Check this guy out, intelligent, articulate, combat veteran and black. Unlike Obama, Allen West knows his history. Wikipedia summarizes his career to date. His website offers you an opportunity to support him. But please listen to him first:

Tuesday evening’s discussion on renewable energy lead by Gene Humphrey was excellent. He distinguished “alternative energy” (Coal was an alternative to wood following the deforestation of the British Isles!) from “renewable energy” (Sustainable energy that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising resources for future generations.) It is good to note at the start that traditional transitional sources, oil, coal, gas and nuclear account for about 90% of our current energy. So all the remaining sources must have dramatic growth to replace or reduce dependence on those sources. Gene treated the naturally replenished resources, sunlight, wind, rain, tides and geothermal energy and then compared some of the traditional sources and their alternatives.

The amount of solar energy reaching the earth’s surface in one year is more that all the earth’s non-recoverable energy resources combined. It is both active (photovoltaic) and passive (thermal water heating) yet provides only 4/100ths of 1% of current world usage. Land use is the issue since a 550MW PV plant occupies 9.5 square miles, and a more efficient 354 MW Thermal plant takes 2.5 square miles. To replace current US electrical production from coal would take 1,600 to 4,000 square miles. So which states in the southwest will offer 4,000 square miles of land to supply the US appetite and what productive land uses will be impacted.

Distributed solar generation, the rooftop panels have dropped in price from $10.50 to $7.60 per installed watt.  (As a reference and as you would expect on grid base load power from new nuclear is $1.70-$1.90 per watt and from new coal $1.50-$2.50 per watt.) Yet government subsidy principally the investment tax credit has increased for commercial PV but is capped for residential PV. Likewise, powers to grid sales are limited for residential PV. Notwithstanding the perverse limitations individual rooftop solar PV investments in the southwest can generate a seven-year payback in some cases. The cost of the subsidy is not accounted for nor is the missed opportunity cost of the power to grid sales limitation.

Wind power supplies about 3/10 of 1% of our energy and is growing at the rate of 30% per year with a lot of the growth is due to tax incentives and efficient investment vehicles. There is dramatic growth potential estimated to be 5 times the current production. Power costs are 2-4 cents per KWH for large-scale units. As with solar, land use and the NIMBY factor come into play, as a 3 MW generator requires a quarter acre of land. In high wind areas, farmers and ranchers are forming associations to efficiently lease or license land to production companies expediting wind power growth. We briefly discussed the vertical generators as being more aesthetically acceptable for smaller applications. 

Hydro generates about 3% of global energy. It is long lived and low maintenance generating power at 2-4 cents per KWH day in day out. As we have recently seen in the Pacific Northwest, drought periods can affect the amount of electricity generated. Closely related is an insignificant amount of base power from wave and tidal action was briefly discussed. Geothermal, which accounts for 2/10 of 1% of our energy is primarily available at the edge of tectonic plates where high temperature resources are available. This has low power factors because of the relatively low temperatures.

Traditional sources were also compared: Nuclear, 6% of energy, growing rapidly is a major underused resource in the US but also subject to the “peak” limitations that Don discussed last month. There are thirty plants or expansions currently being planned. Government and public opposition make dramatic growth unlikely. Reprocessing is something that can be undertaken in the US on a greater scale. Yucca Mountain is something we in Nevada should exploit, not shun!

Tar sands and biofuels were also covered. Alberta’s tar sands are proven at 1.75 trillion bbls, 173 of which are economic today at $28/bbl cost. Biofuels, 2/10 of 1% of energy, have only a 25% energy yield. Their subsidy and trade barriers by government fiat are so uneconomic as to be unconscionable. We raise food prices for ourselves and for poor Mexicans and protect the likes of ADM and Cargill through the agency of the political shills in Congress and the Administration.

One intriguing aspect of our discussion was Gene suggestion of renewable combinations, i.e. using solar, wind or tidal to generate daytime power that pumps water to a reservoir, affecting “storage” for subsequent release and generation of hydroelectric power when needed. Or how about photochemical, using photovoltaic solar to drive electrolysis producing hydrogen! Or, in an area where Gene had patents, coal to gas, underground combustion in the right places!

Gene notes summarize with a current-future cost projection estimate of the various resources for comparison:

Gene thanks for a great discussion, everyone got involved.

Hubris is excessive pride or self-confidence, arrogance. It came from the ancient Greeks who prized and praised arête, meaning excellence, excellence in competition, in the arts, in statesmanship, in trade and indeed in battle. But with arête came the temptation to excessive pride, arrogance, outrage and “presumption toward the gods.” Hubris was that unforgiveable sin that brought condemnation in Athens. Old expressions like, “too big for his own pants,” and newer ones like, “a legend in his own mind,” come to mind as the beginning of hubris.

But perfect, spot-on examples are larger than life in Washington, DC where our ruling liberals reign supreme:

·      Last week we had Obama firing the CEO of General Motors, this after telling GM what kind of cars to build and demanding a tougher restructure. Note he did not fire the head of the UAW. Note also that, instead of putting the company in bankruptcy where those with money at risk who are legally entitled to control the salvageable remnants of that albatross could install competent management, he poured billions of taxpayer money into the carcass.

·      Today following Obama’s heady example we have the nations chief tax collector, who by the way intentionally didn’t pay his own taxes, saying that he was going to fire bank executives and directors at banks that require “exceptional” government assistance. Of course the government will determine what banks are forced to take “exceptional” assistance. It is important to remember that major banks are now restricted from giving back the “assistance” they were forced to take. Tiny Tim Geithner who can’t even staff his own Treasury department is going to take on the task of installing competent management at major banks!

·      Then we have the show last week of the government leaning on secured Chrysler lenders to pressure them to agree to a equity for debt swap and give up the security they would be entitled to in bankruptcy. All this to get a deal done for the benefit of a foreign auto manufacturer, Fiat S.A. Apparently, there is no thought of a conflict of interest here much less of the health of the Chrysler secured lenders that they say they’re trying to protect.

·      Not to be outdone by the executive branch the Democratic Congress has pressured the Financial Standards Accounting Board (FASB) to loosen the profession’s mark to market rules. If the Chris Dodds and Barney Franks of that world think they are competent enough to establish accounting rules, investors had better beware.  Anyway we will magically solve many of the banks bad asset problems by changing the rules, changing the definition of what is bad. In truth though, the bad asset that is no longer a bad asset hasn’t changed one iota! Japan tried something akin to this and suffered ten years of stagnation.

It gets boring to retell the earlier aspects of Obama’s rush to Big Brotherhood, the non-stimulus plan, the deficit tripling budget, the 8000 earmarks, the tax increases for the benefit of the non taxpayers, the cap and trade stealth tax. Suffice it to say that the ruling liberals know with metaphysical certitude what is best for each and every one of us and each and every one of our grandchildren not yet born! This is hubris at its best.

Tom Motherway, tom@renohayek.com

A friend the other day suggested a new bumper sticker, “It Took a Carter to Get a Reagan.” That made me wonder if things could possibly get that bad under BHO, will the Atlas Shrugged looters and moochers drive the producers out?

Stephen Moore, a member of the WSJ editorial board penned an excellent feature in the March issue of American Spectator which ventures some historical comparisons. I remember car pooling in California and long gas lines and stagflation. This wasn’t the depression my father lived through but it got my attention and changed my economic and political thinking for good.

Moore takes our recent economic history forward from the Kennedy era in concise political detail. It is a must read. A small excerpt follows. Hopefully the current ruling classes will learn from history, though I doubt it.

ANOTHER HUGE CARTER BLUNDER was his energy policy, even though it was his top domestic policy concern. Carter had declared that ending the energy crisis was for the nation “the moral equivalent of war.” This was an era of gasoline lines—a time when motorists would start lining up at 6 a.m. on frigid winter mornings to be first in line to fill up the tank.

Throughout the 1970s, under Nixon, Ford, and Carter, OPEC severely restricted production of oil, contributing to a big spike in the price of heating oil and gasoline. The fall in the value of the dollar—and the loss of its purchasing power—played a key and underappreciated role here as well. By the late 1970s the price of a barrel of oil had more than tripled from $10 to $32 a barrel.

Jimmy Carter was pessimistic about America’s ability to pull out of the oil price spike. Thoroughly a Malthusian, he gloomily predicted in 1977 that “we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

Political panic during his administration spawned a potpourri of crackpot responses, including gas rationing; wellhead price controls; a “gas guzzler tax” on cars; an odd-even license plate system for rotating the days of the week that Americans could fill-’er-up; a voluntary policy urging stores and public buildings to turn the thermostat to a chilly 65 degrees in winter and a sweaty 80 in summer; a windfall profits tax imposed on producers of domestic oil, so that drillers could not “profit” from the OPEC price spikes; and a $2 billion “investment” in something called the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, an alternative renewable energy boondoggle that had produced not a kilowatt of electricity by the time it was closed down in 1982.

The one policy change that was desperately needed was decontrol of oil and natural gas prices— which Ronald Reagan was calling for on the 1980 presidential campaign trail. But Carter fought the idea and denounced proposed natural gas price decontrols as “immoral and obscene.”

The effect of the Carter price control and windfall profits tax policies was that U.S. oil production fell from 11 to 9 million barrels a day from 1971 to 1980 (incredibly even as the retail price at the pump for gasoline more than tripled). Price controls made it unprofitable for domestic producers to increase output through more expensive processes, such as drilling deeper wells, fracturing, steam or water injection, offshore drilling, and so on. The other perverse effect of the price controls and profits taxes was that U.S. imports of foreign oil rose from 4 to 8.5 million barrels of oil a day from 1970 to 1977, as demand for oil rose and domestic production fell. In the final analysis, Carter’s policies led to less conservation, less domestic production, more dependence on foreign oil, and higher long-term prices.

IT WASN’T JUST HIGH ENERGY PRICES that flummoxed Jimmy Carter—the rise in all prices became an irresistible force of nature during his presidency. Carter was a convert to the Phillips Curve belief that high inflation had to be tolerated to put people to work. So even with the money supply rising by 11 percent a year in 1977, he and his cadre of economists urged the Federal Reserve Bank to lower interest rates and quicken the pace of the printing presses to push more dollars into the economy. One of his chief economic advisers, Lawrence Klein, said, “We need faster monetary growth,” even as inflation raged and monetarist economists argued just the opposite. In 1977 inflation was at an intolerable 7 percent, in 1978 it climbed to 9 percent, in 1979 it hit 12 percent, and in 1980 it shot up further to 14 percent. In 1980 the prime mortgage interest rate hit an astronomical high of 20.5 percent. The home building industry virtually shut down with interest rates that high. America was starting to resemble a Third World country in terms of monetary policy.

Carter had no solution. In 1978 he called the inflation bulge a “temporary aberration.” Then in later years when the “temporary” nature of inflation suggested that the president suffered from a detachment from reality, Carter said that inflation wasn’t his fault, but more of a moral affliction affecting American society because we had lost our capacity to “sacrifice for the common good.” He declared in one speech that it was “a myth that the government can stop inflation.” Americans scratched their heads and wondered if the Fed and Congress and the president couldn’t stop inflation, then who could?

via The American Spectator : That ’70s Horror Show.

Tom Motherway

“My Real Time With Bill Maher” is a brilliant call to arms by Andrew Breitbart. The media and educational establishments are controlled the leftists and they are ugly and intolerant bunch. These two characteristics have not been well illustrated to the general public. In fact, conservatives have often been painted with them. 

So to overcome the ignorance foisted by TV comedians, tenured professors and mainstream media “journalists” we must first show up, we must advance positive solutions showing the advantage of conservative values, and we must politely and respectfully engage or attempt to engage in intelligent discussion. If we get hammered, booed, shouted down, etc., all the better, for we will have won the first battle. 

Subsequent battles will be easier and will tend to be more focused on issues. It is there that the conservative appeal lies.

I’m reminded of the last scene of “Gran Torino” in which Clint Eastwood reaches for his cigarette lighter for the last time . As the audience wiped tears away, there was a collective sense that Clint had won. We can also win, if we engage.

Pretty much everyone I respect in media and politics recommended I not go on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher.” But on Friday night, I defied that wisdom and had the time of my life.

I sparred with Mr. Maher, Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson and a MoveOn.org audience from hell that booed my sentences before they were completed. Unfortunately, my wife and in-laws, who watched from the green room, were not as enamored with the experience as I was.

Since the salad days of ABC’s “Politically Incorrect,” which minted countless right-wing pundits and best-selling authors, conservatives have rightly assessed the HBO version of the Maher show as R-rated and shockingly hostile to their worldview. So most opt out.

I totally see why. But I think that’s exactly the wrong strategy.

The problem with the withdrawal approach is that it cedes the popular culture debate to the other side. We figure talk radio, a certain cable news network and some independent Internet venues will allow for us to get our ideas out to the masses. Well, those few outlets are greatly outnumbered. They are also isolated and targeted for destruction by the activist left. The sitting president (using taxpayer money) is now leading the charge.

via RealClearPolitics – Articles – My Real Time With Bill Maher.

Tom Motherway