Pirate's Cove

Back to San Fran

Republicans and Democrats alike are working to preserve our state’s rich environmental heritage so future generations will be able to enjoy our parks, rivers, forests, beaches, habitats and open spaces, though we often differ in how we approach our shared goal.

But protecting the environment should not give state bureaucrats free rein to recklessly spend our hard-earned tax dollars to create expensive new government programs, without accountability to lawmakers or taxpayers. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the appointed bureaucrats at the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) have recently proposed.

The PUC recently voted to impose a surcharge on all electricity and natural gas customers in California to pay for a new $600 million think tank to study global warming. It is simply irresponsible that, at a time when we are paying record high prices for gas and groceries, the PUC is taking more from ratepayers to spend on a new program.

It is also inappropriate for the PUC to increase utility rates and spend $600 million to create an unnecessary government-run think tank at a time when our state faces a $17 billion deficit.

This is the essense of AGW: create awareness, study groups, spend lots of money, but, never really accomplish anything but feel good projects and ones that cost massive amounts of money and damage the economy and people.

What are the Democrats doing to offset their massive carbon footprint for their convention? Buy lightbulbs! That should do it!

But this year, Massachusetts delegates to the August Democratic National Convention in Colorado – billed as trying to be the most environmentally-sustainable convention in history – are being asked to engage in an offset program that, if it does what it says, makes a lot of local sense.

Delegates and their supporters can offset travel, hotel and food by replacing incandescent light bulbs in local low-income homes with far more efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs. The program cuts down on carbon dioxide, the key global warming gas – and saves families money.

First, what do those low income folks do when the bulb dies? It is environmentally dangerous to just throw it in the garbage, and, it is not easy to dispose of them properly. Second, for the androgynous malcontent who wrote the story, the main greenhouse gas is water vapor. Please buy a net to catch one of those elusive clues.

But, hey, good news! Global warming to spark increase in US wildfires

TODAY much of the north-western US wilderness is already a tinderbox, but thanks to global warming, wildfires will be scorching even more land every year by the end of the century.

Uh huh. It couldn’t have anything to do with the enviro-wackos constantly suing and forcing land and parks owners to leave all the dead brush where it lies, right? Say, if they are so smart as to know what will happen in 92 years, could they tell me what the weather will be like mid July on the Jersey Shore when I go for a visit to the ‘rentals?

BTW, for all the AGW disciples, you keep saying we should only listen to climatologists. So, why should we listen to James Hansen, whose degrees are not in climatology, but mathmatics, astronomy, and physics?