Category Archives: Green Energy
Oklahoma House Passes Bill to Ban UN Agenda 21
by Alex Newman, The New American via Tenth Amendment Center Blog
Following Alabama’s lead, lawmakers in the Oklahoma House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to approve popular legislation protecting private-property rights and banning a controversial United Nations “sustainable development” scheme known as Agenda 21, which critics say represents a serious threat to American values and liberty. If approved by the Senate as expected, the law would also prohibit state and local governments from working with the UN or its affiliates to implement any sort of “international law” that violates the U.S. or Oklahoma constitutions.
The bill, H.B. 1412, was passed in the state House last week on a bipartisan vote, with a Republican-led coalition of 67 supporting the legislation against 17 Democrats who opposed the measure. It originally passed out of the States’ Rights Committee in late February and is now in the state Senate, where a broad coalition of activists — supporters of national sovereignty, private property, the Constitution, individual liberty, Tea Party groups, and more — is working to ensure its passage.
Of course, Oklahoma is just the latest state to take action against the highly controversial UN plan, which calls for a transformation of human civilization under the guise of promoting so-called “sustainability.” In May of last year, Alabama became the first state to officially ban UN Agenda 21 after a law to protect private property and due process rights was signed by Gov. Robert Bentley. The wildly popular bi-partisan legislation was approved unanimously in both houses of the state legislature.
Before that, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Tennessee adopted a resolution blasting the dubious UN agenda as a radical “socialist” plot at odds with individual liberty, private-property rights, and the U.S. Constitution. Lawmakers in Kansas followed suit. Numerous other state governments, under heavy pressure from activists across the political spectrum, are also working to ban the “sustainable development” scheme in their jurisdictions. City and county governments, meanwhile, are taking action to protect residents, too.
In Oklahoma, lawmakers said legislation was needed to defend citizens and their rights from the UN scheme as well. Despite having never been ratified by the U.S. Senate as required by the Constitution, supporters of the bill explained, officials at all levels — especially the federal executive branch, mostly using unconstitutional “grants” and decrees — have been quietly working to implement the controversial 1992 international agreement across America.
“House Bill 1412 is a short little bill, barely two pages long; it deals with a big topic though, protecting personal property rights,” noted Republican Rep. Sally Kern, who sponsored the legislation in the Oklahoma House.
Related articles
- Oklahoma Bill Would Nullify Agenda 21 (tenthamendmentcenter.com)
- Alabama & Oklahoma Ban NWO Agenda 21 Banking Scheme: States At War With Their Over Taken Federal Corporation! (politicalvelcraft.org)
- Oklahoma House Passes Obamacare Nullification Bill (godfatherpolitics.com)
10 Problems With the Green Agenda
Via Listverse
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions then the road to climategeddon must be paved with pages from the green agenda. For the past couple of decades, armchair environmentalists and image-conscious politicians have been pushing through planet-saving initiatives that are often anything but. Initiatives like:
10 • Carbon Offsetting
Let’s say you’re environmentally-conscious but need to fly. Enter carbon offsetting: for the price of a coffee you can pay some third world farmer to quit burning coal, or some company to plant enough trees to cancel out the emissions from your trip.
If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. The whole practice of carbon offsetting is so fundamentally flawed that eco-writer George Monbiot compared it to pushing food around your plate “to create the impression you have eaten it.” The numbers simply don’t add up: if we in the West decided to offset even fifty percent of our emissions targets, developing nations would have to magically start emitting negative amounts of carbon. Commercial offsetting is no better; investigations routinely find companies fudging their figures, or outright lying. With no industry standard, there’s nothing to measure improvements against; meaning companies can claim whatever they like.
9 • Organic Food
Organic foods are routinely billed as environmentally friendly and chemical free; despite being neither. All the nasty stuff we use in agriculture was developed to solve efficiency problems; take it away and you’re back to square one. A liter of organic milk, for example, can require up to eighty percent more land to produce than regular milk. This means deforestation, destruction of habitats and other things you don’t associate with organic. But wait, it gets worse: multiple studies have found high levels of pesticide in supposedly-organic food; while researchers have concluded eating it is no healthier and its production may lead to increased pollution. The chasm between what we expect and what we get from organic food has gotten so wide even die hard Greens have dropped it in favor of local and sustainable.
8 • Water Conservation
If you’re in possession of a Y chromosome, you’ve probably experienced the waterless urinals in McDonald’s. Insofar as you were thinking about such things, they maybe even seemed like a good idea; after all, saving that much water must be a good thing, right?
Well, not if you want to work without the constant stench of urine. Turns out stagnant pee doesn’t react well with copper piping; and by that we mean it chews right through. Chicago City Hall wound up decommissioning their waterless urinals after that exact situation led to waste flooding the toilets. But what about day-to-day conservation, like in your home? Yeah, maybe—if your neighbors are flushing nonstop. In Germany people have gotten so good at keeping water usage down their sewers are getting backed up, forcing the utility companies to blast insane amounts of water through just to keep them working. As a result, water rates are skyrocketing—while little to no benefit is provided to the environment.
7 • Insulation
According to one green group, a single town with below-average insulation can waste as much energy in a year as the BP oil spill. By my maths, that’s something like the equivalent of a bazillion oil spills happening annually. No wonder governments are subsidizing home insulation.
Which is great, so long as people buy the right type. See, skinning cats and insulating houses have one thing in common: there’s no one way to do it. Some methods, such as mineral wool or denim, are super-green—others, involving blown hydrofluorocarbons, are like punching Mother Nature in the face. It’s estimated this poisonous junk has a global warming potential nearly 1,500 times that of carbon dioxide, meaning it’ll take roughly ten lifetimes to settle your environmental debt. Even worse, as demand for insulation grows, so does production, leading to more pollution and so on and so on until Armageddon.
6 • Wind Turbines
As anyone who’s ever lived below an RnB-obsessed neighbor knows, hearing stuff you don’t want to hear can be irritating as hell. Same applies to wind turbines.
To date no study has found a correlation between turbines and physical illness, though there may be an interesting mental one. According to that link, while people living near community-owned turbines rarely report health problems, people who have had them forced on their village often do. Complaints often focus on the low-level humming noise and shadow flicker a sun-blocking side effect officially classed as an annoyance, but probably enough to send most of us into a blind murderous rage. Obviously they could just start building these turbines further away or go the Denmark route and give local people a stake in them, but that’s probably too much to ask.
Related articles
Has the Kyoto protocol done more harm than good?
by Fred Pearce via New Scientist
Fifteen years after its painful birth in Kyoto, Japan, the world’s first legally binding agreement to limit emissions of greenhouse gases ended this week.
For some it is a victorious conclusion. The 37 industrial nations that stuck with the protocol after the US pulled out in 2005 say they exceeded their promises, cutting their emissions for the period from 2008 to 2012 to an average of 16 per cent below 1990 levels, compared with the 4.7 per cent promised in the agreement.
But the protocol only ever applied to rich industrialised nations. Most of the cuts came from Eastern European countries when their economies collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall – reductions that would have happened anyway.
Emissions rise
In the same period, global emissions have risen by 50 per cent, thanks to the rapid industrialisation of nations such as China, not covered by the original deal.
Formally the protocol lives on. Climate talks in Doha in December created a second “compliance period” stretching to 2020, when diplomats promise a new deal involving all nations will come into force. But with Russia, Japan, New Zealand and Canada pulling out, this next period only covers nations which contribute 14 per cent of global emissions, mainly the European Union and Australia.
What’s more, phase 2 contains the same fundamental loophole as the first deal. Too many rich countries have met their targets by moving their carbon-intensive industries, such as steel and aluminium manufacturing, offshore to nations not covered by the protocol.
MORE . . .
Related articles
- Has the Kyoto protocol done more harm than good? (newscientist.com)
- Happy New Year – Kyoto Is Dead (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Kyoto climate change treaty sputters to a sorry end. (cbc.ca)
- U.N. Conference Agrees To Extend Kyoto Protocol (npr.org)
- A Crippled Kyoto (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
- Kyoto climate change treaty sputters to a sorry end (updatednews.ca)
Damning Emails Link White House to Another Green Flop
via townhall.com
Just-revealed emails confirm that the Obama administration, and the president himself, have misled Americans about the White House’s role in fast-tracking a $400 million “stimulus” loan guarantee to a politically-connected “green energy” firm. If you followed the Solyndra saga, this will come as no surprise to you — nor will the fact that Obama has been spreading misinformation about his White House’s culpability in the matter. Revealing Politics boils this scandal down into a digestible one minute clip, the crux of which is the smoking-gun email that directly contradicts Obama’s smirking denial that “politics” had anything to do with Abound Solar‘s taxpayer-funded windfall:
“These are decisions, by the way, that are made by the Department of Energy;
they have nothing to do with politics.”
In emails unearthed by Colorado-based reporter Todd Shepard, one DOE official overseeing the loan program warns another that they’d better get the ball rolling on the Abound Solar taxpayer cash infusion: “You better let him know the WH wants to move Abound forward.” The “him” appears to be a Treasury Department advisor connected to the process. The same initial DOE Senior Credit Advisor later refers to the White House’s meddling as the “transaction pressure under which we are all now operating.” See the raw emails here and here. Mary Katharine Ham puts this story into further context:
Abound Solar, which counts major Obama bundler Pat Stryker among its early backers, is now under criminal investigation for misleading investors. It went bankrupt in mid-2012, leaving employees out of work and taxpayers with the bill. The company had gone through $70 million of a federal loan guarantee worth $400 million. It was supposed to create 1,500 permanent jobs, according to the president’s 2010 announcement of the loan.
Say, were this company’s balance sheets packed with red flags prior to taxpayer cash being doled out? You bet. Replace “Solyndra” with “Abound,” and “George Kaiser” with “Pat Styker,” and it looks as though we have another Washington-engineered, utterly corrupt “green jobs” failure. It doesn’t take a great leap to suggest that this loan was all about politics. But at the very least, we know that Obama’s contention on Denver television last week that the deal had “nothing to do” with political considerations is patently, verifably false. Parting thought: Guess what’s one of the central elements of Obama’s cobbled-together, last-minute second term “agenda.” You guessed it — more taxpayer-funded “green energy” adventurism. Which deep-pocketed Democrat donors would stand to benefit next time?
Related articles
- LIES ABOUND Email contradicts Obama, shows White House supported loan to green company Abound Solar (conservativeread.com)
- ‘Nothing to do with politics’? Emails indicate White House role in failed Colo. green energy loan (twitchy.com)
- Dept. of Energy e-mails contradict Obama denials on another green energy failure (hotair.com)
- Obama Also Caught Lying About ‘Abound Solar’ in Last Week’s KUSA Interview with Kyle Clark (Video) (nicedeb.wordpress.com)
- Stunner… Leaked Emails Prove Obama Administration Drove Cash to Failed Green Company (Video) (thegatewaypundit.com)
- Obama DOE Scandal: Leaked DOE emails expose White House lies (atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)
- Bankrupt green loan loser Abound Solar now under investigation in Colorado (michellemalkin.com)
