Posted on May 23, 2013 by John Hinderaker in Climate, Energy Policy

Is Europe Giving Up on “Green” Energy?

Leaders of the 27 European Union countries met yesterday to discuss energy issues. The meeting, as described by AFP, represents a turning point in European energy policy. Europe’s leaders are ready to join the shale oil and gas revolution to avoid being left behind economically:

EU leaders agreed Wednesday to face up to the challenge posed by the shale oil and gas revolution which has slashed US energy prices, undercutting Europe’s competitive edge.

“All leaders are aware that sustainable and affordable energy is key to keeping factories and jobs in Europe,” European President Herman Van Rompuy said.

“Industry finds it hard to compete with foreign firms who pay half the price for electricity, like in the United States,” Van Rompuy said at the close of an EU summit focused on energy and tax evasion. …

The EU’s 27 heads of state and government met amid fears the US-led shale boom will reshape the global economy and leave Europe far behind.

Stuck in the doldrums, the European economy has lost nearly all momentum, with growth hard to come by and rising energy costs a real concern.

“We need to secure good value energy supplies … (which) involves making most use of indigenous resources, such as shale,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron. “We need to ensure that the old rules do not hold us back … regulation must not get in the way” of developing such resources, he added.

This graphic circulated widely at the EU meeting, and apparently persuaded many in attendance that it is time to forget about “green” energy:

Factory production is moving from Europe to the United States, in part as a result of America’s vastly cheaper electricity. Watts Up With That? compiled some reactions to the EU meeting. Some samples:

The portion of Wednesday’s EU summit that will be devoted to energy policy could be boiled down to a single, eye-popping chart that has been making the rounds in Brussels over the last week. It tracks electricity prices – excluding taxes – for industry in the EU, US and Japan. From a common point in 2005, three lines diverge widely to reflect the fact that prices in Europe are now 37 per cent higher than those in the US, and almost 20 per cent higher than those in Japan. That chart captures a growing fear in Europe that rising energy prices now pose a threat to the industrial competitiveness of a region mired in recession. It has been driven home by a steady stream of announcements from European manufacturers about plans to build new production facilities in the US. –Joshua Chaffin, Financial Times, 22 May 2013

Europe’s plan to decarbonise its economy by 2050 could be turned on its head at a summit today if EU heads of state and government sign off on measures prioritising industrial competitiveness over climate change in draft conclusions seen by EurActiv. One high-profile German MEP Holger Krahmer (ALDE), hailed the end of “climate hysteria” in a jubilant press statement. –EurActiv, 22 May 2013

The naive faith of policy makers that Europe’s main competitors would follow this shift from cheap fossil fuels to expensive green energy has gone up in smoke. In reality, most nations are completely unimpressed by Europe’s approach. Europe, the Washington Post recently warned, “has become a green-energy basket case. Instead of a model for the world to emulate, Europe has become a model of what not to do.” EU leaders are beginning to wake up to the enormity of the green energy fiasco. They will meet in Brussels for an energy summit on May 22 to discuss how to respond to the crisis. –Benny Peiser, Financial Post, 14 May 2013

Soaring German energy costs in the wake of the country’s transition to renewable energy have seen more and more firms thinking abut relocating their operations. German industry lobby associations on Wednesday sent a warning shot towards the government in Berlin, saying that rising energy costs in the country would drive away more and more German companies. –Deutsche Welle, 22 May 2013

It’s tempting to say we told you so, but…ah, what the heck: we told you so.

Posted on by Paul Mirengoff in Immigration, Obama administration, Obamacare

Obama on the verge of becoming one of America’s most successful presidents ever

With so many scandals in the picture or looming, it’s easy to miss the fact that President Obama may soon become one of the most successful presidents in American history. I’m defining success as fulfilling Obama’s mission of substantially transforming America.

The Obama administration scandals matter because, to one degree or another, they involve scandalous conduct. But step back for moment. In 20 years, very few people will remember any of them.

By contrast, in 20 years — assuming that Obamacare sticks and Schumer-Rubio style immigration reform is enacted — Americans will constantly experience the impact of the Obama presidency.

Obamacare is an enormous deal. It directly affects about one-sixth of the U.S. economy. It directly affects not just our well-being, but also life and death. Arguably, it provides the most significant entitlement in American history, and certainly one of the top three. No entitlement enacted since 1964 comes close to matching it.

Enacting Schumer-Rubio style immigration reform would be just as impactful. It would radically transform America by ultimately leading to citizenship for (an estimated) 30 million or more Mexicans, nearly all of whom will be low-skilled individuals, and many of whom violated American law as their very first act in this country.

It is highly unlikely that these new citizens will assimilate successfully. Thus, America will be a far less unified country than it is today.

It is overwhelmingly likely that the vast majority of the new citizens will vote consistently for Democrats. It is virtually certain that they will not vote for conservative Republicans, as that designation is currently understood. Thus, America will not be anything close to a “center-right” country. If we are a “center” country, it will only because the center moved significantly to the left.

The economic impact of Schumer-Rubio is subject to legitimate debate, so I’m not going to include it in my analysis. But quite apart from immigration policy, the U.S. almost surely will either have an enormous debt problem or will have taxed the relatively well-to-do to the breaking point.

Either state of affairs will reflect another Obama administration “success” — its ability to fend off Republican efforts to reform entitlements and to bring about substantial cuts in government.

And, with so many new underclass voters, it will be nearly impossible to reverse the rot.

Name a U.S. president since Lincoln who has had more of an impact on America than that which I have just described. You could make a case for Reagan, but FDR is the only one I would agree on.

Posted on by Paul Mirengoff in IRS, Obama Administration Scandals

White House counsel met with top treasury lawyer three times last year after learning of IRS audit

The Daily Caller reports that White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler had three unprecedented one-on-one meetings last year with the Treasury Department’s chief lawyer, Chistopher Meade. The meetings were in September and December of 2012. Meade had known about the inspector general’s investigation of the IRS’s targeting of conservative nonprofits since at least June 2012.

According to the Daily Caller, Ruemmler had never previous met with Meade one-on-one.

Meade and Ruemmler also were involved in a larger meeting on July 2, 2012 and another one on July 17, says the Daily Caller. These meetings occurred soon after Meade became acting general counsel of the Treasury Department in June. At that time, if not before, Meade found out about the IRS audit. Meade had been at Treasury since March 2010.

Ruemmler says she didn’t learn about the audit until last month. But the timing of her meetings with Meade casts suspicion on that claim. Ordinarily, one would expect that the blockbuster IRS audit would a topic, if not Topic A, in any discussion between the top Treasury Department lawyer and the top White House lawyer.

As an aside, and for what it’s worth, let’s look more closely at these two lawyers. Ruemmler has an excellent reputation in Washington. You can get a sense of it from this Washington Post story, which includes praise not just from liberal lawyers but from John Dowd, a Republican and a partner at my former law firm.

The Washington Post isn’t above shamelessly puffing favored Washington insiders. But a friend who is a leading conservative lawyer has spoken well to me of Ruemmler.

Nonetheless, Ruemmler has some questions to answer.

Meade is a former Ivy League radical. Not there’s anything horribly wrong with that — John and I plead guilty to the same charge.

But Meade wasn’t protesting the bloody Vietnam War or racial segregation. According to the Daily Caller, Meade was arrested in February 1990 for disorderly conduct after disrupting Vice President Dan Quayle’s speech to Congressional Republicans. Meade’s beef with Quayle? The U.S. military action in Panama!

Meade was something of a Whiz Kid at Princeton. “Give me any issue,” he boasted to the school newspaper, “and I’ll tell you why we’re protesting the Bush administration’s policy on it.”

One can imagine how he feels about the Tea Party.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Obama Administration Scandals

They’re Right: Obama Is No Tricky Dick

There’s an old adage in the public relations trade that if you’re on the defensive, you’re losing the PR battle.  And so it is rather delicious to watch Obama’s defenders on the left furiously spinning that no, no—no way is any of this like Nixon!  Scott already took down Steve Chapman’s “false equivalence” column; the Washington Post editorial board—and who is more authoritative on Watergate than them??—thinks the comparison risible.  But the sober Carl Cannon finds the demurrals unconvincing and thinks the comparison fits, while Al Hunt, my museum-grade exhibit for the mediocrity of modern journalism, says Obama is “no better than Nixon” and that John Mitchell must be smirking somewhere about Eric Holder.

You can spell all this shorter: Fail!

But Bill Kristol ironically joins in the Obama-Nixon deniers by noting that indeed Obama isn’t Nixon because. . . Nixon was a far superior person and president:

I protest. Will no one stand up for Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon was a combat veteran, a staunch and brave anti-Communist, a man who took on the liberal establishment and at times his own party’s as well, a leader who often thought for himself and had the courage of his convictions, a president who assembled a first-rate Cabinet and one who—while flawed both in character and in policy judgment—usually tried to confront the real problems and deal with challenges of his times. Richard Nixon led neither the country nor his own administration from behind.

Hear, hear!  Of course, as my old mentor M. Stanton Evans liked to say, a true conservative is someone who didn’t support Nixon until after Watergate.  Or, as he claimed at the time, he called the White House in 1973 to say, “Gosh, if I’d known you guys were doing all of this neat stuff I wouldn’t have been so hard on you.”  Stan was among the conservatives who broke publicly with Nixon in 1971, saying at the time, “There’s only two things I don’t like about the Nixon administration—its domestic policy, and its foreign policy.”

But this raises a point: Prior to these scandals, unlike conservatives under Nixon, hardly anyone on the left raised his voice in opposition to things like drone warfare and Gitmo that had them marching in the streets under Bush.  Because power is more important than principle.  If Obama’s support from the left really does begin to break seriously, it will be because he threatens to take down the left’s hold on political power.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Energy Policy, Environment

Environmentalists for Nuclear Power

I’ve had occasion to write before about my enviro-dissident pals Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland (here, here, here, and here, and also in National Review), describing them on one occasion as “my existentially-challenged progressive pals.”  Well, now they’ve really done it: a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal on why environmentalists should support nuclear power.

Along the way, they really deliver some well-deserved smack on Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Bill McKibben:

The same environmental leaders point to Germany’s solar program as a model for effective action on global warming. Mr. McKibben describes Germany as “the only major country that’s really pursued renewable power at an appropriate pace” and points out that its state of Bavaria boasts more solar panels than the entire U.S. Germany’s solar panels were “enough to provide close to 50 percent of the nation’s power,” Mr. Kennedy wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times.

All of this has led many to conclude that electricity from Germany’s solar power is far cheaper than Finland’s new nuclear power will be. The opposite is the case.

The cost of building and operating the Finnish nuclear plant over the next 20 years will be $15 billion. Over that time period, the plant will generate 225 terawatt-hours (twh) of electricity at a cost of 7 cents per kilowatt hour.

Since 2000, Germany has heavily subsidized electricity production from solar panels—offering long-term contracts to producers to purchase electricity at prices substantially above wholesale rates. The resulting solar installations are expected to generate 400 twh electricity over the 20 years that the panels will receive the subsidy, at a total cost to German ratepayers of $130 billion, or 32 cents per kwh.

In short, solar electricity in Germany will cost almost five times more for every kilowatt hour of electricity it provides than Finland’s new nuclear plant.

This is all prelude to the release next month of a documentary movie entitled Pandora’s Promise, in which a number of leading environmentalists will tell how and why they have changed their mind on nuclear power.  The film played well at the Sundance Film Festival recently (I guess Robert Redford was asleep at his solar-powered switch when the application came in that day).  Here’s the trailer:

And is you have another five minutes, here’s the director Robert Stone explaining some background to the film.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Islam, Minnesota, Terrorism

Judge Davis and the Muslim-American muddle

Minnesota is home to the largest Somali community in the United States, numbering at least 25,000. If it takes a village, we have a couple.

Yet we know amazingly little about the Somali community, probably because we are afraid to ask the relevant questions. We know they are mostly Muslim — we can see the hijabs, we are familiar with the many local controversies to which their faith has given rise over the past 10 years — but are they loyal residents or citizens of the United States? In the conflict between the United States and the Islamist forces with which we are contending, whose side are they on?

The terror trial that concluded with a raft of guilty verdicts in October 2011 raised these questions and others. The two convicted defendants are women who were convicted of charges including conspiracy to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization, of providing support, and of lying to the FBI. The “terrorist organization” is al Shabab, an affiliate of al Qaeda. The women were naturalized American citizens pursuing the jihad in Rochester, Minnesota.

The ringleader was not exactly remorseful after the jury returned its guilty verdicts. According to the AP, she stood before the judge and stated through an interpreter: “I am very happy.” She added that she knew she was going to heaven. As I noted at the time, she may be going to heaven, but she’ll be stopping off in prison first. As for the rest of us, she advised: “You will go to hell.” Yes, ma’am, the feeling is mutual.

The investigation that resulted in the charges involved here has consumed the local FBI office for years. The investigation has previously resulted in a string of guilty pleas involving local Somali men supporting al Shabab. A subsequent case against Mahamud Said Omar in guilty verdicts in Minneapolis this past October. Investigators believe at least 21 Somali men have left Minnesota to join al Shabab. We’re a little concerned they might choose to return to Minnesota to continue the jihad.

What about the rest of the local Somali community? Members of the local Somali community materialized at the federal courthouse in Minneapolis to support the women at trial, but not because they didn’t commit the crimes charged. The members of the local Somali community appearing at the courthouse never bothered to cite any evidence of innocence. The question was beside the point. No voice expressly spoke up on behalf of law-abidingness or loyalty to the United States, and no journalist has to my knowledge explored the issue, although Peter Skerry provided some valuable background (and no comfort) in “The Muslim-American muddle.”

It’s easy to miss, but the Minnesota cases have been in the news this month as some of the Somali defendants returned to court for sentencing. The man convicted last fall appeared for sentencing last week, as did the two women.

The common thread in these cases is the presiding judge, United States District Judge Michael Davis, a man for whom I have great respect. I tried a small case before him when he was a state district court judge and John and I litigated a serious free speech case against the University of Minnesota before him in federal court. He is a fair man and a fine judge.

Last week in sentencing a Somali man who had pleaded guilty and cooperated with the government in the case of the man convicted at trial last fall, Judge Davis said: “I don’t know you. The government doesn’t know you. Your family doesn’t know you.” He obviously remains troubled by the evidence in the case.

In separate hearings for the two women last week, Judge Davis sentenced the ringleader to 20 years and her colleague to 10 years. Before sentencing the women, Judge Davis asked them if they supported jihad, suicide bombings and Sharia law. “Does she understand there are some Muslim women who wear dresses or short skirts?” Davis asked the interpreter for one of the women. As in the case involving the Somali man, Judge Davis must have been troubled by the evidence at trial. Judge Davis said the questions were aimed at determining the likelihood that the women would continue to support terrorist causes when they are released from prison.

So there is of course a sequel. CAIR promptly announced that it plans to file a complaint against Judge Davis for questioning the women on their religious beliefs and “equating mainstream Islamic principles with terrorism,” as the CAIR news release puts it. As for the relationship between “mainstream Islamic principles” and terrorism, at any rate, we’re not supposed to see it, say it, think it or act on it, lest we be stigmatized as “Islamophobic.”

CAIR itself has been aptly described by Daniel Pipes as Islamists fooling the establishment. It’s an establishment of which Judge Davis appears no longer to be a member in good standing.

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Paul Mirengoff in IRS, Obama Administration Scandals

Did Lois Lerner waive her Fifth Amendment protection?

William Taylor III, the lawyer Lois Lerner selected to represent her before the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee, is part of a firm that’s about as tight with the Obama administration as it could be. According to Washingtonian Magazine, the firm, a boutique litigation shop called Zuckerman Spaeder, has sent a higher percentage of partners into the Obama administration than any other law firm.

But did Lerner’s lawyer do her a disservice today by having her make an opening statement in which she denied all wrongdoing? Rep. Trey Gowdy certainly thought so. He argued that, by denying any wrongdoing, Lerner waived her right to assert the Fifth Amendment. The theory is that a witness cannot affirmatively assert her innocence and then dodge examination about that assertion through a privilege claim.

Committee chairman Issa says he’s looking into the question of whether Lerner’s assertion of her innocence, coupled with her authentication of certain documents, constitutes a waiver. If Issa and committee counsel conclude that it does, he presumably will recall Lerner as a witness.

But Lerner’s denial of guilt was extremely general. It involved no statements about specific facts. In that sense, it seemed more analogous to a plea of “not guilty” (though there are no pleas at a congressional committee hearing) than to substantive testimony.

Does this mean that she didn’t waive the Fifth Amendment after all? To me, it seems like a close question.

That’s also the conclusion reached by Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy. Kerr contacted a list of criminal procedure professors that, he says, includes some serious Fifth Amendment experts. The result?

Opinions were somewhat mixed, but I think it’s fair to say that the bulk of responders thought that Lerner had not actually testified because she gave no statements about the facts of what happened. If that view is right, Lerner successfully invoked her Fifth Amendment rights and cannot be called again. But this was not a unanimous view, it was not based on the full transcript, and there are no cases that seem to be directly on point.

Since the question is unsettled and probably close, it seems to me that Lerner was not well-served today by her counsel, however well-connected to the Obama administration it may be.