What does John Podesta, CEO and President of the Center for American Progress (CAP) , think will best stimulate the economy? “[T]he transformation of our outdated energy infrastructure to new platforms of efficiency and reduce carbon emissions represents the great potential engine for economic recovery, for job growth, for innovation, and for long-term sustainable growth for our economy.” He argued at the CAP event on April 1st that “President Obama and our congressional leaders recognized this nexus when they included in the stimulus package an unprecedented $90 billion of investments in clean energy programs including $17 billion in spending and loan guarantees for smart grid technology, utility scale renewable energy generation, and thousands of miles of new transmission lines to bring these clean electrons to market.”
Furthermore, Podesta said, “Investments in low carbon infrastructure have…greater net benefits than alternative strategies for economic stimulus because they boast high domestic content, are skill and labor intensive, have a large employment multiplier effect, and create good local jobs that can’t be outsourced.” But that’s not all. Because nobody in the private sector wants to spend their own money on this expensive research, the American taxpayers get to pay them to.: “Moreover, a good mix of direct spending, tax breaks, loan guarantees, and matching funds will help attract additional private investment at a time, obviously, when credit is tight. The influx of stimulus money to help transform and rebuild the electricity grid is a solid down payment on the transition to a low-carbon economy.” Apparently, this will be great for the economy and job creation—and for whomever is doing the research.
Where do we sign up? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid already has. He also spoke at the event. However, he took a different approach to the issue. “70% of [the] oil we use everyday comes from Venezuela, the unstable Middle East—how can we sleep at night? How can we rest well recognizing that we are so dependent on others for what goes on in this country on a daily basis? We will never, ever be a secure nation as long as we’re dependent on foreign oil. That’s why, when we talk about renewable energy, we’d be using the wind, the sun, geothermal, things that are renewable. And that’s what this is all about.”
Another panelist, T. Boone Pickens, the founder and chairman of BP Capital Management, said, “We’re working with an issue here that is bipartisan. It’s not a Democrat or Republican issue. It’s about America.” He concluded, “We have 10 million people working on this, and so it’s real. It is going to happen, and we’re going to have…a clean economy. It’s going to be green, and it’s going to be our resources. And that is the key the whole time: we have to do it with our own resources, and we can do that.”
The fourth panelist was Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at CAP. He said, “We are fundamentally talking about rebuilding the very foundation of our economy on a low-carbon energy platform. And with all the problems that we talked about—our dependence on oil…the need for a recovery package, and the…need for investment in the foundation of our economy, and of course the crippling problem of our global climate crisis—they’re all interrelated and very closely connected around the type of energy system that we have and type of system that we build.”
Hendricks argued that “it’s very important to jumpstart demand by spending and stimulus, but now we really have to fundamentally rethink the rules of the road.” He asserted that “when we combine solutions, we can come up with better solutions,” and “ultimately, [the solution] has to be green.” He argued that “this is a national problem that needs a national solution.” And so the “global climate crisis [emphasis added]” becomes a “national problem [emphasis added].”
“Nothing is more imaginary than the claim that CO2 is causing global warming and the proposal designed to lead us to safety is unnecessary and will create real problems,” environmental consultant Dr. Tim Ball wrote in an article that appeared in the Canada Free Press on April 6, 2009. “Imagine basing a major global policy on the output of a grossly simplistic computer model of a very complex system.”
“Worse, the model considers only one miniscule variable known to have no effect while it ignores the major variables.” Dr. Ball was a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg.
“It is non-existent because the world has cooled since 2000 as CO2 increased and temperatures correlate with changes in the sun,” Dr. Ball writes. “Many climate experts expect the cooling to continue at least until 2030.”
“Why?” Why indeed.
“The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is responsible for providing the hobgoblin of global warming,” Dr. Ball argues. “They claim CO2 is almost the sole cause of warming while effectively ignoring the sun.”
“Their claim that the sun is of little consequence is unbelievable and only a measure of their deception and lousy science.” As AIA has already reported, the U. N. uses nothing but hypotheticals in their beloved models, no actuals.
This could be a big mistake. “We have known for 80 years that even small changes in solar radiation have a strong effect on Earth’s temperature and climate,” Harvard climatologist Willie Soon has said.
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma
, gleefully keeps a running list of scientists who have become skeptical of global warming. That roster runs in the hundreds and is growing.
Meanwhile, a growing number of economists have become skeptical of “green jobs.”
Heather Latham is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.
