Energy Poverty Around the World

The global warming/climate change industry has been aggressively pushing renewable energy, wind, solar, and biofuels for a long time even though the economies of various industrialized countries need much more energy than what renewables generate.

The green activists have been zealously lobbying Congress and the EPA to change the laws, rules, and regulations that would make it much more expensive and difficult for fossil fuel energy producers to survive while passing the higher costs onto consumers, impoverishing those customers on fixed incomes and taking away disposable income from the rest.

Green energy causes electricity poverty around the world. Today the Fraser Institute of Canada, an independent, non-partisan public policy think-tank released a study that found that energy poverty is on the rise in Canada.

"Government policies that raise electricity prices may push some families into energy poverty and further stretch the household budgets of families already in energy poverty," said Taylor Jackson, study co-author and policy analyst at the Fraser Institute.

"Because high energy costs take a large bite out of many household budgets, families across Canada pay the price when government energy policies boost the cost of electricity," said Kenneth Green, the Fraser Institute's senior director of natural resource studies and co-author of Energy Costs and Canadian Households: How Much Are We Spending?

According to the study, Canadian households that make $47,700 or less per year are disproportionately affected by energy poverty.

The Fraser Institute found that in 2013 the three regions most affected by energy poverty were Atlantic Canada at 20.6 percent, Saskatchewan at 12.9 percent and Ontario at 7.5 percent, with a general 7.9 percentage in Canada. “Between 2010 and 2013, energy poverty was on the rise in most provinces.” British Columbia had the lowest at 5.3 percent.

The study authors also found that the Green Energy Act of Ontario is responsible for the increase in electricity prices.

In 2013 Der Spiegel warned us that “the political world is wedged between the green-energy lobby, masquerading as saviors of the world, and the established electric utilities, with their dire warnings of chaotic supply problems and job losses.” http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/high-costs-and-errors-of-german-transition-to-renewable-energy-a-920288.html

In Germany, the Energiewende, or energy wave (revolution), was “Chancellor Angela Merkel’s project of the century.” It turned out to be a flop, although not as bad as her recent policy of welcoming with open arms of waves of violent Muslims into Europe.

After the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, Merkel “quickly decided to begin phasing out nuclear power and lead the country into the age of wind and solar.” The government-predicted renewable energy surcharge turned out to be higher than the 20 percent price hike.

Of all the companies that must pay the renewable energy surcharge, 2,300 German businesses with lobbying representation, were able to exempt themselves from this green energy surcharge by claiming tough international competition.

Der Spiegel said that German customers were forced to pay 20 billion euros for electricity from solar, wind, and biofuel plants that had a market price of only 3 billion euros. The authors explained that this cost did not include “unintended costs and collateral damage associated with the project.” The costs included the fact that, depending on weather and time of day, the entire country can face “absurd states of energy surplus or deficit.” Solar panels and wind turbines can generate lots of electricity at times and other times zero.

According to Der Spiegel, more than 300,000 German households a year had their electricity cut off for unpaid bills. Caritas, a charity group, called this “energy poverty.”

Sweden, a heavily forested country, used up its biomass from wood and paper industry waste to fuel conventional power plants; once it exhausted this source, it switched to wind farms on land because the offshore ones were very expensive and tended to rust much quicker.

There is no doubt that Americans have also been affected by energy poverty. The Institute for Energy Research is citing the case of the residents in Pueblo, Colorado. The state’s Clean Air-Clean Jobs Act forced inexpensive coal plants to be closed. Their residential kWh rate has increased 26 percent since 2010 when “the new local utility company in Pueblo replaced nearly all its inherited cheap coal capacity with wind and natural gas.” Residential customers, with a poverty rate of 18.1 percent and one third of the population on welfare, had to pay for the large infrastructure bills when the switch was made. Wind turbines were added in order to meet the state’s Clean Air-Clean Jobs Act requirement of 30 percent capacity coming from renewable resources. http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/energy-poverty-coming-america-coal-shuttered-green-power/

At CPAC 2015, during a panel discussion on climate change and global warming alarmism, Gary Broadbent, representing Murray Energy Corporation, the largest privately held coal mine in the U.S., highlighted Obama’s “war on coal” via regulations passed by EPA alone in the last five years totaling 25,000 pages.  Quoting Robert E. Murray, Chairman of Murray Energy Corporation, Broadband said, “Prior to the election of President Obama, coal provided 52% of the electricity generation in our country. Today it is 37%. In our judgement, it will further decline to about 30%, at a maximum.”

Enumerating the 411 power plants designated for closure through 2016, “101,000 megawatts of the lowest cost electricity in America,” CEO Murray wrote that electricity, generated by coal at the plant cost of 4 cents per kWh, will be replaced by “Mr. Obama and his appointees” with 15 cent per kWh electricity from natural gas and 22 cent per kWh electricity from wind and solar power, not to mention the huge subsidies to solar power from American taxpayers.

In CEO Murray’s opinion, the Obama Administration has bypassed illegally Congress, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the States and their Public Utility Commissions, which are “empowered to regulate the availability and cost of electricity.”

According to Chairman Murray, while we came within 700 megawatts of reducing loads to 61 million Americans in 13 states during the Polar Vortex of 2014, “China has been building a new 500 megawatt coal-fired plant every week for years, [and] burned about 4.0 billion tons of coal last year.”

Quarantine Quandary

Photo courtesy: Facebook Timeline Photos

As the ISIS crisis is conveniently ignored right before the election, the main stream media is focusing on the next crisis, the Ebola spread and the schizophrenic response from the CDC. Meanwhile Congress is silent, waiting for guidance on what opinion they should form before they actually do the job they were elected to do, legislate to protect the best interests of the American people.

The Congressional Research Service has issued a report on October 9, 2014, RL 33201, outlining the federal and state quarantine and isolation authority. Jared P. Cole, Legislative attorney, overviewed the state and federal public health laws in regards to the “quarantine and isolation of individuals” when individual liberties will be restricted. http://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL33201.pdf

The state public health authority is derived from the Tenth Amendment. The federal public health authority to “prescribe quarantine and other health measures” is derived from the Commerce Clause, a clause that gives Congress authority to regulate interstate and international commerce.

Cole describes two measures that can be undertaken by health authorities in order to prevent those infected with or exposed to a contagious disease from infecting others:

-          Quarantine (separating individuals exposed to an infection but “not yet ill” from those who had not been exposed)

-          Isolation (separating “infected individuals” from those who are not infected)

http://www.flu.gov/planning-preparedness/federal/pandemic-influenza-implementation.pdf

The state health departments have primary quarantine authority.  (Cole, RL33201, p. 4)

“The federal government may assist or take over the management of an intrastate incident if requested by a state or if the federal government determines local efforts are inadequate.”  http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dq/sars_facts/isolationquarantine.pdf

Who is responsible for preventing the outbreak and spread of an infectious disease in the U.S.?

The Secretary of Health and Human Services has the authority granted by Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act to make and enforce regulations “to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States.” (RL33201, pp. 4-5)

The HHS Secretary has broad authority to “apprehend, detain, or conditionally release a person.” The Secretary can only do so with communicable diseases that are included in the Executive Order 13295 of April 4, 2003. The diseases listed are cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fevers (including Ebola), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and influenza viruses with the potential to cause a pandemic.

The HHS Secretary transferred quarantine authority in 2000 to the Director of the CDC. Measures for interstate and foreign quarantine are now under CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine. http://www.cdc.gov/ncpdcid/dgmq/index.html.

Federal regulations authorize the “apprehension, detention, examination, or conditional release” only of persons coming into a state from a foreign country.” Ship captains and airline pilots are required to report immediately the presence of ill passengers on board their vessels.  “If found to be infected, such individuals may be detained for such time and in such manner as may be reasonably necessary.” (Cole, p. 5)

If someone becomes violently ill on domestic and international flights, pilots are required to notify before arrival the CDC Quarantine Station closest to their destination airport. Twenty such stations are located at ports of entry into the U.S., assisted by DHS in “the enforcement of quarantine rules and regulations.”

Since we have not stopped flights originating from West Africa where Ebola has reached epidemic proportions, the probability of such infectious persons arriving daily is very real.

The Director of the CDC is in charge of preventing the spread of communicable diseases from state to state.

Cole said, “To prevent the spread of diseases between states, the regulations prohibit infected persons from traveling from one state to another without a permit from the health officer of the state, possession, or locality of destination, if such a permit is required under the law applicable to the place of destination. (RL33201, p. 7)

Cole added that the Secretary of HHS can bar the entry of persons from foreign countries if the “existence of any communicable disease” poses a “serious danger” of entering the United States. The “suspension of the right to introduce such persons and property is required in the interest of public health.” The 2005 proposed rule for this statutory authority was not adopted. (70 Fed. Reg. 71892)

Then there is the Do Not Board (DNB) list which was developed by DHS and CDC and made operational in June 2007. To make this list a person must be:

-          Likely contagious with a communicable disease

-          Ignorant or non-compliant with the recommended medical treatment (such as someone with antibiotic resistant TB)

-          Likely to board a commercial aircraft or boat

At the state level, state police has the authority of quarantine and isolation; time and manner vary from state to state. Most quarantine state laws are 40-100 years old, lacking the contemporary scientific knowledge of communicable diseases. (RL33201, p. 10)

Can an individual have the right to challenge his or her quarantine or isolation?

Some courts recognize the petition for a writ of habeas corpus, to test the legality of the detention. “Often petitioners seek a declaration that the statute under which they were quarantined is unconstitutional.” (RL33201, p. 11)

Here are some legal challenges described in Cole’s  report:

-          Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824, the Supreme Court “alluded to a state’s authority to quarantine under the police powers”

-          Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Louisiana State Board of Health, 1902, “addressed a state’s power to quarantine an entire geographic area” (even though commerce was affected, the quarantine was not unconstitutional)

-          In another case, the court ruled that “it is ‘well settled’ that states may impose quarantines to prevent the spread of disease even though quarantines ‘affect interstate commerce’”

-          Miller v. Campbell City (leaking methane and hydrogen gases prompted an entire area quarantine which was broken by a resident who tried to go home; the court decided that the quarantine was not in bad faith or malicious)

-          U.S. v. Shinnick (a female passenger who could not prove vaccination after arriving from a smallpox-infected area in Stockholm, Sweden, was placed in isolation)

-          People ex rel. Barmore v. Robertson (woman who ran a boarding house and boarded an infected person, was quarantined in her home as a carrier of typhoid fever)

-          O’Connor v. Donaldson (man diagnosed with tuberculosis was hospitalized a few days in New York against his will; the court ruled that a “state’s police powers may confine individuals solely to protect society from the dangers of antisocial acts or communicable diseases”)

-          Wong Wai v. Williamson (San Francisco Board of Health “ordered all Chinese residents to be inoculated against bubonic plague, restricting their right to leave the city, citing nine deaths allegedly from plague. The inoculations were tainted, causing severe consequences.”)

-          Jew Ho v. Williamson (the quarantine was discriminatory since it applied only to Chinese residents, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment; it questioned whether the plague actually caused the deaths)

http://fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL33201.pdf

Cole raises the question of potential future legal challenges:

1.      Eminent domain

-          case of widespread domestic public health emergency, if the quarantine and isolation necessitate private facilities when medical facilities become overburdened

In August 2003, after a heat wave caused 11,000 deaths in Paris, the government took over refrigerated warehouses as temporary morgues.

The State of Washington, after a volcanic eruption, restricted access to a town near the volcano. The court declared the “exercise of police power permissible and did not require compensation.”

           

2.      Self-imposed or home quarantines

-          can a “state support a population asked to voluntarily stay at home for a period of time”

-          can a state provide “legal immunity to businesses asked to provide facilities for quarantine”

We have the power and rules in place for quarantine and isolation in order to safeguard the health of the people of the United States from illegal immigrants’ communicable diseases like Ebola and the enterovirus D68 which has already killed several children. Instead, Congress is busy playing politics with people’s lives in order to win elections and to support this administration’s immigration policy. Scanning someone’s temperature at the airport is a sick joke.

We are not stopping flights from the affected Ebola zones, and illegal alien children from Latin America are still entering through our southern border, and are still being dispersed among our healthy children. Our soldiers, highly trained for war but sent to West Africa to play doctors, are going to be placed in quarantine in Liberia in the event they should become infected with Ebola, while potentially sick West Africans are still given visas every day to fly to the “racist” United States for first class treatment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abundant Energy Supply Strangled by Environmentally Driven Regulations

The Committee on Energy and Commerce convened on March 25, 2014 to hear testimony on H.R. 6, the “Domestic Prosperity and Global Freedom Act,” introduced by Rep. Cory Gardner. This bill was precipitated by the Energy Information Administration’s statement that “America’s natural gas has been raising since 2006. EIA projects such increases to continue through 2040, and expects domestic production of natural gas to remain well above domestic demand.” 

Chairman Fred Upton believes that our natural gas surplus is needed by “our allies around the world” and we should engage in “a mutually beneficial trade in liquefied natural gas (LNG).” In his opinion, federal policy has not yet “adjusted to the new reality of American energy abundance, and in fact Obama administration red tape often stands in the way of the potential benefits of the energy boom.”

Besides job creation at home, “constructing and running the LNG export facilities and additional energy industry jobs as natural gas producers expand their output to meet the increase in demand,” Chairman Upton believes that H.R. 6 would help Ukraine and Eastern and Central European countries who are dependent on Russian natural gas. Russia would have less “leverage over these nations” and prices of LNG would come down. https://energycommerce.house.gov/hearing/hr-6-domestic-prosperity-and-global-freedom-act

The Hoover Institution agreed that “the hydrocarbon boom in the United States has been driven by fracking.” Shale-gas production through fracking in North Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York accounts for 44 percent of total U.S. natural gas output. http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/170026

Predictions in the 1970s indicating that America would run out of natural gas were wrong. Even the production of oil fell (1990-2008), increasing our oil dependency on imports from unstable and hostile nations. The International Energy Agency reported that in 2013 U.S. production of crude oil increased by 991,000 barrels a day and oil imports declined by 16 percent.

Newsmax.com wrote that “America produced an average of about 12.1 million barrels of crude oil, natural gas liquids, and biofuels a day in 2013 – that’s 300,000 barrels a day more than Saudi Arabia and 1.6 million more than Russia, the two previous leaders.”

Gary D. Libecap, Economics professor at the University of California and research fellow at Hoover Institution, said that “fracking and natural gas production have been good for the economy, good for democracies worldwide, and good for the environment.” Environmentalists would probably disagree since complaints have been lodged with the EPA about the deleterious effects on soil and ground water from fracking and horizontal drilling.

Energy experts believe that the Obama administration slows or prevents drilling on federal lands by delaying and denying permits. Consequently, production on federal lands fell 23 percent since 2007. According to the Institute for Policy Innovation, the federal government owns 28 percent of U.S. land, 62 percent in Alaska and 47 percent in 11 western states. http://www.ipi.org/

The current administration chooses instead to concentrate on very expensive and insufficient wind and solar energy generation, particularly solar. In addition to the 34 failed green companies funded with taxpayer dollars, of which Solyndra was the poster child of a $535 million colossal failure, the Aqua Caliente Solar Project in Yuma, Arizona takes the top spot with $967 million in federal loans. Yuma has an unemployment rate of 26.1 percent. So far, the Yuma project created 10 permanent jobs. When completed at the end of this year, the solar facility will have 16 permanent employees. It will only cost taxpayers $60.4 million per job creation. http://lastresistance.com/5226/obama-spends-967-million-create-10-solar-energy-jobs/

Fracking on the other hand, creates real jobs and helps towns like Midland, Texas to increase per capita income three times the national average and to reduce unemployment to a low 2.9 percent, while extracting oil which is needed to produce energy and to run our large economy.

Because the current administration believes that carbon pollution drives climate change, the proposed budget for FY 2015 includes a $1 billion Climate Resilience Fund to fight man-made (anthropogenic) global warming. Our electricity generation from “dirty” coal will then be curtailed by EPA’s expensive job-killing and coal fire-plant closing regulations and we will be stuck with huge electric bills and potential shortages.  

Our way of life depends on electricity - lights, refrigerators, air conditioning, furnaces, computers, internet, radios, TVs, ATMs, banks, grocery stores, cell phones, chargers, medical devices, life support systems, operating rooms, gas pumps, electric cars, plants, farms, refineries, water purification, sewer systems – 68 percent is generated by fossil fuels, 20 percent by nuclear, and 7 percent by hydro power. http://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2014/03/22/us-electricity-system-in-regulatory-and-terrorist-crosshairs-n1812722/page/full

According to the Energy Information Agency (EIA), net energy generation from coal has dropped from 49 percent in 2007 to 37 percent in 2012. Right now, the shortage is partly offset by increases in natural gas.

EPA’s retrofitting regulations and the requirement to use non-existent carbon capture technology, has resulted in coal fire plant closures. This prompted Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the Chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, to propose an amendment to H.R. 3826 (http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3826)

that would make sure that EPA’s standards for all types of new power plants use existing technology.  Rep. Smith said, “By requiring carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology that doesn’t even exist, the EPA’s new power plant proposal effectively bans new coal power. There is no coal power plant anywhere in the world that can meet the EPA’s radical proposal.” http://schweikert.house.gov/press-releases/rep-schweikert-cosponsors-amendment-to-curb-epa-overreach-on-power-plant-emissions-standards/

Robert Romano explained that “largely as a result of coal plant closures, overall electricity generation in the U.S. has dropped from 4.005 trillion kWh in 2007 to 3.89 trillion kWh in 2012, meanwhile end use has only decreased from 3.89 trillion kWh to just 3.832 trillion kWh. The difference between electricity generation and end use, or implied spare capacity, has dropped from 115 billion kWh to 58 billion kWh from 2007-2012.” This decrease of 50 percent is troublesome - steady demand would cause eventual brownouts. http://netrightdaily.com/2014/03/epa-lost-mind/#ixzz2vaOr9QUP

According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA), approximately 11.5 million American homes use wood burning stoves for heat. EPA issued new rules on emissions of particles and gases released from residential wood stoves and other wood-fired heaters built after 2015 and the rules will be more stringent in five years.  EPA “estimates that 85,695 wood stoves will be manufactured and sold in 2015.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/epa-moves-to-regulate-new-wood-stoves/2014/01/03/b08cb232-7484-11e3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html

The airborne particulates allowed change from 15 micrograms per cubic meter to 12. Bob Adelman put it in proper perspective, “Secondhand tobacco smoke in a closed-car exposes a person to 3,000-4,000 micrograms of particulates per cubic meter.”  According to John Crouch of the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association, particulate pollution from wood burning stoves often occurs because consumers use insufficiently dried wood.

I wrote about cook stoves in my book, “U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy.” The drive to replace cook stoves with “clean cook stoves” with chimneys came from the United Nations and translated into grants of $100,000 to $750,000 awarded by the Department of Energy through the “Clean Biomass Cook stove Technologies” initiative.  The grants were intended to help 100 million households in third world countries by 2020. http://www.amazon.com/U-N-Agenda-21-Environmental-Piracy-ebook/dp/B009WC6JXO/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396282329&sr=1-1&keywords=UN+Agenda+21%3A+Environmental+Piracy

Two studies evaluated the “clean cook stoves” and found that they delivered the same amount of measured pollution as the previous stoves. RESPIRA (Randomized Exposure Study of Pollution Indoors) showed improved air quality but not overall health.  “Up in Smoke,” a much larger study from MIT showed same amount of measured pollution and no significant change in overall health. The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is forging ahead with studies in Ghana, Nepal, and Kenya in spite of the two studies’ results.

Should our power grid fail because of a solar flare, EMP, cyber, or terrorist attack, we will experience a civilization setback and population demise that is hard to fathom. While our administration concentrates on environmental issues, on April 16, 2013, terrorists attacked a power substation near San Jose, California as reported by the Wall Street Journal on February 5, 2014.  The fact that this very important piece of information was not reported by the media until a year later is disturbing. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778

Terrorists cut fiber optic cables and destroyed 17 transformers by causing them to leak oil coolant, resulting in overheating and failure. The targeted attack which lasted one hour indicated that the terrorists were very knowledgeable. The repairs took 27 days. Those maintaining the grid were able to reroute power and avoid blackouts.

Electricity is delivered to us through “a complex, interconnected system of power lines, substations, and transformers called the power grid. The entire United States is divided into just three separate grid segments: East, West, and Texas.” (Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek)

Billions are spent on “climate change prevention,” and on expensive smart meters that endanger and harm our health and attack our privacy, while our complex grid is easy prey to sabotage and attacks, protected only by cameras and chain link fences. It is not just that electricity prices must “necessarily skyrocket,” as our President promised, our grid is a sitting duck to potential attacks, and our energy production is being reduced significantly by overly stringent EPA regulations.