Green Weenie Award
May 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
One of my favorite scenes from Dirty Harry (the first film to “talk back to liberalism,” as the late, great Richard Grenier put it) is when Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Callahan meets his new and unwanted partner, Chico Gonzales: Callahan: “You from around here?” Gonzales: “Yeah, but I went to school at San Jose State.” Callahan: “Just what I need, a college boy. . . Get your degree?” Gonzales: “Sociology.” Callahan:
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April 24, 2013 — Steven Hayward
When even the New York Times calls you “the Solyndra of the electric car industry,” you know you’ve had it. Fisker, another Obamanation that cost taxpayers over $500 million in subsidies and props, was losing more than $500,000 per vehicle. (But I’m sure they made up for it in volume.) I especially like this droll bit of narrative in the Times’ story: “Fisker, with its technical problems, management turmoil and
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April 14, 2013 — Steven Hayward
We’re never short of Green Weenie Award nominees—in fact we can hardly keep up—but this week’s is so off the chart that we couldn’t have made it up in our worst mescaline-induced homage to Hunter S. Thompson. From The Guardian newspaper in Britain (hat tip to Anthony Watts and his WattsUpWithThat site) comes the news of the ultimate mashup: environmentalism and pornography. So . . . oh what the hell,
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April 10, 2013 — Steven Hayward
These are grim times for the climate campaign, as we’ve noted here repeatedly. Cap and trade failed in the Senate, and isn’t ever coming back. The White House pre-emptively ruled out a carbon tax. The EPA, according to several reports, is going to miss a deadline this Friday on the next step in its coal-killing regulatory agenda, apparently because it has noticed that its proposed rules are unlikely to survive
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March 16, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I’ve long argued that Greenpeace deserves to be considered the John Birch Society of the environmental movement—an extremist organization that ought to be openly shunned by “mainstream” environmental organizations, just as the modern conservative movement decided to marginalize the John Birch Society starting back in the early 1960s. That’s if the “mainstream” environmental movement actually wants to be taken seriously by mainstream Americans. There is some doubt about this question.
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March 10, 2013 — Steven Hayward
What do you get when you mashup a boomerang with a hockey stick? Probably a game that even drunk Australians wouldn’t play.* Yet that is the latest new wrinkle in climate change this week. Science magazine has just published a new article that purports to be the latest “smoking gun” of human caused global warming. The article, “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the past 11,300 Years,” uses
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February 27, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Can it really be that in all these months we’ve never given the coveted Power Line Green Weenie Award to the railroad engineer who heads the IPCC, the egregious Rajendra Pachauri? As the official co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Al Gore, Pachauri deserves a weenie on general principle alone. While he may know railroad engineering, whose connection to climate science is unclear, he is certainly ignorant of Godwin’s
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February 20, 2013 — Steven Hayward
This week we’re having to break out an Oscar Meyer eight-pack of Green Weenies to give away. First, the Keystone (Pipeline) Kops have attracted the notice of New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, who writes the following this week in “How Not To Solve Climate Change”: In fact, this should be a no-brainer for the president, for all the reasons I stated earlier, and one more: the strategy of activists
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January 30, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I’ve argued for a long time that environmentalists are the cheap dates (or battered spouses) of the Democratic Party, but even Obama’s shout out to climate change in his inaugural address isn’t satisfying them. There was quite a negative reaction to Theta Skocpol’s critical report on why climate legislation failed in Obama’s first term because environmental groups hate being told they’re a bunch of losers. To the contrary, the Center
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January 23, 2013 — Steven Hayward
People often refer to the whole renewable energy sector as a “racket,” as it depends on subsidies and mandates to make money. Hence the essentially corrupt deals cut in Washington to keep the subsidies in place. Well guess what: it really is a racket. A police sting in Italy recently revealed heavy Mafia involvement in renewable energy projects. From yesterday’s Washington Post: PALERMO, Italy — Inside a midnight-blue BMW, a
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January 14, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The steady, relentless collapse of the climate campaign proceeds apace, notwithstanding the sugar high climate campaigners enjoyed after Hurricane Sandy and Obama’s re-election. Obama promises that a price on carbon is a main objective of his second term, but given that it is an Obama promise, climate campaigners should understand they’ve just been given the kiss of death. The media is slowly starting to give up on the whole game.
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January 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I mentioned here yesterday that Pennsylvanians are enjoying a surge of prosperity while New York Governor Andrew Cuomo kowtows to cheap-energy-hating environmentalists who are making their last stand again natural gas. Cuomo keeps hiding behind “safety reviews,” missing several deadlines for a decision and calling for additional investigation. Today the New York Times reports that Cuomo has been sitting on a state Health Department assessment that concluded months ago that
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January 3, 2013 — Steven Hayward
America’s tax system wasn’t the only thing that went over a cliff at midnight on December 31. The Kyoto Protocol on climate change—the treaty I’ve called the most feckless and unserious act of international diplomacy since the Kellogg-Briand Pact—expired on December 31. Despite all the best efforts of the worst people, there was no 11th hour rescue, no climate “grand bargain,” and not even a tax increase on the top
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December 25, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Sometimes an environmentalist will go above and beyond the guidelines and do something so egregious that a Green Weenie of the Week isn’t sufficient recognition. So we’ve reserved a special Green Weenie of the Year for Outstanding Achievement in Environmental Demagoguery. I was certain for a while Earth First’s “assassination hit list” of people deserving direct action, such as Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon, for the apparent sin of delivering
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December 20, 2012 — Steven Hayward
First there was Captain Planet. Then there was EcoKat from Kansas State University. Remember her? Well now there’s the Green Ninja from San Jose State University. You’ll be pleased to know that this project was supported by . . . taxpayers. Naturally. The project has received a $390,000 grant from NASA to support professional development for teachers, and $20,000 from PG&E to pilot an energy reduction contest for Santa Clara
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December 17, 2012 — Steven Hayward
While analysts will argue for a long time what effect Hurricane Sandy had on the outcome of the election (some people think it tipped the close race to Obama), a question not getting enough attention is whether Sandy was a hurricane at all when it made landfall. The answer, it turns out, may depend more on insurance regulation than science. The question is additionally important because hurricane warnings were never
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December 5, 2012 — Steven Hayward
There are a handful of indispensible writers on energy and resource issues, and if you had to narrow the list down to just the top two or three people, I’d have to name Vaclav Smil as my Numero Uno. Among Smil’s terrific books are Energy Myths and Realities and Energy at the Crossroads, but see also his Why America Is Not a New Rome. Perhaps his most useful insight is
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