The Middle is Always Evil

Barack Obama has announced his major Energy appointments, and the news isn’t good. Our new Energy Secretary under Obama will be a professor of physics at the University of Berkeley named Steven Chu. Liberals will be quick to point to his Nobel Prize as one of his strengths, but I will be quicker and point out that his Nobel Prize is in physics, which has nothing to do with energy policy. Despite the fact that climate science is not his academic expertise, Chu has made finding solutions to global warming into something of a “passion,” according to the New York Times.

What is his solution to the “problem” of global warming?

We need to alter the playing field with tax and fiscal polices… Developed countries have made this step with air and water pollution by enacting outright regulations and installing a cap and trade system.

Uh huh. So the new Energy Secretary has no plans on how to create new energy in the United States? Just more regulation and taxes on energy that we already have?

More:

Mr. Chu has called for gradually ramping up gasoline taxes over 15 years to coax consumers into buying more-efficient cars and living in neighborhoods closer to work. “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Mr. Chu, who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in September.

The new Energy Secretary is not interested in energy independence. In the strictest sense of the word, he is looking to foster a new energy dependence– not a dependence on foreign suppliers, like in the past. No, Chu’s new energy plan is to socially-engineer the American people towards a further dependence on the government. The state will decide what kind of cars we drive and how close we live together.

The media is taking much enjoyment in pointing out that Obama disagrees with Chu on gas taxes. Its true. In the past, Obama has opposed a raise in the gas tax, but it is likely that his reasons were rooted in political pragmatism (remember gas prices in the summer?). But now that he’s got the top job, Obama can appoint ideologues like Chu to high-level positions in his cabinet and let them make all of the hard decisions for him.

In addition to wanting to dictate to oil companies what they should charge for their products, Mr. Chu has referred to coal powered energy as his “worst nightmare,” and has said that even clean-coal technologies will not be enough. “It’s not guaranteed we have a solution for coal,” he said.

Take a look at this graph of where our electricity came from in 2007. As you can see, coal power makes up about half of all of it. That’s a good thing; and Steven Chu wants a “solution” for it.

In summary:

Breaking:

Free republic is reporting the possibility of an Obama team connection to Blago-gate; apparently, when Blagojevich asked if Obama could push some clout around to get his wife placed on a paid corporate board, Advisor A responded that he, “thinks he could,” and that a “President-elect can do almost anything he sets his mind to.” The indictment names Rahm Emmanuel specifically as an advisor to the president elect; could he be Advisor A?

No matter who it is, the Obama team has been implicated; Obama now admits that a two hour long conference call took place between his team and the Blago-team about the Senate seat, and he has declined to out and out deny any wrong doing. He has, however, expressed “confidence” that there was none. This thing is obviously only beginning to unravel…

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

President Obama can define his legacy in the first 100 days by laying the groundwork for a global tax on carbon dioxide emissions that is effective, efficient, equitable and enforceable. An effective, harmonized tax on C02 emissions must stabilize the growth of atmospheric concentrations of GHGs by no later than 2020. The tax must also be adjusted annually, by a global body, according to this objective.

I’m glad that I did not misunderstand Mr. Nader; for a moment I was concerned that he wanted the United States government to tax carbon emissions– I can take a small solace in knowing that under his plan, CO2 usage will be taxed by a foreign body that does not represent me. But don’t worry! You’ve heard of it; its called the United Nations! Who ever heard of “No Taxation Without Representation,” anyway?

Let’s get specific. What are your plans?

The most efficient way to apply a carbon tax is at a relatively small number of major carbon bottlenecks, which cover the lion’s share of GHGs. The key points where flows of carbon are the most concentrated include: trunk pipelines for gas, refineries for oil, railroad heads for coal, liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals, cement, steel, aluminum and GHG-intensive chemical plants.

I’m not entirely sure, but what Nader is asking for here might be entirely without precedent. Nader is seriously suggesting that the United Nations send an army of bureaucrats into the United States. These men will busy themselves measuring the emissions of all of the above industries. They will then convene, most likely in secret, to decide exactly how high a tax they will impose on each industry, a figure which will be based on how much said industry has produced. This is something that Nader wants done every year.

In case you’re wondering what the goal of such a plan could possibly be, here’s this:

Nader’s final sentence:

If President Obama hits the ground running fast in the direction of a global carbon tax, he can usher in a new dawn that might finally make peace between man and climate.

Nader betrays himself. He views man and the environment in the same way that Karl Marx viewed the bourgeois and the proletariat. Oppressor, oppressed. There is nothing new about the environmentalist movement. Yesterday it was a Class Revolution, today it is the Green Revolution.

This is the new Marxism. These are the new Marxists.