Low flush toilets mandated by building codes are costing San Francisco $114 million due to backed up waste in sewer lines, and the city will be using 8.5 million pounds of bleach to break up the clogs. All that bleach will ultimately wind up going into the Bay.
LA community colleges wasted $10 million on flawed designs for green power, then went ahead with plans to spend $44 million on solar projects resulting in minimal savings on power bills.
Consumers are complaining that federal regulations are causing detergents and clothes washers to fail to do their jobs. The feds made the soap companies take the phosphates out of detergents, and manufacturers are currently being paid a $250 tax credit per unit to build washing machines featuring inferior performance.
Charles Lane was moved by a bad commuting experience to reflect on the insanity of governmental efforts to promote less efficient and impractical automotive technologies in the name of environmentalism.
Count me among the many thousands of Washington area residents who spent Wednesday night stuck in traffic as a snowstorm sowed chaos all around us. Being car-bound in sub-freezing weather for six hours can make a guy think. I counted my blessings. The situation could have been worse, I realized: My fellow commuters and I could have been trying to make it home in electric cars, like the ones President Obama is constantly promoting, most recently in his State of the Union address. …
This subsidized market niche is just one well-publicized malfunction away from disaster. Perhaps a Volt battery will overheat and burst into flames, as some computer batteries have been known to do. Or maybe a Leaf driver will suffer frostbite while stuck in the next blizzard. Let’s just hope one of his neighbors pulls over to help him out.
Modern efforts by government to promote the use and adoption of inefficient and uneconomic technologies by cash subsidies in pursuit of newer, tidier means of doing things we can do perfectly well and much more cheaply already resemble the obsessive efforts of pre-modern European princes to create gold by funding alchemical experiments. Throwing money in the direction of superstition does not actually create new industries and technologies. It just wastes money.
Leftism originally created political movements by agitating the masses through a combination of flattering their desires and exaggerating their grievances, but Capitalism baffled the Left by transforming the needy Proletariat into a prosperous Middle Class, while Socialism in the countries where it fully achieved power impoverished everyone outside the Nomenklatura. Socialism consequently collapsed while Capitalism thrived, so the Left went back to the drawing board.
Absent economic grievances, the Left with remarkable ingenuity decided to hitch its wagon to the rising Environmental Movement, and to replace obsolescent economic themes intended to inspire animosity and class division with new, entirely imaginary problems requiring the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the State.
Van Jones, the Communist run out of his White House advisor position via the exposure of his political background by Glenn Beck, refers indiscreetly to trying “to pretend” that EPA interventions are required by market failure.
Of course, praying to jaguar goddesses addicted to human sacrifice may not really be so inappropriate, if you happen to be a member of the international bureaucratic clerisy using alleged Anthropogenic climate change as a tool for gaining economic advantage.
The latest Wikileaks document dump, reports the Guardian, reveals that US diplomats used threats and bribery and spied on developing countries in an underhanded effort to force them to conform to a regulatory regime dictated by the leading Western governments.
Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.
The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
Negotiating a climate treaty is a high-stakes game, not just because of the danger warming poses to civilisation but also because re-engineering the global economy to a low-carbon model will see the flow of billions of dollars redirected.
When I was a boy, in most parts of the United States outside the largest and most intensely regulated metropolitan areas, if you owned some land and wanted to build something, you could go right ahead and build it. Over the years, the empire of government has grown unceasingly, zoning regulations, infinitely detailed building codes, environmental regulations, and complex systems of permits and permissions have spread across America like kudzu.
Your tax dollars support what the Declaration of Independence referred to as “a multitude of New Offices, and… swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” Every one of those officials feels obligated to see to it that the American property owner conforms to every item and detail of the regulatory regime which represents the entire raison d’etre of his career and livelihood.
Roland Toy, at American Thinker, describes his own, perfectly typical encounter with the system Americans have enthusiastically created to protect them from themselves.
133 days earlier I had submitted plans for my house to the county building department. A month later, the department sent a letter explaining that the proposed septic system had to be relocated 60 feet to the east of a location the county had approved earlier. However, in recent months a bald eagle’s nest had been spotted in adjacent public lands, and the county now required a buffer between the nest and any development on my property. Fine. I had seen a bald eagle soaring overhead — once with something that looked like a small animal it its claws. Anything for the symbol of America. And the septic system relocation was less than trivial, a few steps in one direction in the midst of millions of acres of sandy wilderness that was already officially sanctioned for a septic system.
The problem arose when the relocation required a new permit application, complete with fresh paperwork, hefty fees, a two-week waiting period for public input, and a new soil study by a professional soil engineer on a county-approved list.
I called the man who had signed the letter and appealed to his common sense, to his engineering acumen, and finally to his decency. Any moron could see that the septic system could be nudged a few feet with zero environmental impact — the approved sand dune was the same whether 8′ or 80′ or 8000′ feet from the property line. What could possibly be accomplished by breathing life into a new bureaucratic tangle? But in the end, my entreaties failed and the conversation amounted to mutual declarations of war. I backed off when he began making vague references to a possible environmental assessment report. Thus began a slow-motion shell game in which a bureaucrat, after extracting an extortionate fee, transferred irrelevant paperwork from one file folder to another. Some highlights of that loony process ($2,831.00, 103 days) are shown below:
* Submit plans to county ($450.00).
* County disapproves plans, requires variance.
* Variance request submitted ($125.00).
* Request denied. New application and soil study required.
* At an arbitration meeting ($250.00), the arbitrator rules for the county. Not technically a county employee, he’s on a chummy first-name basis with the county representatives.
* Start new application ($125.00) and commission a second soil study ($1,350.00) by an engineer on the county-approved list .
* Plan reviewers fail to show for a meeting. They’re at a ‘team-building’ retreat. In an unpleasant scene, two customer service representatives complain about my attitude after I tell them that for the non-meeting I had to drive 180 miles over winding mountain roads.
* County approves new septic system location.
* Craig makes site visit for percolation test ($541.00).
Back at the percolation test, all that was history. I understood it and wasn’t destined to repeat it. But Craig had been leafing through his papers for a long while. “Is there a problem?” I asked.
“Your soil engineer isn’t on the new approved list.”
“He’s gotta be there. You guys gave me his name.”
Craig pulled out his cell phone and spoke intently with his superiors. Eventually he hung up and said, “It’s probably nothing serious. But something’s screwy with the new list and I can’t do the inspection until the paperwork is right.”
“What’s the problem?”
“We’re not sure yet, but your engineer just isn’t on the list.”
“So you don’t know how long it’s going to take to fix or if it can be fixed?”
Craig muttered abjectly, “I’m sorry. I’m still on probation and they audit me.”
Like contentious litigation, every interaction with the building department had a tendency to take on an unpredictable life of its own. This was a moment of truth. God may have understood the SNAFU that had kept my engineer’s name off the list, but I didn’t. When does reasonable accommodation become craven appeasement? Would I continue working with the totalitarians who were polluting my life? Would I start another round of telephone tag, being stood up at meetings, preparing for rigged arbitrations, and paying the fees? Would I have to commission yet another soil assessment, the third one that would reiterate what everybody already knew? Or would I draw a line in the literal sand and rebel against the yoke of tyranny? A crazy image flashed through my mind. I was in the percolation test hole with a rifle, holding off swarms of g-men in bulletproof vests as helicopters and a lone bald eagle circled overhead.
Peter Wood, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, describes how a new kind of totalitarian stupidity is taking over America’s colleges. But the good news is it’s displacing the older equivalent stupidity: racial cant. In other words: Ebola isn’t all bad; it’s killing off the Plague bacillus.
The pursuit of diversity on campuses remains a highly visible priority, but it is being subtly demoted by enthusiasm for sustainability. As an ideology, diversity is running out of steam, while sustainability is on fire. This month hundreds of colleges will mark the eighth annual Campus Sustainability Day, with activities to include a Webcast offering “social-change strategies and tools” to help campuses lower carbon emissions. …
Diversity and sustainability are the two most characteristic ideas of the modern academy. Diversity asks us to focus on group identity and personal affiliation, and it puts race at the center of the discussion. Sustainability asks us to focus on humanity’s use of natural resources, and it puts climate at the center of discussion. Outwardly, diversity and sustainability belong to separate narratives. They deal with different topics and might, in principle, have no more friction between them than typically exists between English departments and physics labs. Or between polar bears and tropical fish. But in fact, diversity and sustainability have a complicated, decades-old rivalry.
They vie, in effect, for the same conceptual space and the same passions. Both are about repairing the world; both invite exuberant commitment; both are moralistic; and most of all, both are encompassing ideas that crowd out other encompassing ideas. They also compete for the same financial resources.
Diversity and sustainability are also both second-wave movements. Diversity is second-wave affirmative action; sustainability is second-wave environmentalism. …
One index of the rise of sustainability at the expense of diversity is the size of the institutional memberships of their professional groups. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education now lists as members 800 colleges and universities in the United States. The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, by contrast, has about 150 member institutions.
Diversity is a story of a once-fresh ideology that swept through higher education in a spirit of triumph but that quickly seems to be losing its status as the sexiest ideology on campus. Diversiphiles would like to keep the adrenaline flowing, but it is hard. Freshmen now arrive on campus already having sucked on multicultural milkshakes from kindergarten to senior prom. Diversity for them is just the same ol’ same ol’. …
I view this changing of the ideological guard with wariness. Diversity was pretty bad; sustainability may be even worse. Both movements subtract from the better purposes of higher education. Diversity authorizes double standards in admissions and hiring, breeds a campus culture of hypocrisy, mismatches students to educational opportunities, fosters ethnic resentments, elevates group identity over individual achievement, and trivializes the curriculum. Of course, those punishments were something that had to be accepted in the spirit of atoning for the original sin of racism.
But for its part, sustainability has the logic of a stampede. We all must run in the same direction for fear of some rumored and largely invisible threat. The real threat is the stampede itself. Sustainability numbers among its advocates some scrupulous scientists and quite a few sober facilities managers who simply want to trim utility bills. But in the main, sustainability is the triumph of hypothesis over evidence. Its scientific grounding is mostly a matter of models and extrapolations and appeals to authority. Evoking imminent and planet-destroying catastrophe, sustainatopians call for radical changes in economic arrangements and social patterns. Higher education is summoned to set aside whatever it is doing to help make this revolution in production, distribution, and consumption a reality. …
The diversity movement has always been rife with contradictions. Seeking to promote racial equality, it evolved into a system that perpetuates inequalities. But whatever else it is, the diversity movement thirsts to be part of mainstream America. Its ultimate goal is to make diversity a principle of the same standing as freedom and equality in our national life. The sustainability movement, by contrast, has no such affection for the larger culture or loyalty to the American experiment. It dismisses the comforts of American life, including our political freedom, as unworthy extravagance. Sustainability summons us to a supposedly higher good. Personal security, national prosperity, and individual freedom may just have to go as we press on to our low-impact, carbon-free new order. In this sense, it goes beyond promising to redeem us from social iniquity to redeeming us from human nature itself.
Many campus adherents to sustainability may eventually tire of its puritanical preachiness and its unfulfilled prophecies, but for the moment, sustainability has cachet. Diversity, meanwhile, has aged into a static bureaucracy, and diversicrats increasingly spend their energy polishing the spoons. …
In the end, I suspect that a quarter-century or so of hugging identity politics close and trying to feel perpetual shame about the nation’s racial past just proved too dreary. Sustainability may be based on a grimmer view of life in general, but it offers relief from that ever-expanding story of group oppression that had eventually become all that diversity had to offer. In an odd way, sustainability is liberating.
British director, film-writer Richard Curtis (best-known in America for Four Wedding and a Funeral) evidently thought what he was doing to nonconformists with the latest 10/10 carbon reduction eco-campaign in his No Pressure short film was funny, but viewers are reacting with distaste to its gleefully sanguinary totalitarianism.
The film’s makers are evidently trying to remove it from public view, and climate skeptics are working hard keeping it available.
James Delingpole
UPI reports that another great European nanny state measure is on the way.
[S]tart-stop systems that turn off a car when it is idling and reignite the engine when the driver releases the brake will be coming to the United States and Canada in the next five years, The Detroit News reported.
The technology is widespread in Europe and will be embraced in North America as a tool to meet increasingly stringent fuel-economy and emissions requirements, auto experts say.
“Engineers kill for one-tenth of a mile per gallon,” Joe Phillippi of AutoTrends Consulting Inc. said. “In city driving, it would make a huge impact.”
Estimates vary, but the consensus is shutting off the engine at a stop can improve fuel economy as much as 15 percent.
Consumer acceptance could be a challenge.
“It is a strange sensation because the engine suddenly turns off,” said analyst Stephanie Brinley of EMC Strategic Communications in Troy, Mich. “It is quick and seamless, but you can tell it happens.”
Half of the new cars in Europe will have start-stop technology in 2012, and North America will reach that figure in 2016, said Frank Frister, product manager with Bosch North America, one of the companies developing stop-start systems.
There you’ll be stopped at the light, and in front of you will be one of those holier-than-thous who has taken care to equip himself with the latest earth-saving technology.
The light changes, the complex electronic system stutters, and the democrat in the Prius fiddles with his ignition trying to get his engine restarted as seconds tick by and your blood pressure rises.
You probably didn’t even know that the humble carp, an oily fish belonging to the Eurasian family Cyprinidae (which includes goldfish), constituted a problem.
The Chinese and Japanese think carp are beautiful and keep them in ponds for ornamental purposes.
Carp is an important staple in Continental European cuisine, most familiar in America in the form of the Jewish Gefilte fish.
Carp are popular with anglers in Europe, and to British bait fishermen a good carp can represent a real trophy. Isaac Walton claimed, in the Compleat Angler (1653), that
The Carp is the queen of rivers; a stately, a good, and a very subtle fish; that was not at first bred, nor hath been long in England, but is now naturalised.”
But for the Federal government, carp are a SERIOUS PROBLEM. One requiring yet another Czar.
The White House has tapped a former leader of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and the Indiana Wildlife Federation as the Asian carp czar to oversee the federal response to keeping the invasive species out of the Great Lakes.
On a conference call today with Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and other congressional leaders, President Obama’s Council on Environmental Quality announced the selection of John Goss to lead the near $80 million, multi-pronged federal attack against Asian carp.
“This is a serious challenge, a serious threat,” Durbin said. “When it comes to the Asian carp threat, we are not in denial. We are not in a go-slow mode. We are in a full attack, full-speed ahead mode. We want to stop this carp from advancing.”
Asian carp, which have steadily moved toward Chicago since the 1990s, present a challenge for scientists and fish biologists. The fish are aggressive eaters, consuming as much as 40 percent of their body weight a day in plankton, and frequently beat out native fish for food, threatening those populations.
They are also prolific breeders with no natural predators in the U.S. The fish were imported in the 1970s to help wastewater treatment facilities in the South keep their retention ponds clean. Mississippi River flooding allowed the fish to escape and then move into the Missouri and Illinois rivers. Some species can grow to more than 100 pounds.
The challenge for Goss, who was director of the Indiana DNR under two governors and served for four years as the executive director of the Indiana National Wildlife Federation, will be to make sure millions in federal money is spent efficiently, to oversee several on-going studies — including one looking into the possibility of permanently shutting down the Chicago waterway system linking Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River–and to bring together Great Lakes states currently locked in a courtroom battle over the response to the Asian carp threat.
Does anyone seriously believe that $80 million spent on studies and the creation of a Federal Asian Carp Directorate is really going to stop these frisky critters?
Jim Treacher, at Daily Caller, wrote the admirable headline quoted above.
[Yesterday] afternoon James Jay Lee, a crazy person with a gun, a bomb, and an anti-human manifesto inspired by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, took hostages at the offices of the Discovery Channel in Silver Spring. He was shot and killed by police. The hostages were freed, unharmed.
