George Will and Walter Wolfman Williams because they weighed in on energy issues. George Will is a nonfiction baseball writer and Wolfman claims to be an economist, so neither one by definition knows anything about energy consumption except that they do a lot of it. But when Kathleen Parker weighs in on Cap and Trade the whole world must be …what waiting with baited breathe? I mean:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0720parkerjul20,0,3212727.column
Kathleen Parker
Bio
Kathleen Parker assesses the country’s mental health with a reporter’s gimlet eye combined with a sense of humor.
“My ambitious goal,” she says, “is to try to inject a little sanity into a world gone barking mad.”
She came to column-writing the old-fashioned way, working her way up journalism’s ladder from smaller papers to larger ones.
“I never set out to become a commentator – and do continue to resist the label ‘pundit’ – but I found that keeping my opinion out of my writing was impossible,” says Parker. “One can only stand watching from the sidelines for so long without finally having to say, ‘Um, excuse me, but you people are nuts.'”
Her writings in support of American troops, first-responders and other front-line participants in the war on terror were among the reasons The Week magazine named her as one of the country’s top five columnists in 2004 and 2005.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/biographies/kathleen-parker.html
Kathleen Parker
» Columnist | Parker started her column in 1987 when she was a staff writer for The Orlando Sentinel. Her column was nationally syndicated in 1995 and she joined The Washington Post Writers Group in 2006. Along the way, she has contributed articles to The Weekly Standard, Time, Town & Country, Cosmopolitan and Fortune Small Business, and she serves on USA Today’s Board of Contributors and writes for that newspaper’s op-ed page. She is a regular guest on “The Chris Matthews Show” on NBC. Her book “Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care” was published in 2008 by Random House.
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http://www.sj-r.com/opinions/x1911310943/Kathleen-Parker-A-crude-reality-about-clean-energy-security
Kathleen Parker: A crude reality about clean energy, security
Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — What’s in a name? A bit of deception when it comes to the American Clean Energy and Security Act.A more accurate title might be: the American Clean Energy and Less Security Act.To get to the bottom of what’s wrong with the 1,400-page energy bill passed by the House of Representatives, you have to dig deeper than Canada’s tar sands. And what you find there is just as sludgy — and taxing to process.Crudely refined: The greener we are, the less secure we’re likely to be.
Meaning, we either can be green or we can be less dependent on oil from terrorist-sponsoring states. But under the current energy bill, we can’t be both.
Put another way: The more we cap our carbon, the happier the Saudis are. That’s because most Middle Eastern crude is more easily accessible and requires less processing than what we and our friendlier neighbors can produce.
If you don’t know this, it’s because beer summits are more fun than math. Herewith, a short course for word people.
Basically, the energy bill focuses primarily on stationary sources of CO2 emissions (power and manufacturing plants) and would do little to address mobile sources of emissions, i.e. transportation.
Since virtually all U.S. stationary sources use domestic energy — coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar, biomass, etc. — the energy bill would do almost nothing about reducing oil or gasoline imports. Foreign sources provide about 70 percent of the oil used in refining gasoline and diesel.
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I am not going to report anymore of this drivel than the allowed several paragraphs. If you want your intelligence insulted you can go read the rest of it. First because she has heard it over and over from the military she believes that WHERE we get our energy from has anything to do with our national security. Because OPEC kicked our economic asses after the oil embargo in 1973-76 the myth has been propagated that our energy sources “hold us hostage”. Well if we had a diverse enough portfolio then that would never be true AND if we had moved away from the carbon economy back then we would not even be having this discussion.
There in lies (pun intended) her second stupidity that is she fails to mention ANY alternative to Saudi Oil or the carbon economy. She does not take into account that OPEC oil only amounts to about 20% of our total imports. Canada, Venezuela and Nigeria along with Mexico are our biggest oil partners. Nor does she take into account the alternatives to carbon (batteries) are well underway especially in the transportation sector where gasoline consumption will continue its decline for the foreseeable future until we use NONE at all.
But the biggest hugest irony is that “Cap and Trade” is a time tested Industry suggested method of modifying our emissions. It was used most notably in the 70s to get rid of or mute acid rain. It worked very well and only modestly contributed to the rise in electrical costs. The same can be expected in the carbon market. The fact is that we need to quit burning coal all together or we will burn ourselves out of house and home. She doesn’t even remotely address the issue of our using the atmosphere as an open sewer. Dumb da Dumb dumb…just the facts mam.
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