Sunday, June 26, 2011

NYT and Bubbles

I was pleased to see that the NYT actually had reverted, if briefly, to being a newspaper instead of a hack mouthpiece for the Obama regime.

They had this very plausible story about the "green energy bubble." And it's true: many of the companies that were recently photo ops for some grinning Obama regime rep (including Mr. Obama himself) have gone belly up. They only were created to suck down subsidies from idiots. A classic bubble. The Green she go boom. Pop go a bunch of weasels.

But then I looked more closely. Far from focusing on the actual bubble, the one in green energy, the one that has already burst, the Green Lady of News is actually forecasting a bubble in...natural gas. The discovery of enormous new reserves of cheap, clean-burning fuel is very annoying to the Green Energy Gods, the apparatchiks of the regime who want to use public money to pay off their pals. And for the "peak idiocy" bunch....fugeddaboudit. Natural gas is a disaster for the authoritarians who want us all to return to sad stone age lives perched in caves and contemplating the sins of "late" capitalism.

Amazing. Just when you think the NYTimes can't sink any lower, they submerge into the muck.

(Nod to the Blonde)

2 comments:

Ryan said...

In fairness, the Fisher Coachworks that went under trying to make electric buses was almost certainly a spin-off of GM's old Fisher division into a private company, so they were doubly doomed.

J Scheppers said...

I am think that I am mungerian green: If it takes more resources than it saves it ain't recycling or green.

So a proposed challenge to the carbon tax crowd, what if they started at home and applied a carbon tax to the federal budget (returned to the taxpayers). In the US 1 Metric ton of carbon is produce for each $2200 GDP. Let's say we use the IPCC recommendation of about $30 per MT as the tax rate.

The tax on the $3.4 trillion 2010 budget would be $46 billion. How many Congress people would be able to reduce spending by that amount for the environment?

I know the irrationality of the accounting to make this possible. But the clarity that congress would not reduce their resource allocations to compensate for the externality of their CO2 makes it clear congress does not truly believe in IPCC price of carbon.

I temper my remarks that congress is smart enough to know that a carbon tax is guaranteed to be disastrous for re-election, so it is not in the cards for the US at least not in the near future.