expanded by the stimulus legislation, make economic and environmental sense. Beyond the short-term increase in construction hiring, they say, the cleaner air and lower carbon emissions will benefit the country for decades.

“Subsidies and government support have been part of many key industries in U.S. history — railroads, oil, gas and coal, aviation,” said Damien LaVera, an Energy Department spokesman.

A Case Study

NRG’s California Valley Solar Ranch project is a case study in the banquet of government subsidies available to the owners of a renewable-energy plant.

The first subsidy is for construction. The plant is expected to cost $1.6 billion to build, with key components made by SunPower at factories in California and Asia. In late September, the Energy Department agreed to guarantee a $1.2 billion construction loan, with the Treasury Department lending the money at an exceptionally low interest rate of about 3.5 percent, compared with the 7 percent that executives said they would otherwise have had to pay.

That support alone is worth about $205 million to NRG over the life of the loan, according to an analysis performed for The New York Times by Booz & Company, a strategic consulting firm that regularly performs such studies for private investors.

When construction is complete, NRG is eligible to receive a $430 million check from the Treasury Department — part of a change made in 2009 that allows clean-energy projects to receive 30 percent of their cost as a cash grant upfront instead of taking other tax breaks gradually over several years.

Californians are also making a big contribution. Under a state law passed to encourage the construction of more solar projects, NRG will not have to pay property taxes to San Luis Obispo County on its solar panels, saving it an estimated $14 million a year.

Assisted by another state law, which mandates that California utilities buy 33 percent of their power from clean-energy sources by 2020, the project’s developers struck lucrative contracts with the local utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, to buy the plant’s power for 25 years.

P.G.& E., and ultimately its electric customers, will pay NRG $150 to $180 a megawatt-hour, according to a person familiar with the project, who asked not to be identified because the price information was confidential. At the time the contract was awarded, that was about 50 percent more than the expected market cost of electricity in California from a newly built gas-powered plant, state officials said.

While neither state regulators nor the companies will divulge all the details, the extra cost to ratepayers amounts to a $462 million subsidy, according to Booz, which calculated the present value of the higher rates over the life of the contracts.

Additional depreciation tax breaks for renewable energy plants could save the company an additional $110 million, according to Christopher Dann, the Booz analyst who examined the project.

The total value of all those subsidies in today’s dollars is about $1.4 billion, leading to an expected rate of return of 25 percent for the project’s equity investors, according to Booz.

Mr. Crane of NRG disputed the Booz estimate, saying that the company’s return on equity was “in the midteens.”

NRG, which initially is investing about $400 million of its own money in the project, expects to get all of its equity back in two to five years, according to a statement it made in August to Wall Street analysts.

By 2015, NRG expects to be earning at least $300 million a year in profits from all of its solar projects combined, making these investments some of the more lucrative pieces in its sprawling portfolio, which includes dozens of power plants fueled by coal, natural gas and oil.

NRG is not the only company gobbling up subsidies. At least 10 of the 16 solar or wind electricity generation projects that secured Energy Department loan guarantees intend to also take the Treasury Department grant, and all but two of the projects have long-term agreements to sell almost all of their power, according to a survey of the companies by The Times.

These projects, in almost all cases, benefit from legislation that has been passed in about 30 states that pushes local utility companies to buy a significant share of their power from renewable sources, like solar or wind power. These mandates often have resulted in contracts with above-market rates for the project developers, and a guarantee of a steady revenue stream.

“It is like building a hotel, where you know in advance you are going to have 100 percent room occupancy for 25 years,” said Kevin Smith, chief executive of SolarReserve. His Nevada solar project has secured a 25-year power-purchase agreement with the state’s largest utility and a $737 million Energy Department loan guarantee and is on track to receive a $200 million Treasury grant.

Because the purchase mandates can drive up electricity rates significantly, some states, including New Jersey and Colorado, are considering softening the requirements on utilities.

Brookfield Asset Management, a giant Canadian investment firm, will receive so many subsidies for a New Hampshire wind farm that they are worth 46 percent to 80 percent of the $229 million price of the project, when measured in today’s dollars, according to analyses for The Times performed by Booz and two other two industry financial experts. (The wide range reflects a disagreement between the experts on the future price of electricity in New Hampshire.)

Richard Legault, the chief executive of Brookfield Renewable Power, the division that oversees the Granite Reliable project in New Hampshire, declined to discuss his profit expectations in detail, but said the project might not have happened without government assistance.

“When everything has come together, it is a good investment for Brookfield, it is no doubt,” Mr. Legault said. “We are quite happy with it.” (Brookfield is also the owner of the small park in Manhattan that is home to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.)...**Surprise, Surprise, Surprise!**

Even companies whose business has little to do with energy or finance, like the Internet giant Google, benefit from the public subsidies. Google has invested in several renewable energy projects, including a giant solar plant in the California desert and a wind farm in Oregon, in part to get federal tax breaks that it can use to offset its profits from Web advertising.

Industry executives and other supporters of the subsidies say that the public money was vital to the projects, in part because financing for renewable energy projects dried up during the recession. They also note that more traditional energy sectors, like oil and natural gas, get heavy subsidies of their own. For example, in the 2010 fiscal year, the oil and gas producers got federal tax breaks of $2.7 billion, according to an analysis by the Energy Information Administration.

“These programs just level the playing field for what oil and gas and nuclear industries have enjoyed for the last 50 years,” said Rhone Resch, president of Solar Energy Industries Association. “Do you have to provide more policy support and funding initially? Absolutely. But the result is more energy security, clean energy and domestic jobs.”

Michael E. Webber, associate director of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas, Austin, said renewable energy subsidies were a worthy investment. “It is a form of corporate welfare that is consistent with other social goals like job creation, clean air and boosting a domestic source of energy,” he said.

Overflowing Breaks

Obama administration officials said the subsidies were intended to help renewable-energy plants that were jumbo-sized or used innovative technology, both potential obstacles to getting private financing. But even proponents of the subsidies say the administration may have gone overboard.

Concerns that the government was being too generous reached all the way to President Obama. In an October 2010 memo prepared for the president, Lawrence H. Summers, then his top economic adviser; Carol M. Browner, then his adviser on energy matters; and Ronald A. Klain, then the vice president’s chief of staff, expressed discomfort with the “double dipping” that was starting to take place. They said investors had little “skin in the game.”

Officials involved in reviewing the loan applications said that Treasury Department officials pressed the Energy Department to respond to these concerns.

Officials at both agencies declined to discuss the anticipated financial returns of the clean-energy projects the federal government has agreed to guarantee, saying the information was confidential.

But Energy Department officials said they had carefully evaluated every project to try to calculate how much money the developers and investors stood to make. “They were rejected, if they looked too rich or too risky,” Mr. LaVera, the Energy Department spokesman said.

In at least one instance — NRG’s Agua Caliente solar project in Yuma County, Ariz. — the Energy Department demanded that the company agree not to apply for a Treasury grant it was legally entitled to receive. The government was concerned the extra subsidy would result in excessive profit, NRG executives confirmed.

In other cases, the agency required that companies use most of the Treasury grants that they would get when construction was complete to pay down part of the government-guaranteed construction loans instead of cashing out the equity investors.

“The private sector really has more skin in the game than the public realizes,” said Andy Katell, a spokesman for GE Energy Financial Services, which like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other financial firms has large investments in several of these projects.

But there is no doubt that the deals are lucrative for the companies involved.

G.E., for example, lobbied Congress in 2009 to help expand the subsidy programs, and it now profits from every aspect of the boom in renewable-power plant construction. **Crony Socialism on full display...from a company..GE which pays NO corporate income taxes!**

It is also an investor in one solar and one wind project that have secured about $2 billion in federal loan guarantees and expects to collect nearly $1 billion in Treasury grants. The company has also won hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to sell its turbines to wind plants built with public subsidies.

Mr. Katell said G.E. and other companies were simply “playing ball” under the rules set by Congress and the Obama administration to promote the industry. “It is good for the country, and good for our company,” he said.

Satya Kumar, an analyst at Credit Suisse who specializes in renewable energy companies, said there was no question the country would see real benefits from the surge in renewable energy projects.

posted November 14, 2011 03:19 PM            

as to all those wonderful fossil fuels we should keep using (till they're all gone and THEN WHAT?) did you know that in the height of the texas drought this summer an entire aquifer of tens of millions of gallons (near austin) was emptied to flush deep oil out of wells so you could rev up your gas guzzler a few more times?

posted December 22, 2011 11:12 AM            

This is an example of a totally irrelevant response.

There are now, right now, more PROVEN fossil fuel reserves in the world than at any time in history!

Further, the United States is the repository of more of these PROVEN reserves than any other nation on earth and more than most of the rest of the world combined!

The goal of the eco-nuts...including O'Bomber...is to take America down. They pine for a candle, mule and wagon society. A back to the 19th century...Little House on the Prairie culture where America is irrelevant on the world stage.

They are anti-civilization Loony-Tunes leftists.

To that end, the Loony-Tunes running the EPA these days have planned to implement new regulations which will force the closing of coal fired electric generating plants in America....and skyrocket consumer electric rates.

When your lights go off, your refrigerators stop running, your computers shut down and your HVAC won't run to heat and cool your dwellings..and you can't recharge the batteries on your O'BomberMobile; remember O'Bomber's promise.

"I will bankrupt the coal companies"

"I will skyrocket your electricity rates"

If a foreign nation made war on America and Americans the way O'Bomber has, is and plans to continue; the bombers would fly!

November 2012 can't come too soon!

The EPA Is Dreaming Of A Blackout Christmas
Flashlights make great stocking stuffers
by John Hayward
12/21/2011

In another triumph for government transparency, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson signed the final MACT Rule last Friday, but she’s been keeping it secret until a formal announcement planned for today. MACT stands for Maximum Achievable Control Technology. It covers emission rules for various industries, controlling the technologies the EPA finds achievable in the same sense that a choke chain controls a dog.

The new MACT rules are going to come down hard on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, despite serious questions raised by critics about the EPA’s methodology for calculating costs and benefits from the rule. Many of the benefits it claims to provide already emanate from the Clean Air Act, while its project costs are deliriously underestimated, compared to independent analyses. One reason the EPA is keeping things under wraps is that it got tired of all the criticism.

How high are those costs likely to be? The Associated Press estimated that “more than 32 mostly coal-fired power plants in a dozen states will be forced to close because of the new, more stringent regulations. Another 36 plants are at risk of closing.” This will drain at least 14.7 gigawatts, “enough power for more than 11 million households,” off the grid between 2014 and 2015. The town manager of Glen Lyn, Virginia worries that his entire town might actually be wiped out when their power plant is shut down by the new rules.

The AP nevertheless assures us that “no lights will go dark,” which sounds less like a prediction than a prayer. How do we lose 14.7 gigawatts without any lights going dark?

And that’s a fairly lowball estimate of the impact from these plant closings. Last month, the Institute for Energy Research estimated that the true effect will be nearly double what the EPA estimates, or at least 28 gigawatts of generating capacity… and even that might not be the end of it. According to the Wall Street Journal, the highly respected North American Electric Reliability Corporation believes that “on top of the 38 gigawatts of generation that is already being run below normal levels or slated for early retirement, another 36 to 59 gigawatts will come offline by 2018, depending on the ‘scope and timing’ of EPA demands.” (Emphasis mine.)

So the total damage might be twice as bad as the Institute for Energy Research fears, and they’re predicting twice as much energy loss as the EPA. Building new power plants to take up the slack is not something that can be done quickly. As the Wall Street Journal explains, “there are bottlenecks in permitting, engineering, financing, and building a new plant and then tying it to the electricity networks.”

You know that piddly $70 or $80 bucks a month Obama has been raiding Social Security to tuck into your breast pocket? You might want to start saving that money to pay your future electric bills, with 15% to 20% increases on the table in many states, just for starters. Not to mention your skyrocketing local taxes, if you happen to live in the “coal belt” or a town that’s about to lose its coal-fired plant. Those industries pay a lot of taxes, and you’ll be expected to make up the shortfall. The Associated Press looked at one example:

Take Giles County, where American Electric Power​'s Glen Lyn plant is located, and where 44 jobs are on the line.

County Administrator Chris McKlarney worries about the $600,000 tax-revenue hit his $40 million budget will take. But that's just one concern involving a plant and workers whose community contribution is "hard to quantify."

"They've done so much donation-wise for local causes ... And they're really good people working there," he said. "They're coaches in Little League sports, involved in the Parent-Teacher Organization — you lose those kind of people, it's tough."

And they're good jobs — stable, well-paying positions with good benefits in places where such things can be hard to find.

Good jobs are going to be much harder to find in the energy-starved America the Obama Administration has been plotting to inflict upon us.

On the bright side, you might recall a panicked President Obama, after reports of zero net job growth last summer, stammering something about how the EPA would be instructed to consider the impact of its rules upon job creation. If you recall that, please be a good citizen and strike yourself in the forehead repeatedly until you forget it. Also, please forget about Obama openly promising to destroy the coal industry during the 2008 campaign. It’s one of the few campaign promises he seems hell-bent on keeping, but we’re supposed to politely ignore it and pretend he’s a wise technocrat who cares about the middle class.

Fortunately, leaving useless White House promises aside, there is a federal agency changed with maintaining the integrity of America’s electrical power grid, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Unfortunately, they’re deadlocked over whether to take action. The Administration is eager to regulate the dickens out of Americans, but much less keen about regulating itself.

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) has been trying to work up Congressional legislation to delay the new EPA rules, as well as demanding an investigation into why this appendage of the Most Transparent Administration In History refuses to answer his questions about the methodology behind its new rules. Meanwhile, a thought for your last-minute Christmas shopping: flashlights and batteries make great stocking stuffers.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=48283

posted December 22, 2011 02:25 PM            

2 - in london in the 50s people i know were walking to school with GAS MASKS because the air was so bad. the solution was the BAN ON SMOKE PRODUCING FUELS. by the time i got to london in the 70s a "pea-souper" was a memory...in fact in the 21 years i lived there i only saw ONE serious thick fog. the SMOG that had been causing the "traditional" london "fog" was GONE.

3 - given the above, how much do you think people will save in healthcare for their lungs, eyes, etc when the air clears?

posted December 22, 2011 02:43 PM            

Get your prescription checked katatonic...or learn how to read.

I'm getting tired of doing your "homework" for you. If you spent half as much time checking out what you say...before you said it..as you do whining, wheezing, pi$$ing, moaning, screeching and shrieking...you'd be much better informed.

posted December 22, 2011 11:19 PM            

i see the clip contains those words. out of context but just a little, right?

and my comment about the profit motive from the energy giants holds. they have been doing MY-T-FINE lately and they want to keep the big margin in place so they are charging their customers for the improvements needed to keep the juice flowing at all.

i don't source my opinion all the time. it's my opinion. when i QUOTE someone i cite it. plain and simple.

you omitted to say that the costs of retrofitting would be EXPECTED to be passed on to consumers by the energy companies. because they are not going to take ONE PENNY LESS than what they have gotten used to, even to get to a better place.

does that mean we should never make the effort to improve anything? it has to make people rich to be worth it, is that it?

now i wonder how much it will cost us to cover the costs for them to clean up the water and soil from all the accidents, leaks and chemicals needed to create these wonderful fossil fuels into energy for their pocketbooks?

not to mention the apparently unsolvable problem of nuclear garbage.

i have no problem with people becoming as rich as croesus. but if that is ALL that matters, then there will be a few very rich people around, eventually, with no consumers to keep them going or do their work for them.