In the Pipeline: 6/19/13

Say your prayers and do your penance, the end is coming. The Wall Street Journal (6/18/13) reports: “Consider the meaning in contemporary jargon of the famous carbon footprint that we all leave behind us. What is it, after all, if not the gaseous equivalent of Original Sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing? We can all gauge the volume of our emissions, day after day, with the injunction to curtail them, just as children saying their catechisms are supposed to curtail their sins.”

 His Majesty may shout ‘forward’ towards Germany, but the Germams are shouting back go back. The Institute for Energy Research (6/19/13) reports: “While Obama looks to Berlin for guidance, German companies are looking to America for salvation. Ulrich Grillo, president of the Federation of German Industries, warned the government last week that rising energy costs would force German firms to flee to other countries, including the United States. Grillo credited the shale boom with making America a more attractive investment option. Amazingly, despite the talk of energiewende, Germany is building a large amount of coal-fired electricity generation. New coal-fired plants with a capacity of 5.3 gigawatts of electricity will come on line this year. In total, there are 10 new coal and lignite power plants currently under construction in Germany. While Germany talks about reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and provides large subsidies for renewables, the country is in fact expanding new coal resources, unlike the United States.”

 There has been no greater savior of rural America than the shale boom. The Weekly Standard 6/24/13 reports: “Today, Stanley is anything but quiet. There’s a nearly constant roar of diesel engines as tanker trucks haul oil barrels down Route 2. The Cenex gas station and truck stop in Stanley, once a lonely outpost for the occasional truck driver or farmer, is full of customers. Even on a rainy morning, the sound of power tools echoes from the new mid-rise hotel being constructed across the street. The Subway next door, only a few weeks old, has a line out the door by noon. The people waiting, young and old, chat with one another about job openings (“Hess is hiring in Tioga”), where they’re living (in a busted RV, at the Microtel), where they come from (every place from Louisiana to Alaska), and how they ended up in this forgotten corner of the country. Where there once was silence there’s now a hum.“

Until then these cuisinarts of the sky will continue…. The Telegraph (6/17/13) reports: “I wonder what it will take before the world truly wakes up to the horror, the corruption, the expense, the pointlessness, the total wrongness-in-every-way of the wind industry. My guess – and it will happen – is the decapitation, by a rogue turbine blade, of an innocent passer-by. Till then, though, we have photographs like this to send the mind boggling as to why anyone, anywhere can still be so purblind as to go on championing these bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco crucifixes.”

There’s presenting your argument and then there’s outright deception, we think this is the latter. This interactive map displays petrochemical accident in bright red and by default hides the plants with no reported accidents. Center for Effective Government (6/18/12) reports: “As you can see from the map, there are many facilities that have at least one of the listed chemicals on-site, and many of those facilities have had at least one accident. Find your community on our map. Examine the risk management plan for facilities near your home. And ask your local public officials if they’ve seen the plan.”