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Posts Tagged ‘Steven Chu’

The Dennis Moore Award: Hands Down Winner Is Steven Chu.

by Flyovercountry ( 75 Comments › )
Filed under Energy at March 7th, 2012 - 8:30 am

Political Cartoons by Henry Payne

Good news for those of you suckers who could actually afford, even after the government subsidy, to actually buy a Chevy Volt.  It appears as though your ridiculously over priced car, will remain a true collector’s item, a very rare make and model indeed. Chevrolet has announced suspension in the manufacture of these spontaneously combustive automobiles. Who really cares if the U.S. taxpayers actually paid about $200,000 per unit sold so far, so that only the very wealthiest among us could have a car that runs on the more efficient, but woefully impractical electricity. It makes you feel good and confident in your smug, to know that the very dimmest among us will believe that you are actually doing some good for the environment. As long as you have the appearance of someone who cares about the little people who are being taxed to death in order to subsidize your pompous lifestyle, that’s really the important thing here isn’t it.

Fear not America, our President and his Administration full of dolts have a plan to bring back the unwanted Volt and inflict this very dangerous car upon us. While running for President, those of us who actually listened to Barack Obama heard him tell us that he felt that sending the price signal of $4.00 per gallon for gasoline would be sufficient for us all to switch to a more acceptable behavior, of buying a massively expensive hybrid vehicle or utilizing the not yet built high speed rail. As it turns out, $4.00 per gallon gasoline hasn’t worked to do that just yet. So Steven Chu, our Secretary of Energy, has announced that he intends to use his bureaucracy to insure that gas prices climb even higher. Welcome to the new purpose for the Department of Energy. When Jimmy Carter, the last Marxist to be elected President, established this monstrous Federal Agency, he told us the purpose was to insure that there would always be plenty of energy for our economy to consume, and to build what ever we needed in order to maintain our economic well being. Today, the Department of Energy is there to insure that we have no energy to use.

As is always the case with these well intentioned government interventions, there is an unintended consequence. Besides the destruction of our economic well being based on a world wide hoax, besides the havoc created by eliminating our capacity to produce an affordable source of energy based on the myth that we would be able to replace it with fairy dust, we have done something that even the staunchest Socialist among us would never support or even defend. We have instituted a regressive form of wealth redistribution. This scheme of producing hybrid cars which cost the taxpayers $200,000 plus to produce and then sell them only to the very wealthiest members of our society at a $200,000 loss is stealing from the poor to give to the rich. How does it feel my fellow citizens to know that you in fact own a Chevy Volt, or at least part of one, but will never be allowed to drive it. That privilege is reserved for the Obama Supporters well above the marginal tax rate where the majority of Americans reside. But have no fear, when you have the temerity to balk at the unnecessarily inflated gas prices, our President will smugly tell you that you should go out and participate in one of his approved behaviors. It is simply astounding to me that some on our side believe that we will not be able to defeat this man.

Cross Posted at Musings of a Mad Conservative.

Hat tip to Huckfunn

Obama? Nukes? Huh?

by snork ( 127 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Climate, Economy, Technology at January 30th, 2010 - 8:00 am

From Bloomberg, we have this baffling article: Obama Said to Seek $54 Billion in Nuclear-Power Loans Baffling not only because the left has never been nuke-friendly in the US, but also because of the details.

Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama, acting on a pledge to support nuclear power, will propose tripling U.S. loan guarantees for new reactors to more than $54 billion, an administration official said.

The additional loan guarantees in Obama’s budget, which will be released Feb. 1, are part of an effort to bolster nuclear-power production after the president called for doing so in his State of the Union address Jan. 27. In a conference call with reporters, Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced a panel to find a solution to storing the waste generated by nuclear plants.

The motivation I think is pretty clear. They know that they aren’t going to get a cap-n-trade kind of deal, and they also know that the economics of solar and wind just doesn’t pencil out, and so if they want to reduce CO2 emissions (and punish the coal industry), the way to do it is to incent nukes.

But here’s the part that doesn’t make any sense:

For the 2011 budget, the department will add $36 billion to the $18.5 billion already approved for nuclear-power plant loan guarantees, according to the official, who asked not to be identified because the budget hasn’t been released. Congress started the program in 2005 to encourage new plant construction, but the department has yet to issue a loan guarantee.

[…]

Industry groups such as the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute have said the loan guarantees are critical to reviving the industry because most companies can’t afford the capital investment in a facility that can take a decade to complete. The institute in a December report put the cost of a reactor at as much as $9 billion.

So the loans need to be guaranteed by the government and the guarantees have to be budgeted? It sure sounds to me like the operators have no intention of repaying the loans, and this is a back door subsidy. If the economics pencils out, there should be no need for a guarantee, and if risk is an issue, the biggest risk is legal or regulatory, and the government should indemnify them against lawsuits and regulations coming at them in the future.

I guess that in a roundabout way, they have indemnified them against these risks, but they’re also indemnifying them against other risks, such as the wholesale price of power going down, and the risk of their own operational mismanagement. If the loans are guaranteed, then give all the mucky mucks big fat raises, because Uncle Sam will pick up the tab.

Just like this student loan forgiveness, this kind of guarantee/forgiveness is welfare. In this case corporate welfare. Let’s get out of the way and let them build nukes, but if they won’t do it on their own (and ditto for refineries, btw), the market’s trying to tell us that we don’t need them, at least right now.

The money would be better spent on research into next-generation technologies, but Chu is wetting his pants that the climate is going to melt next year, and we have to do something, big, and now.  I think their open mind toward nukes is a step in the right direction, but just watch – this is going to be another massive boondoggle.

UPDATE: As an example of what can go wrong with a massive government-backed crash program of nuclear power plant building, read the history of WPPSS.

UPDATE II: An interesting article about one of the next-generation nuke technologies, Thorium power. Thorium is considerably more abundant than uranium, but that’s not the only advantage.


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