Hat tip to the DANE, and courtesy of the Heritage Foundation:

The House Republican Conference released a video last week titled “The Pelosi Premium” contrasting then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) 2006 promise to pass a “commonsense plan to help bring down skyrocketing gas prices” with the steep rise in gas prices since she took the gavel. According to the video, the price of a gallon of gas has risen from $2.33 in January 2007 to $3.40 in April 2008.

But let’s say that, as an environmentalist, you want to both 1) drastically reduce carbon emissions; but 2) want to pay as little a political price as possible for causing the requisite economic damage a reduction in carbon emissions would bring. How could you accomplish both of the goals? Well you might just pass a an energy bill that: 1) imposes huge new alternative fuel mandates; 2) allows for no development of new energy sources, and 3) raises taxes that discourage energy exploration and production.

It is not like the House wasn’t repeatedly warned that their policies would lead to higher gas prices. So we must entertain the possibility that that is what they meant to do all along.

Remember that out of any one gallon of gas, the Oil Companies make 8 or 9 Cents profit, and the TAXES on that same gallon run about 42 Cents!

From the Daily Mail (UK):

At the age of 27 this young woman (Toni Vernelli) at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to “protect the planet”.

Incredibly, instead of mourning the loss of a family that never was, her boyfriend (now husband) presented her with a congratulations card.

While some might think it strange to celebrate the reversal of nature and denial of motherhood, Toni relishes her decision with an almost religious zeal.

“Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35.

“Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”

While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future.

I agree completely that people of Ms. Vernelli’s political/social proclivities should voluntarily be sterilzed.  In fact, I hoper that it becomes vogue, and a full fad/trend for such folks.

Is there any way that we could convince Lawyers to go the same route?

Courtesy of Der Spiegel:

(James) Lovelock is a chemist, inventor, author and visionary environmental guru. Using a detector he invented himself, he was the first to provide evidence of ozone-consuming fluorochlorohydrocarbons (FCHC) in the atmosphere. More importantly, Lovelock is the inventor of the famous “Gaia hypothosis,” which holds that the planet (which he named after the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gaia), constantly controls all of its systems on land, in the water and in the air in such a way as to preserve life — almost as if the earth itself were a living organism.

…

No world power, no scientist, no politician, no consumer forsaking his or her familiar comforts, and neither emissions trading nor wind energy nor biofuels will be capable of preventing the earth’s demise, he says. According to Lovelock, it will at best be possible to delay the catastrophe for a while — primarily through the massive expansion of nuclear energy.

…

“Our situation,” Lovelock says, “is similar to that of a boat that suddenly loses engine power shortly before reaching Niagara Falls. What’s the point of trying to repair the engine?” To save what it can, Lovelock believes, the world must embark on a completely different path. Most important, it must abandon the notion of “green romanticism.”

…

Lovelock has nothing but ridicule for environmentalists’ favorite issues, such as “sustainable development” and “renewable energy,” calling them “well-meaning nonsense.” He is convinced that wind and solar energy will never be even remotely capable of meeting worldwide energy needs. In China alone, for example, a new large coal power plant is put into operation every five days, imposing additional burdens on the atmosphere. The only solution, according to Lovelock, is the massive expansion of nuclear energy worldwide.

…

“Fanatical Greens” who confuse nuclear power with nuclear bombs, says Lovelock, have discredited this source of energy. Do-gooders, he adds, are concerned about pesticide residues in bananas and the link between mobile phones and cancer, all the while accepting CO2 poisoning as a necessary evil. “They strain out the mosquitoes while blithely swallowing camels,” he says.

There is so little that I can add to this.

No matter how you slice it, Nuclear Energy is the cleanest and most plentiful of all of our options with currently available technology.  Depending on who’s estimates you use, there are suffiecient Uranium reserves for up to 100 years, and other sources of fissionable materials that could last for serveral hundred years.

And research on Fusion power generation is ongoing, and will, someday, provide us with the ultimate achievement of limitless inexpensive energy.

Charles Krauthammer, whose name is only slightly less cool than Wolf Blitzer (though he surpasses the Communist News Network host on every other level), shows the way on Energy Independence:

There are three serious things we can do now: Tax gas. Drill in the Arctic. Go nuclear.

That’s the really important part. You can stop reading now if you like, and go on to the next post. Still here? Well, he gets down to the details:

First, tax gas. The president ostentatiously rolled out his 20-in-10 plan: reducing gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years. This with Rube Goldberg regulation — fuel-efficiency standards, artificially mandated levels of “renewable and alternative fuels in 2017″ and various bribes (er, incentives) for government-favored technologies — of the kind we have been trying for three decades. Good grief. I can give you a 20-in-2: tax gas to $4 a gallon. With oil prices having fallen to $55 a barrel, now is the time. The effect of a gas-tax hike will be seen in less than two years…

This also works on another level… The best way to wean people from a behavior that the government decides is BAD FOR THEM, is to TAX IT. Just look at Cigarettes… And those that continue to indulge, pay the freight. This will give the government some revenue that can be used to create a prize for the first practical process to create Hydrogen Gas, that costs less or pollutes less or uses less energy than it consumes, or something like that. Or fuel cells, or a Pocket Nuclear Reactor. Whatever.

No regulator, no fuel-efficiency standards, no presidential exhortations, no grand experiments with switchgrass. Raise the price and people change their habits. It’s the essence of capitalism.

Second, immediate drilling to recover oil that is under U.S. control, namely in the Arctic and on the Outer Continental Shelf. No one pretends that this fixes everything. But a million barrels a day from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is 5 percent of our consumption. In tight markets, that makes a crucial difference.

Combining these two, we should be able to cut our 60% reliance on imports to 1970ish levels (say 35%).

No one has a remotely good idea about how to make any difference in global warming without enlisting China and India, and without destroying the carbon-based Western economy. The obvious first step, however, is an extremely powerful source of energy that produces not an ounce of carbon dioxide: nuclear.What about nuclear waste? Well, coal produces toxic pollutants, as does oil. Both produce carbon dioxide that we are told is going to end civilization as we know it. These wastes are widely dispersed and almost impossible to recover once they get thrown into the atmosphere. Nukes produce waste as well, but it comes out concentrated — very toxic and lasting nearly forever, but because it is packed into a small manageable volume, it is more controllable. And it doesn’t pollute the atmosphere. At all.

I have expanded on this topic in the past. Anyone interested can go to the old American Empire page and check the Energy category. I really like the finish too:

So much easier to say ethanol. That it will do farcically little is beside the point. Our debates about oil consumption, energy dependence and global warming are not meant to be serious. They are meant for show.