Green energy destroys 2 jobs for every 1 created, study finds

via Bloomberg:

Job Losses From Obama Green Stimulus Foreseen in Spanish Study

By Gianluca Baratti

March 27 (Bloomberg) -- Subsidizing renewable energy in the U.S. may destroy two jobs for every one created if Spain’s experience with windmills and solar farms is any guide.

For every new position that depends on energy price supports, at least 2.2 jobs in other industries will disappear, according to a study from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2010 budget proposal contains about $20 billion in tax incentives for clean-energy programs. In Spain, where wind turbines provided 11 percent of power demand last year, generators earn rates as much as 11 times more for renewable energy compared with burning fossil fuels.

The premiums paid for solar, biomass, wave and wind power - - which are charged to consumers in their bills -- translated into a $774,000 cost for each Spanish “green job” created since 2000, said Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at the university and author of the report.

“The loss of jobs could be greater if you account for the amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to higher energy prices,” he said in an interview.

h/t: FoxNation

The automakers need customers, not bailouts

While Obama gleefully spends a trillion or so dollars in a futile attempt to spend the US out of recession, here's surprising news about one country doing something sensible.

China February Auto Sales Rise 25% After Tax Cuts

The Commies are acting like capitalists and our Capitalist leaders are spending like commies. Tell me how screwed up the world is right now!

The Failure of Obamanomics

Obama Fiddles While Wall Street Burns by Jed Babbin

But President Obama -- having first claimed that only government can solve the economic problems -- is failing to provide any solutions Wall Street can believe in.

RTWT.

McClintock: An Inconvenient Question

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York on the contradictions of green policies:



Via Reason.com

Goldenberg: AGW = Al Gore Warming

NOAA Meteorologist Claims 'Gross, Blatant Censorship' for Speaking Out Against Climate Change Alarmism

Stanley Goldenberg of NOAA's Hurricane Research Division tells ICCC audience global warming has no measurable impact on hurricane activity.

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
3/9/2009 8:06:09 PM

You often hear scientists who promote the theory of man-made global warming allege they are victims of censorship. But when it is the other way around – that scientists who dispute that claim are victims of the same thing, you never hear a peep.

That’s what Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) Hurricane Research Division, told an audience at the The Heartland Institute’s 2009 International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC) in New York on March 9. Voices that counter global warming alarmism are often subject to censorship, he said.

“The debate, as you also know, is masked by media censorship, bias and distortion,” Goldenberg said. “I’m interviewed quite bit on many, many levels and thankfully most of our interviews are benign. They’re trying to get out to the public.”



Goldenberg explained that as a skeptic of the anthropogenic global warming theory, he had firsthand experience, and he challenged the media to give a positive spin to the ICCC event.

“[I]’ve seen gross, gross blatant censorship,” Goldenberg said. “If you’re here from the media I’d be glad to argue with you from firsthand experience. I challenge anybody from a mainstream media source to take or print a positive report on this conference. They won’t get it past the editor. If they do, miracles do happen.”

Goldenberg is known for his research on how hurricane activity variability can be influenced on anything from intraseasonal to multi-decadal time scales. He disputes the theory hurricanes are significantly impacted by global warming. And he claimed his colleagues at other hurricane research institutions dispute it as well.

“Not a single, to my knowledge – not a single scientist at the National Hurricane Center, the Hurricane Research Division, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center – I’m trying to find out about the Central Pacific Hurricane Center – believe that hurricanes – numbers, activity – that there’s any measurable impact from any so-called global warming.”

Goldenberg explained there were differences between the terms anthropogenic global warming (AGW), referred to as “Al Gore warming” and global warming or climate change when used. He also alluded to the media’s willingness to use natural catastrophe to propagate this alarmism.

“Just because climate change has happened doesn’t mean AGW,” Goldenberg said. “Just because weather disasters happen doesn’t mean AGW. And an inconvenient truth that most of the media are speaking of, CAGW – that’s very important. They’re not just talking about AGW, but catastrophic [anthropogenic global warming]. If we just have a little bit of warming from manmade causes, nobody really cares, but they’re talking about it’s going to be catastrophic.”

A recent Business & Media Institute analysis discovered global warming alarmists often link weather phenomena like tornadoes, hurricanes, ice melt, droughts and wildfires with global warming and the media embrace the stories. However, when wintry weather hits places that aren’t accustomed to it – like recent snows in Las Vegas and New Orleans – the news coverage isn’t as quick to point their finger at the possibility of global cooling.

More links to news stories about the ICCC.

Vaclav Klaus

The President of a former Communist country has some good advice for the president of the country known so far as the world's bastion of capitalism.

Massive government spending and tighter regulation would prolong recession, Czech President Vaclav Klaus said on Monday, as he urged U.S. President Barack Obama not to endanger the free market economy in his response to the financial crisis.

PM Harper makes the TV circuit in the US

Following the visit on President Obama to Canada, our PM Stephen Harper is staying in the limelight by speaking out on the US networks.




With Larry Kudlow on CNBC.






And also with Alexis Glick on Fox Business Network


click images to play videos




Harper's comments on oil production, the Oil Sands and carbon emissions are interesting. His position seems to be that Canada will move to reduce carbon emissions and he welcomes the fact that the US under Obama will do the same, thus leveling the playing field.

The rest of the conversations center on the economy and economic stimulus.

Mr. Global Warming

The unauthorized biography, courtesy Celestial Junk.

h/t

Will history repeat itself?

Avner Mandelman asks (Report on Business)if the stimulus mania currently possessing western politicians is just a case of history repeating itself.

Imagine this: A group of community organizers, aided by mesmerizing rhetoric and calls for equality, fraternity and hope, remove the privileged from power. But the government they inherit is heavily in debt to the tune of a third of the GDP. The debt comes due, the government can't pay, so the economy tanks.

What to do? Taxes are out - the taxpayers have fled (or are broke). The ingenious solution: Print more money as a stimulus package! What about interest on the printed stimulus? Piffle. Just print it also!

This is not the United States in 2009 - at least not yet. It is France, 1789, right after the French Revolution.

Why mention this history?

Well, because the results weren't very pretty.

Maine cold breaks 84 year record

Just because you won't see this in the main stream media:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Geological Survey and Maine State Climate Office announced today that a minus-50 reading in northwestern Maine held up to scientific scrutiny.

That beats Maine's old record of 48 below zero set in 1925 in Van Buren, and ties the record for coldest temperature recorded in New England. That reading was made in 1933 in Bloomfield, Vt.

The record on New Hampshire's Mount Washington is minus-47.

Maine's minus-50 reading was made on Jan. 16 at a remote site along the Big Black River near the Quebec border as the region was in the grip of a blast of arctic air.

Wilson acts on CO2

...by banning the local broadcast of British government ads on climate change and denounced their energy-saving message as "insidious propaganda."

The hard-line Protestant, a leading light in the Democratic Unionist Party, argues that global weather patterns are naturally cooling, not warming — and humanity should invest in coping with God-driven climate change, not trying to slow down a man-made problem.

His latest fight is against the central government in London, which funds an "Act on CO2" campaign encouraging the public to reduce their use of electricity and fossil fuels.

Previously.

Mr. Wilson represents something extremely rare in a politician - he is one who is unafraid to speak the truth. Bravo Sammy. I wish we had more like ye!

h/t

Ball: On Pravda’s New Ice Age Story

Dr. Tim Ball's latest post On Pravda’s New Ice Age Story starts off by taking aim at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the premise of human induced (anthropogenic) global warming from the emissions of carbon dioxide:

I have said the IPCC focus on CO2 is akin to saying my car is not running well and I am going to determine the cause by ignoring the engine (sun), the transmission (water vapor), and most other mechanical parts and focus on one nut (CO2) on the right rear wheel. Worse, they only look at one thread of the nut, the human portion of CO2. The ease with which they have achieved this degree of focus is frightening, but understandable because it was premeditated.

But that's just the prelude. The main focus of Dr. Ball's post is a recent article in the Russian newspaper Pravda titled Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age which states:

“The Earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science.”

To put this into perspective and avoid confusion with the recent short term period of global cooling, Dr. Ball offers this explanation over a much larger time frame:

This is the fact that the Earth over the last 10,000 years has emerged from one segment of the most recent Ice Age (Pleistocene). We are currently in an interglacial (Holocene) and scientists anticipate it will end as we slide into another Ice Age. A diagram of global temperatures over the last 400,000 years derived from Antarctic ice cores shows the pattern during the Pleistocene.

The blue line shows the temperature with current temperatures on the right. Notice there are four previous interglacials, two of them with higher temperatures than today. The intervening periods are the ice ages when massive glaciers formed on the land. Also note how the temperature declines after the interglacial peak; that is the cooling the Pravda article is discussing.

It is generally agreed that changes in the sun/earth relationship are the major mechanism driving long-term climate patterns. These are collectively known as the Milankovitch Effect and include; changes in the Earth’s orbit caused primarily by the gravitational pull of Jupiter with a 100,000-year cycle; changes in the tilt of the Earth of undetermined cause, with a 40,000- year cycle; and a shift in the date of equinox with a 19,000-year cycle. Although Milankovitch’s work was initially accepted it lost favor when his results conflicted with some radiocarbon data. I recall conferences in the 1980s when reference to Milankovitch brought vigorous protest. However, by the 1990s he was back in favor.

Another important point about the Pravda article is the observation that supporters of the human caused global warming (AGW) only consider a short time frame. “ The main flaw in the AGW theory is that its proponents focus on evidence from only the past 1,000 years at most, while ignoring the evidence from the past million years--evidence which is essential for a true understanding of climatology.” It is true that the now discredited “hockey stick” examined climate of the last thousand years, but this was only to try and eliminate the Medieval Warm Period. In fact, the focus is at most the temperature of the last 140 years.

Read the full story at FCPP Publications. (h/t)

Related: The IPCC under the Microscope. (h/t)