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Tuesday’s hearing by the Texas Senate Business and Commerce Committee helped shine some light on the challenges of Texas’ green energy efforts. While we heard great things about the state’s energy efficiency program, we didn’t hear how much the program costs consumers–so i helped out with some testimony. Since 2002, Texas consumers have paid $591.1 million to support the state’s energy efficiency program, and the program’s estimated cost for 2010 is $114.8 million. A recent increase to the program by the Public Utility Commission of Texas will probably double these costs. And legislative proposals could increase the annual cost to over $500 million. All of this would be okay, of course, if the state’s energy efficiency program saved consumers money through reduced consumption of electricity. However, there is simply no way to properly determine the efficiency of the state’s energy efficiency program. But an educated guess is that it costs more than it saves. A sampling of recent remarks from John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism: “What I want to do today is to talk about the new thinking and the new approach that President Obama brings to the task of safeguarding the American people from violent extremism and terrorism.” “The president understands that military power, intelligence operations and law enforcement alone will never solve the second long-term challenge we face – the threat of violent extremism generally, including the political, economic and social factors that help put so many individuals on the path to violence. … Extremist violence and terrorist attacks are therefore, often the final, murderous manifestations of a long process rooted in helplessness, humiliation and hatred. … This is why the president’s approach includes a critical fourth element – the recognition that addressing these upstream factors is ultimately not a military operation, but a political, economic and social campaign to meet the basic needs and legitimate grievances of ordinary people.” “As many have noted, the president does not describe this as a “war on terrorism.” That is because terrorism is but a tactic – a means to an end – which, in al-Qaida’s case, is global domination by an Islamic caliphate. … Likewise, the president does not describe this as a “global war.” … Nor does President Obama see this challenge as a fight against jihadists. Describing terrorists in this way, using the legitimate term “jihad,” which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve.” “President Obama has made it clear that the United States will not be defined simply by what we are against, but by what we are for … Rather than looking at allies and other nations through the narrow prism of terrorism, whether they are with us or against us, the administration is now engaging other countries and people across a broader range of areas.” “At the same time, terrorism is recognized as one of the many transnational challenges the world will face in the 21st century. We saw this in [the president’s] speech in Cairo, where he spoke of a broader engagement with the world’s Muslims, including the issues important to them – education, public health, economic development, responsive governance and women’s rights. Indeed, it was telling that the president was actually criticized in certain quarters in this country for not using words like terror, terrorist and terrorism in that speech. This goes to the heart of this new approach. Why should a great and powerful nation like the United States allow its relationship with more than a billion Muslims around the world be defined by the narrow hatred and nihilistic actions of an exceptionally small minority of Muslims?” The fallout from Climategate continues to shake the foundations of the theory that global warming is manmade. My employer, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, recently held a debate on the issue at our 8th Annual Policy Orientation for the Texas Legislature. I think the results show even more clearly that the global warming machine may soon collapse on itself because of a lack of internal support. Watch live streaming video from texaspublicpolicyfoundation at livestream.com
Why in the world would National Review say that, “Republicans ought to promote new energy technologies in order to reduce the risks of global warming?” I can’t think of a good reason. Yet that is exactly what it does in an article by Ramesh Ponnuru, “Contractual Obligations,” that discusses the need for a new “Contract for America.” Is it because, as Mr. Ponnuru points out, people worry about global warming? Well, people worry about not being able to pay their mortgages, but that doesn’t mean we should support massive government bailouts. Except that NR supported the Bush bailout plan as well. According to the Cato Institute, federal subsidy programs topped the 2,000 mark for the first time last week. Almost half of those have been created in the last 20 years: the number of federal subsidy programs soared 21 percent during the 1990s and 40 percent during the 2000s. As Chris Edwards, Cato’s director of tax policy, rather depressingly puts it, “There is a federal subsidy program for every year that has passed since Emperor Augustus held sway in Rome. We’ve gone from bread and circuses to food stamps, the National Endowment for the Arts, and 1,999 other hand-out programs from the imperial city on the Potomac.” Of course, Washington isn’t alone in the subsidy game. Texas does pretty well too. In addition to the standard economic development programs, Texas is tops in the nation when it comes to renewable energy subsidies. By 2020, Texas consumers could be paying as much $1.3 billion a year to support wind energy—that is in addition to the $300 million or so the Feds are contributing to Texas wind producers. The solar folks are also lining up—the cost of proposed solar subsidies last session ran as high as $220 million. And they’ll all be back in 2011. It would be nice in this one instance if we could topple Texas from its number one ranking. I just released some research, “Prices, Reliability, and Consumer Choice in the Texas Electricity Market,” examining how consumers have fared when it comes to the restructuring of the Texas electricity market to introduce competition. The results? Good. Click on the link to read the whole report. When I was born, my grandparents gave me the wonderful gift of a lifetime subscription to National Geographic magazine. In addition to supplying a curious young boy with many years of amazement over the wonders of creation, at 50 years and counting it must have been a great value—especially when one factors in the rampant inflation during that time. As I grew older, I stopped reading National Geographic for about 15 to 20 years from somewhere in the mid-70s to the 90s. I still valued it at some level because I kept on changing my address as I moved. But spent very little time reading each issue, if at all. When I did finally start reading it again, I noticed it had changed. It was no longer a magazine about nature. It was a magazine with an agenda of proving to the world that God does not exist. Of course, it doesn’t say that out loud. Instead, it uses evolution as its proxy in its propaganda efforts by attempting to prove that every act of creation that Christianity might attribute to God was instead brought about by happenstance. See the 2004 article, “Was Darwin Wrong?” In case you are wondering, their answer is, “No. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming.” I noticed this again in an article, Worlds Apart, in the most recent issue. I just finished reading about the second city, Athens, in Doug Wilson’s Five Cities That Ruled the World. I ran across a great quote this morning to help us remember some of the things that really matter for which we can be grateful at this time of Thanksgiving: “The Little House Books are stories of long ago. Today our way of living and our schools are much different; so many things have made living and learning easier. But the real things haven’t changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures and to be cheerful and have courage when things go wrong. Great improvements in living have been made because every American has always been free to pursue his happiness, and so long as Americans are free they will continue to make our country ever more wonderful.” – Laura Ingalls Wilder Of course, the greatest freedom for which we should be grateful is the freedom from sin we have in Christ. Happy Thanksgiving I ran across a 1989 product comparison of several top-of-the-line computers. Including one from Dell, which featured an 80286 (20 MHz) processor and a 40 MB hard drive, all for the bargain price of $4,099! I remember consistently paying $3,000 for a new computer from Tandy (my first one, with an 8086 processor purchased in 1986) and then Gateway until about 1995-6, when the price started dropping. My first Tandy computer did not have a hard drive, and everything ran off of two floppies. Then about a year later, I was able to buy a 15 MB hard card and at that point was able to start loading some programs and saving files on the computer hard drive, instead of running/saving everything off of a floppy. I skipped the 80286 processor, and bought my next computer with an 80386 processor in 1990, again for about $3,000, then repeated the process again around 1993 at the same price. But finally prices started coming down at the next purchase. I thought it was great! And it was. The problem was … |
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