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Obama Takes on Coal with First-Ever Carbon Limits

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The Obama administration will press ahead Friday with tough requirements for new coal-fired power plants, moving to impose for the first time strict limits on the pollution blamed for global warming.

The proposal would help reshape where Americans get electricity, away from a coal-dependent past into a future fired by cleaner sources of energy. It’s also a key step in President Barack Obama’s global warming plans, because it would help end what he called “the limitless dumping of carbon pollution” from power plants.

Although the proposed rule won’t immediatedly affect plants already operating, it eventually would force the government to limit emissions from the existing power plant fleet, which accounts for a third of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Obama has given the Environmental Protection Agency until next summer to propose those regulations.

The EPA provided The Associated Press with details of the proposal prior to the official announcement, which was expected Friday morning. The public will have a chance to comment on the rule before it becomes final.

Despite some tweaks, the rule packs the same punch as one announced last year, which was widely criticized by industry and Republicans as effectively banning any new coal projects in the U.S.

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Can You Have Economic Prosperity and a Presidential “War” on Carbon Energy?

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Photo Credit: Irish CentralI have been writing on the need for America to take advantage of the vast energy resources it has below the surface in order to become completely energy independent. Not only will this make our economy leap forward, it will vastly improve our national security by not having us dependent on foreign sources.

I invited Dick Storm to give us his perspective from an energy producers standpoint on the state of America’s quest to become energy independent. Web: Citizens for Common Sense Policies.

Dick is an expert in power generation. He started out as a results engineer with Babcock and Wilcox (USA). Over the next 30 years, he held several positions in the energy industry including Senior Service Engineer with Riley Stoker Corp., Principal Engineer-start-up and testing at Carolina Power and Light, and department head of Technical Services at Flame Refractories, Inc.,

In 1992 Dick founded Storm Technologies, Inc., a well established company of Engineers and Combustion Specialists that has worked around the world:

Beneath the average American Citizen’s radar are the ever increasing regulations that cause irreparable harm. For those of us productively employed in the energy industries, we know first-hand how President Obama and the Senate Democrats through federal agencies and their regulations, cripple America’s productive capacity.

According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute the total costs for Americans to comply with federal regulations reached $1.806 trillion in 2012. For the first time, this amounts to more than half of total federal spending. It is more than the GDPs of Canada or Mexico.

Then there are the obvious assaults on our domestic energy supply such as the Keystone Pipeline, the ban on offshore oil production, the sealing off of federal lands for energy production and the “War on Coal.”

Since President Obama has been in office, over 100 coal plants planned to power America in 2008, have been canceled or delayed. These would have provided millions of jobs, not only in the construction of them but in the support and manufacturing sectors as well

In a classic example of how he ignores economic realities, President Obama during his recent trip to Africa, lectured Africans to not make our mistakes in using carbon based fuels. Even though America has done pretty well using carbon based fuels, being the most advanced society in the world.

Today traditional Fossil fuels plus nuclear provide over 90% of America’s total energy. A clear example of Obama’s fecklessness on energy is to stand in front of a group and discuss the benefits of “Green Energy” when America and his administration depend so much on traditional fossil fuels.

The job killing poisons that are harming American public health are not the exhaust gases of power plants; it is the regulations that are spewing from Washington. One of the greatest threats to the American lifestyle that we all came to enjoy is the Obama Administration and their “War on Carbon.”

Our challenge is to educate the general public, to make them aware of how Obama, aided and abetted by the Democrat’s in the Senate and Environmental Extremists, are weakening America.

Much of this will not be understood until it is too late. Once manufacturing capability and infrastructure is killed, it is very difficult to rebuild.

One energy equipment manufacturing example is the American Nuclear Industry. Once thriving and employing hundreds of thousands of highly skilled factory workers, engineers, technicians and administrative people. Now the nuclear industry in America is a bare skeleton of what it once was.

The great Westinghouse Nuclear division was sold off years ago to Toshiba. Now, if a new nuclear power plant is built, most of the components will be “Globally Sourced”. That is code for, “Not Made in America.”

Take mining say for rare earth materials or copper, such as the Alaskan Pebble Mine. Yes, the EPA is against these too. Did you ever hear of the UN Agenda 21? Well if weakening America and spreading your wealth to the rest of the world is the goal of Agenda 21, which just may be at the heart of the Obama agenda. It certainly is not the best interests for America.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

Report: CO2 Not Responsible for Global Warming

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) — not carbon emissions — are the real culprit behind global warming, claims a new study out of the University of Waterloo.

“Conventional thinking says that the emission of human-made non-CFC gases such as carbon dioxide has mainly contributed to global warming. But we have observed data going back to the Industrial Revolution that convincingly shows that conventional understanding is wrong,” said Qing-Bin Lu, a science professor at the University of Waterloo and author of the study.

“In fact, the data shows that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays caused both the polar ozone hole and global warming,” Lu said.

Lu’s findings were published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B and analyzed data from 1850 to the present.

Lu’s study runs counter to the long-standing argument that carbon dioxide emissions were the driving force behind global warming. Recently scientists warned that carbon concentrations were nearing the 400 parts per million level. Scientists say that carbon dioxide levels must be lowered to 350 ppm to avoid the severe impacts of global warming.

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Surprise: Obama’s Science Advisers Press For Carbon Standards

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Photo Credit: Allison Harger

President Obama’s outside team of scientific advisers is recommending the creation of carbon emissions standards for existing pollution sources and continued expansion of shale gas production in order to confront global warming.

Those are two of the wide-ranging climate policy suggestions that the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) unveiled Friday that address ways to curb emissions and adapt to inevitable climatic changes.

Others include creation of a “National Commission on Climate Preparedness,” infrastructure planning that integrates climate risks, and various steps to “decarbonize” the economy.

“Mitigation is needed to avoid a degree of climate change that would be unmanageable despite efforts to adapt. Adaptation is needed because the climate is already changing and some further change is inevitable regardless of what is done to reduce its pace and magnitude,” PCAST said in a letter to Obama released Friday.
The advisers note that broad policies to impose a cost on carbon emissions, such as a carbon tax or cap-and-trade, don’t have political traction. But other options to address emissions are available.

Their letter to Obama urges “new performance standards for CO2 emissions from existing stationary sources.” The endorsement arrives as environmentalists are pressing the administration to begin setting standards for the current fleet of coal-fired power plants.

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Biden Says Obama Agrees With French Socialist On Climate Change

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Photo Credit: U.S. Embassy Jakarta, Indonesia

Vice President Joe Biden says President Barack Obama and France’s new socialist president share the same ambition to regulate carbon emissions.

“I could have been sitting in a private meeting with President Obama [and] he would have not said it in French, he’d say it in English, but you said the same thing,” Biden told President Francois Hollande during a brief Feb. 4 public appearance at the French presidential palace in Paris, France.

“The [French] President pointed out that there … is a need to set out a vision for the young people in both our countries [and] a rallying cry that can be a call for a united effort and support in both our countries to deal with Global Warming,” declared Biden, who is buffing his foreign-policy credentials prior to a possible run for the presidency in 2016.

In his Jan. 21 presidential inauguration address, Obama touted his support for an extremely expensive wave of “Global Warming” regulation.

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations … we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God,” he claimed in his controversial speech . . .

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Carbon Use And Prosperity – A Striking Relationship

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photo credit: cgp greyIn his inaugural address on January 21, President Obama invoked great ideals of human dignity, equality, and most especially “progress” to justify his second-term agenda, a cornerstone of which will be a crusade to limit humanity’s use of carbon.

In fact, nothing could be more antithetical to the goal of advancing the human condition than restricting carbon consumption. A look at the relationship between living standards and humanity’s carbon utilization over the past 200 years, as shown in Figure 1, below, makes this perfectly clear.

Fig. 1 Average global GDP per capita as a function of carbon use, 1800 to 2010. GDP in 2010 dollars.

The story that Figure 1 tells is remarkable; it is, perhaps, one of the grandest stories ever told. It shows how, over the past two centuries, by using carbon in ever-increasing amounts, the human race has lifted itself out of hopeless poverty and misery to achieve a modicum of dignity and happiness. Look at that line reaching up, in direct proportion to global carbon use, from an average global income of $180 per person in 1800 to $2,200 in 1960 to $9,000 today; that is progress.

Of course, we still have a ways to go. The current $9,000 average world income is just a fifth of the $45,000 U.S. average, yet we still have some poverty here. Still, the achievement is incredible. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt campaigned for president on the promise of “a chicken in every pot,” and millions found the offer compelling. Today, in the United States, minimum wage is $7 per hour, and chicken sells for less than $2 per pound; so, a person working at minimum wage can buy a pound of chicken with about 17 minutes’ labor. This is freedom from want, indeed, delivered not by the New Deal, but by the terrific expansion of our use of carbon.

Read more from this story HERE.