Quick Roundup 324
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Best of the Best
Close to a year ago, I noted with glee that, as measured by carbon emissions, Texas ranked as our nation's most productive state.
But who is king of Texas? H-Town and its ... (chortle!) ... environs!
I saw this a week or so ago in a report from the Houston Chronicle that is no longer online, but another source has the gist of it:
Harris County in Texas emitted more than 18.6 million tons of CO2 [Boo-ya! -- ed] in 2002, the latest year for which data was available, according to Vulcan, a three-year project funded by NASA and the US Department of Energy. The county is home to oil and natural gas plants and Houston, which has about 2 million people.The bad news is that this also makes the Houston area -- and its energy customers nationwide -- prime targets for the new taxes on energy use that are all the rage with the global warming crowd.
It was nice to see that this point did not go unnoticed by one of the sources I checked when getting ready to post this morning. The Arizona Republic notes as much regarding an Arizona county that ranked high on the same rogues list for the crime of generating copious amounts of electricity.
Because a decent portion of Phoenix electricity is generated up there at the Four Corners Power Plant run by Arizona Public Service Co. And the rural county gets a double hit from nearby San Juan Generating Station, run by Public Service Co. of New Mexico.Too bad the editiorial comments in that article stopped with that. These new taxes will, I supect, remain somewhat popular as long as enough people feel that they are "doing the right thing" in accepting them as a means of stopping global warming and remain ignorant or forgetful of the proper purpose of government. And so long as they do not see that altruism, the morality used to push global warming hysteria, is wrong.
Phoenix energy thus is one of the big contributors to global-warming emissions, and few experts doubt that those emissions will soon be taxed or traded or otherwise made more expensive.
That means buying electricity in Phoenix will get more expensive.
The only way to successfully oppose global warming hysteria is to reject altruism, which enables it, at its root.
Wrong Metal
Flashbacks seem to be my theme this morning.... Here's another.
Back in March, a report that the steel penny was about to make a comeback caught my eye.
Now, with each new nickel costing more than seven cents to manufacture, our government is talking about doing the same thing with the five-cent piece:
Surging prices for copper, zinc and nickel have some in Congress trying to bring back the steel-made pennies of World War II, and maybe using steel for nickels, as well.The story errs in calling this conundrum evidence that "times are tough" without considering why. High commodity prices across the board are evidence that the government has been inflating the money supply.
Copper and nickel prices have tripled since 2003 and the price of zinc has quadrupled, said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., whose subcommittee oversees the U.S. Mint.
The fact that they're calling steel a "more economical composition" for the coin oozes irony. This whole problem is a direct result of our government's insistence on an inflatable fiat currency, which has no actual value. So long as the government can print more and more money, nothing can remain "economical" for long.
In addition to numerous interesting charts of commodity prices in gold at Priced in Gold, there is a morbidly interesting pair of charts depicting the price of the U.S. Dollar in gold that should make the point.
(As an aside, I like the following line from a discussion of postage prices in gold: "[U]nless you foresee a strong US Dollar in the future, I suggest that you forget the 'Forever Stamp' and stick with the 'Forever Metal' - GOLD.")
Are all the cons "crunchy" now?
We'll end on a double flashback. Think "crunchy conservative" meets "Newt the Statist".
Via HBL comes news of an advertisement that features Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson joining forces to promote global warming hysteria. Here it is:
And if you're a real masochist, you will find more where that came from, including an ad mentioned by Harry Bisnwanger that stars none other than Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi!
-- CAV
3 comments:
I don't have the facts and figures right off hand but, what strikes me is that (congratulations aside) 18.6 million tons is really kind of small, when compared to the size of the earth, or Houston for that matter. If you were to take all those tons and put them together in one place it wouldn't be very impressive. I think it was George Reisman I was reading where he put together the total world mining figures and then converted it into length and compared it to the size of the earth, showing that even though it sounded like a lot, millions of tons takes up a tiny sliver of the planet's amazing size. The Earth is feakin' huge!
It clocks in at (18.6e6*2000*1000)/5.148e18, or 7.23/10000 th OF A PERCENT of the earth's atmospheric mass.
This would be a change of +.038% of the atmosphere's CO2 -- over a year.
Thanks for bringing that up.
Oops!
Just realized I was about to convert Houston's emissions to volume.
In fact, Houston's CO2 emissions amount to 100*1000*18.6e6/5.148e18, or 3.6 x 10-7 percent of the atmosphere's mass, or 9.5 x 10-7 percent of the total amount of CO2.
Yes. Each year, all of Houston's cars, people, and refineries PUT TOGETHER add a whopping nearly one MILLIONTH of a percent to the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
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