http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR3dM-GlZK8&feature=video_response

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf-4lCsLlpg

Walter Russell Mead continues his critique of the UN climate change treaty process with a biting article about the Cancun conference.  Expectations that the conference will produce anything newsworthy are so low that the New York Times will not be sending a reporter to cover the full conference and the BBC, which sent 20 reporters to Copenhagen, will only send one to Cancun.

According to Meade:

“It is not just that the Cancun meeting isn’t expected to produce much.  The whole UN treaty process is increasingly being seen as a colossal and humiliating blunder.”

By highlighting the unworkability of the grand plan at the core of the climate change treaties, Meade demonstrates the utter insanity of the UN Climate Change big thinkers:

“This is the fruit of the gigantic brains of the Great Gurus of Green.  This is the bright shining idea at the core of the UN process: that US opposition to Kyoto could be overcome by requiring the US to pay tens of billions of dollars in Green Danegeld to the third world every year.  And the people who thought of this had Big Degrees from Name Schools!  We know, because they keep telling us, that they are smarter than the rest of us and they understand complex systems better than we do.  These are the geniuses to whom we are to entrust ever greater control over ever larger swathes of the global economy because, after all, they see so clearly and so far.”

Read the entire article here: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/11/28/dead-green-treaty-stinks-up-the-room/

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/orangelimey/750298876/

KJC

General Motors officially announces the debut of the Chevy Volt today.

Further reading:

http://www.whec.com/news/stories/S1859675.shtml?cat=565

http://www.chevrolet.com/volt/?seo=goo_|_2008_Chevy_Retention_|_IMG_Chevy_Volt_|_Chevy_Volt_|_chevy_volt

Photo: http://www.chevrolet.com/volt/?seo=goo_|_2008_Chevy_Retention_|_IMG_Chevy_Volt_|_Chevy_Volt_|_chevy_volt

KJC

According to the Globe:

Raising an average of $3.6 million a year in 2003, 2004, and 2005, the organization aired television ads, paid a public relations firm, and staged a $1.5 million lobbying drive to try to persuade Congress to kill the controversial plan, which has become central to a national debate over the future of clean energy.

But last year, after losing the fight in Washington and focusing its attention on a crucial battle before state regulators, the alliance was falling into debt, raising only $1.4 million - a 50 percent drop compared with 2008 and its lowest yearly fund-raising total since 2002, the year the group was founded. By December, according to recently released tax returns, the organization’s balance sheet showed more than $500,000 in red ink.

While officials with the alliance have vowed to fight on, a steady erosion of funds raised by the group over a three-year period beginning in 2007 raises questions about its ability to continue its crusade against a plan by Cape Wind to erect 130 turbines, each 440 feet high, over 24 square miles in Nantucket Sound, with construction expected to begin as early as next year.

Further reading: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/11/26/once_mighty_wind_farm_foe_falls_into_debt/

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pjh/185488411/

KJC

Al Gore admitted earlier this month that the tax credit for ethanol was mistake. Everyone on the right jumped on his statement as further evidence of Mr. Gore’s hypocrisy.

Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle in an article at Real Clear Politics at Real Clear Politics reminds us that it was Mr. Gore who as Vice President in 1994 broke a 50-50 tie in the Senate by voting in favor of the ethanol tax credit. This credit according to Saunders added $5 billion to the deficit last year.

The Wall St Journal wrote a somewhat sarcastic editorial earlier this month:

Welcome to the college of converts, Mr. Vice President. “It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol,” Al Gore told a gathering of clean energy financiers in Greece this week. The benefits of ethanol are “trivial,” he added, but “It’s hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going.”
No kidding, and Mr. Gore said he knows from experience: “One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for President.”

But was this an epiphany for Mr. Gore? The New York Times Green blog reports that:

A spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, Kalee Kreider, pointed out that the former vice president’s evolving feelings on first-generation biofuels - that is, corn ethanol - were not new, and that Mr. Gore discussed the matter at great length in Chapter 6 of his 2009 book, “Our Choice.”

There, Mr. Gore reflected on his early optimism for the potential of corn-based ethanol to help clean up the nation’s fuel sector - and the disappointment he now feels over its shortcomings:
I feel the disappointment personally because, as vice president of the United States in 1994, I cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of moving forward with a large national commitment to ethanol. In 1978, as a young congressman from a farming district in Middle Tennessee, I organized and hosted a daylong workshop on what was then called “gasohol” for 5,000 constituents, mostly farmers, eager to be a part of the national effort then under way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Throughout my 16 years in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, I was a persistent advocate of helping farmers to earn income from the production of alcohol fuels for cars and trucks. …

In practice, however, the results over the last several years have convinced many analysts that producing first generation ethanol from corn is a mistake.

Will we learn anything by Mr. Gore’s admission that ethanol subsidies are a mistake? Will government policy makers contemplate the unintended consequences of their policies? Those of us who believe that market forces rather than government policies lead to better choices still maintain (perhaps irrationally) a smidgen of hope.

Further reading:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/11/30/you_can_stop_paying_for_al_gores_mistake_108085.html

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/gore-annoys-corn-ethanol-lobby/

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703572404575634753486416076.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/2307146884/

Copyright 2010 — K.J.Collins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bZHzny58ds

Instead of the usual V-8, this new entry into the S-Class will be a be a 4-cylinder diesel. By this move, Mercedes is somewhat out on a limb.  It it is the first of the luxury-car maker to put a downsized engine into one of its luxury cars.

“Green luxury is feasible,” said Verena Mueller, a Mercedes spokeswoman told Bloomberg . “We expect to attract environmentally conscious customers who are seeking the lowest possible CO2 emissions.”

The new diesel will be offered in Europe. There is no information as to whether it will be offered in the U.S.

Further reading:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-08/daimler-ups-ante-in-green-luxury-race-with-smaller-engines-on-s-class-cars.html?loc=interstitialskip

Photo: A truly beautiful car - the MB 300SL http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcheng/22530351/

KJC 2010

An interesting interview on Bloomberg with John Hofmeister, the former CEO of Shell, discussing the oil panel’s findings that they did not find evidence of gross negligence. Near the end of the interview, he reminds us that “Every morning when we wake up we need 20 million barrels of oil in this country to get through the day. ”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT1icRmSzdA

KJC 2010