Wind power supplies about 2% of the energy in the US and in 2009 that was expected to rise to 20% by 2030. The construction of wind farms is buoyed by the 30% tax credit for investment in them but the price for electricity generated by wind energy has fallen recently in to rates below those for electricity generated by natural gas in some areas.

Proponents of wind energy call it a “key” solution to future energy needs, unless it these farms are visible to wealthy liberals. Then they become a menace.

Cape Wind is a windmill farm approved by development by the current administration. The project is expected to cover 24 square miles, cost $2.5 billion and generate enough electricity to furnish power for Cape Cod, Nanatucket Island and Martha’s Vineyard. The project has been opposed by the Kennedy family and Walter Cronkite who said

“Our natural treasures should be off limits to industrialization, and Nantucket is one of those treasures.”

Cronkite later changed his tune when his hypocrisy became too burdensome.

Reliability of wind turbines remains an issue, as well as does life expectancy. Wind turbines were thought to have a life span of 20 years but a former chief wind turbine engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory expects turbines to last 7-11 years. The replacement of gearboxes is expensive. This expense can become problematic when repairs become necessary. I drove from Palm Springs to LA a few years ago and at least one of out of ten windmills was inoperative.

Texas has spent billions on wind farms and has become dependent on wind power. The result of the dependency on green energy that is Texas is suffering from rolling blackouts.

Wyoming is said to have one of the highest wind power potentials of any state in the US and it is home to several wind farms. One of them, Foote Creek Rim, is located near Arlington.

Arlington, Wyoming would seem like the ideal venue for a wind farm to generate clean green energy. It has an an average annual windspeed of 31 mph with gusts occasionally exceeding 100 mph. Arlington, Wyoming also recently endured an extreme windchill of -54 degrees and put on display the effect of severe cold on metal.

Another victim of global warming
Anthony Watts observes:

Combine cold temperatures that make steel brittle along with gusty winds, and you have a Titanic recipe for disaster.

While windmills won’t operate without wind, they will also not operate when the winds are too strong.

At higher speeds the turbines automatically shut down – a feature which allows them to withstand Wyoming’s 125-mph gusts.

In addition:

The turbines are also adapted to operate reliably in extremely cold conditions.

LOL.

Years ago near to where I live my family and I frequented a Chinese restaurant whose food was excellent. With amusement we noted that many of the meals were described as

“Our chef’s most favored dish.”

So when I read an article about the climate and it contains the phrase

“the world’s most respected climate scientists”

I cannot stop thinking about the restaurant and begin laughing out loud. It holds the same meaning to me as does the menu.

NPR provided a good example not long ago.

The year 2010 tied 2005 with the warmest year on record. That makes 34 consecutive years where the global temperature is higher than the average temperature in the 20th century. Last year was also the wettest.

The article quotes John Christy of the University of Alabama:

John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, sees the same general warming trend in his measurements of global temperature. Those are based on satellite measurements of the planet’s air from the surface up to 35,000 feet.

“The take-home lesson is that if you have an El Nino, you’re going to have a hot year,” he says. “But I just finished shoveling eight inches of global warming off my driveway this Monday here in Alabama. So whatever the globe is doing, your local weather can have a completely different picture, that’s for sure.”

(emphasis mine)

We’ll get back to that later. 2010 was the hottest year on record, even before 2010 was over.

Even as negotiators in Cancun struggled Friday to reach a modest climate accord at the U.N.-sponsored talks here, new temperature readings released by NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies show 2010 now ranks as the hottest climate year on record.

But hold on a minute. Maybe it wasn’t THE hottest- maybe it was only tied for the hottest:

According to climatologists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, 2010 was a very hot year. While anyone who witnessed the Vikings Metrodome collapse might not have seen this coming, NASA says that data from 1,000 climate stations shows 2010, as a whole, to be statistically tied for being the hottest year in recorded history.

NOAA gets in on the “tied” mantra.

According to NOAA scientists, 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year of the global surface temperature record, beginning in 1880. This was the 34th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th century average. For the contiguous United States alone, the 2010 average annual temperature was above normal, resulting in the 23rd warmest year on record.

And NASA insisted that warming continues unabated.

Global warming has neither stopped nor slowed in the past decade, according to a draft analysis of temperature data by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Now take note of this from David Rose’s article the Daily Telegraph:

But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications – not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole.

Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US Vice President Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.

~~~~~~

Actually, with the exception of 1998 – a ‘blip’ year when temperatures spiked because of a strong ‘El Nino’ effect (the cyclical warming of the southern Pacific that affects weather around the world) – the data on the Met Office’s and CRU’s own websites show that global temperatures have been flat, not for ten, but for the past 15 years.

(emphasis mine)

Global warming has halted. And an El Nino can raise global temperatures. Hold that thought.

Over at Anthony Watts’ WUWT John Kehr expresses frustration with data coming out of CRU:

The longer I am involved in the global warming debate the more frustrated I am getting with the CRU temperature data. This is the one of the most commonly cited sources of global temperature data, but the numbers just don’t stay put. Each and every month the past monthly temperatures are revised. Since I enter the data into a spreadsheet each month I am constantly seeing the shift in the data. If it was the third significant digit it wouldn’t bother me (very much), but it is much more than that.

The data keeps changing. Downward.

Sep 10th, 2010: January 2010 anomaly was 0.707 °C

Jan 30th, 2011: January 2010 anomaly is now 0.675 °C

That is a 5% shift in the value for last January that has taken place in the past 4 months. All of the initial months of the year show a fairly significant shift in temperature.

Again at WUWT, Dr. David Whitehouse examines a number of databases and points out some really important details.

These five temperature databases I examine give the monthly temperature to thousandths of a degree which is superfluous. When rounded up to a more physically sensible 0.1 deg almost all of the differences between the years of the past decade go away, but that is another story, and not the subject of this post.

He notes that 2010 was an El Nino year. So was 1998, the “hottest year on record.”

He concludes:

Many press reports said that 2010 was a near-record breaking year despite the cooling influence of a La Nina later in the year. What was omitted however was mention of the fact that the reason why the year was marginally warmer than previous years was because of the warming El Nino.

Contrary to press reports the evidence is that 2010 was a year no different from all of the years 2001-2009 with the exception of a moderate to strong El Nino that elevated temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere’s Spring, and a cooling La Nina later in the year. The standstill seen in global temperatures since 2001 continues.

El Nino is described this way:

El Niño is defined by prolonged differences in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures when compared with the average value. The accepted definition is a warming or cooling of at least 0.5 °C (0.9 °F) averaged over the east-central tropical Pacific Ocean. Typically, this anomaly happens at irregular intervals of 2–7 years and lasts nine months to two years.[5] The average period length is 5 years. When this warming or cooling occurs for only seven to nine months, it is classified as El Niño/La Niña “conditions”; when it occurs for more than that period, it is classified as El Niño/La Niña “episodes”.[6]

Even NPR recognized that 2009-2010 was going to be a strong El Nino year. El Nino petered out in May and was replaced by a La Nina.

La Nina is associated with cooler Pacific temperatures.

And snowfall in the Northeast.

There is a very strong potential of heavier than normal snowfalls along the eastern seaboard of the United States at that time especially affecting the Southeastern, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeastern states with drought spreading from southern Texas along to the Gulf states and into parts of the central Midwest.

The picture comes into focus. An El Nino is associated with elevated global temperatures but even with the strongest El Nino on record 2010 was not the warmest year on record and record cold is blasting many parts of the globe.

And it’s a lot colder now than it was 1000 years ago.

We’re not warming. We may be entering a lengthy period of cooling.

From Miami to Maine, Savannah to Seattle, America is caught in an icy grip that one of the U.N.’s top global warming proponents says could mark the beginning of a mini ice age.

And that’s according to our most favored respected scientists.

And you’ll never guess who got one.

The Obama adminstration has issued over 700 waivers granting employers exemptions from participating in Obamacare. Among them is the SEIU, which lobbied hard to have Obamacare implemented so health care costs would be lowered. Now SEIU is exempt because complying with the new cost-lowering law would be too expensive. The SEIU contributed $28 million to the Obama campaign but has no money for Obamacare compliance.

In January the new EPA regulations became effective and almost immediately the Obama administration granted an exemption to the new regulations.

The Obama administration will spare a stalled power plant project in California from the newest federal limits on greenhouse gases and conventional air pollution, U.S. EPA says in a new court filing that marks a policy shift in the face of industry groups and Republicans accusing the agency of holding up construction of large industrial facilities.

The exemption went to the Avenal Power Center, which now is not subject to the current air quality standards. As Tim Carney points out, there’s something curious about this Avenal Power Center:

The proposed Avenal Energy project will be a combined-cycle generating plant consisting of two natural gas-fired General Electric 7FA Gas Turbines with Heat Recovery Steam Generators (HRSG) and one General Electric Steam Turbine.

General Electric.

During his campaign Barack Obama received a great deal of money from GE:

By far, the top recipient of GE money last election was Barack Obama. Obama received far more from GE last cycle — $458,730 — than any candidate in history. The company was in the top 15 of Obama’s fundraising sources. He raised nearly five times as much as McCain from GE, and more than the top 25 Republicans, combined.

Coincidentally, Obama’s plans have evolved such that they are largely congruent with GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s plans. So much so that Carney labeled GE “Government Electric.”

• Obama pushes a cap-and-trade scheme for curbing greenhouse gasses — GE invests in greenhouse gas credits.

• Obama advocates federal support for expanding high-speed rail across the country — GE ramps up its investment in high-speed rail.

• Obama dedicates federal funding to embryonic stem-cell research that destroys human embryos — GE partners with stem-cell giant Geron.

• Obama announces a federal push to curb health care expenses — GE launches “healthymagination,” an initiative pitched as creating more affordable high-tech medical products.

And that was way back in 2009. It’s gotten a lot worse.

The obviousness of political favor in granting waivers should be painfully embarassing were it not for the useful idiocy of the legacy media.

The plot of the movie Logan’s Run has been summarized by one writer in this manner:

In the 23rd century, the survivors of a holocaust now lives within a domed city that is sealed off from the outside world. In the domed city, men and women live in a society where you can only live until you are 30-years old (due to population control and limited resources), the people have two choices: They can either take part in a extermination ceremony called “Carousel” where they are promised of being reborn or they can go on the run and escape to outside the domed city.

Sound vaguely familiar?

Barack Obama is set to impose grand new taxes on the energy industry through EPA regulatory actions and bypass Congress. As noted previously, this will most likely negatively impact the economy via much higher costs for electricity, gasoline and heating oil. It could really not come at a worse time. And Obama did warn us.

“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

What really angers me is that Obama did make clear how Marxist Obama intended to remake this country yet the execrable media did its absolute best to dismiss Obama’s own words.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has ruled that CO2 is a pollutant.

People produce CO2- 2.3 pounds, or 1 kg/day. That means that each person produces 365 kg of CO2 per year and the total CO2 production by the entire US population in one year is 113,150,000 metric tons. The entire CO2 production by the United States is 5,838,181,000 metric tons. That means the people of this country produce 2% of that CO2 each year. Humans contribute a significant portion of the total CO2 emissions into the atmosphere each year.

Something has to be done about that.

Now every useful idiot from Obama on down to Jackson asserts that these new regulations will help clean the air.

But how much? Has anyone asked that? What are the concrete benefits? And what is it we are fighting? Climate change? Climate change happens four times a year where I live and I don’t really want that changed.

If all of the new EPA regulations are implemented, global temperatures will be reduced by six thousandths of one degree Celsius and the sea levels will be halted to the tune of 0.06–0.14 cm by 2100.

Fabulous.

As for warming- have a look at this chart:

You’ll note a couple of things right away. First, fluctuations are common and normal. Second, the Earth was much warmer 1500 years ago that it is today. And that’s without the CO2 levels we see today. So, to post a question- WTF?

Meteorologist Art Horn puts an exclamation point on all of this:

The very small human component of the greenhouse effect has profound implications when governments are considering reducing carbon dioxide concentrations to fight global warming. The United States produces about 20% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions each year. If we were somehow able to shut down all sources of carbon dioxide emissions from the United States, the effect on the global average temperature would be 20% of .1 degree, or .02 degrees. And that’s with shutting down everything that makes carbon dioxide! This decrease of .02 degrees is so small it is completely irrelevant. If achieved, it would drop the global average temperature from 59.0 to 58.98 degrees, and it would take billions, if not trillions, to achieve. After all — we make 87% of our energy from burning fossil fuels. If there were a way to eliminate all carbon dioxide emissions on a global scale, the decrease in temperature would be .1 degree — dropping the temperature from 59.0 degrees to 58.9 degrees. Once again, completely insignificant at a cost that would quite possibly bankrupt the world.

And at least one meteorologist is predicting a new mini ice age.

But let’s ignore all that for a moment. How do we kill those two birds?

Clearly we need to reduce the sources of CO2 emissions, and humans are one source that can be controlled.

As he has no regard for the democratic republic structure of this country, Barack Obama can do a few more extra-Constitutional things. He can issue more Executive Orders to further achieve his ends. He could issue new caps on CO2 emissions by individuals. Once you have used up your limit, you no longer get any medical treatment save for pain pills.

Obama has already begun the process. Death panels have returned, again by regulation. In the WSJ, Rivkin and Foley argue that government is asserting control over one’s bodily autonomy.

This whole scheme doesn’t stand up to legal scrutiny. Government-imposed cost-benefit rationing raises serious constitutional concerns. Individual bodily autonomy is one of the oldest recognized rights. Its constitutional significance is reflected in Supreme Court decisions acknowledging the rights to refuse unwanted treatment and to access treatments such as contraception and abortion. Freedom to make medical decisions is central to the autonomy and dignity encapsulated by the majestic word “liberty” in the Constitution’s due process clauses.

This isn’t to say that government can never interfere with bodily autonomy. State governments can, for example, force citizens to submit to certain treatments (like vaccinations) because of their unique “police power” to protect citizens’ health and safety. And the federal government can ban trade in snake oil treatments through its power to regulate commerce.

They make this point strongly:

If government can limit Americans’ choice of effective medical treatments, there’s no limit to its control over our bodies, and the right to bodily autonomy is an illusion. In the context of the new health law, the FDA’s Avastin decision is the tip of a looming iceberg of government rationing. It must be challenged.

If Obamacare can force a personal mandate upon us and take away bodily autonomy there is no limit to what it can do, including withholding medical treatment once you’ve used up your CO2 emission limit. On the plus side, this would both limit CO2 emissions and lower health care costs.

Before you think this is too out there, remember that Obama’s science czar believes we need forced abortions and mass sterilization to save the planet.

That would kill a lot of birds with two stones. It’s time Obama really got serious.

He could always start with the rich. No one seems to like them right now.

The heaviest snowfall in six decades has largely paralyzed New York and the surrounding states.

Hundreds of airline passengers were stranded for up to 10 hours on the tarmac at overworked Kennedy Airport

City response to storm is slow

Anarchy may break out among stranded airline passengers

Woman waits 30 hours for ambulance after suffering a boken ankle

People are dying for lack of emergency response, including a newborn.

A large city Mayor is overwhelmed. Residents are whining.

There are reports of cannibalism in Madison Square Garden.

(Courtesy Drudge)

Sound familiar? It should.

That cannibalism thing might not really be true, but as Randall Robinson would say, I stand by the rest.

But where is Waldobama during this crisis?

Mele kalikimaka!

He can’t be bothered! He’s on vacation!

George Bush was roundly criticized for his actions following Katrina, but at least he did something. Barack Obama does nothing and escapes media scrutiny completely.

“If you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back at you.”
- Friedrich Nietzche

BP Cited ‘Well Control Situation’ Six Weeks Before Blowout

May 31 (Bloomberg) — BP Plc told regulators six weeks before its well in the Gulf of Mexico exploded that workers were having trouble maintaining control, according to e-mails released yesterday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee investigating the spill.

A March 10 e-mail to Frank Patton, the U.S. Minerals Management Service’s drilling engineer for the New Orleans district, from BP executive Scherie Douglas said the company planned to sever the pipe connecting the well to the rig and plug the hole.

Hello, Obama?

Anyone?

Bueller?

“We are in the midst of a well control situation on MC 252 #001 and have stuck pipe,” Douglas wrote, referring to the subsea block, Mississippi Canyon 252, of the stricken well. “We are bringing out equipment to begin operations to sever the drillpipe, plugback the well and bypass.”

Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, and Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the panel’s oversight subcommittee, released the documents related to oil-well design, and e-mails from March, February and November 2009. The documents “raise questions, but their connection to the blowout, if any, require additional investigation,” the lawmakers said.

The e-mails shows that as early as the second week of March, BP was enlisting help from J. Connor Consulting Inc., a Houston-based firm that advises some of the world’s biggest energy companies on how to respond to oil spills.

So this administration received notice that trouble was a-brewin’.

Federal regulators gave BP permission to cement the well at a shallower depth than normally would have been required after the hole caved in on drilling equipment, the e-mails showed.

There was considerable contact between BP and the regulators under Obama. This is officially Obama’s oil spill.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste”

This is the kind of stuff that makes you believe in conspiracies.

It could be said that Sen. Chuck Schumer catalyzed the banking crisis when he publicly badmouthed IndyMac and caused a panic with a run on the bank that eventually cascaded into the full blown credit crisis. It turned out to be a fortuitous turns of events for Barack Obama who might not have won the Presidential election had it not been for the credit crisis.

Thank you Chuck Schumer.

Now Barack Obama is using the Gulf oil spill crisis to press his energy agenda. Obama has ordered 33 oil wells in the Gulf shut down. That’s going to hurt Louisiana:

Chris John, president of the Mid-Continent Oil & Gas Association, said a temporary shutdown of well operations could put people out of work, and will affect offshore marine service companies, catering companies and Louisiana-based suppliers.

Whether it is really necessary to shut these wells down is a matter of debate:

Given that all 33 rigs recently passed inspections, John suggested that the moratorium is unnecessary.

The effect of halting off-shore drilling could be catastrophic:

“While we dream about a new energy system that is decades in the future, the prices that consumers will have to pay for things like gasoline, electricity, and diesel would just skyrocket” if America halts offshore driller, Hofmeister tells Aaron and Henry in the accompanying segment. “Prices could get to the point where fixed-income and low-income people are simply taken out of the personal mobility marketplace, which would be a shock and unnecessary because of our unwillingness to produce domestic resources.”

How much of a shock? $6-8 a gallon.

If you have watching this terrible event closely, you’ll note that Obama did not take it seriously at first. Then as the public outcry got louder and pressure grew on Obama he began to ratchet up the pressure on BP, rattling the saber and threatening BP with prosecution. If the public turns on Obama even more, one almost expects that Obama would simply incarcerate BP’s CEO.

Obama has seized upon this crisis to push his dream agenda:

“The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future,” Obama said. “That means [making] everything from our homes and businesses to our cars and trucks more energy efficient. It means tapping into our natural gas reserves, and moving ahead with our plan to expand our nation’s fleet of nuclear power plants. And it means rolling back billions of dollars in tax breaks to oil companies so we can prioritize investments in clean energy research and development.”

And then other shoe drops:

The president also renewed his call for what critics characterize as a carbon tax.

“The only way the transition to clean energy will succeed is if the private sector is fully invested in this future,” he said. “And the only way to do that is by finally putting a price on carbon pollution.”

This would for certain destroy the country financially and render us entirely unable to compete in the world economy. We can’t say he didn’t warn us:

This would make $6-8 a gallon gas look cheap. That is, if you could find it.

Because that will be the end result if you see where this line of thinking is going…Didn’t stupid “intellectuals” already try this once already when they tried communism? And in the end everyone was poor.

En­vi­ron­men­tal dam­age caused by rich na­t­ions dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly harms poor ones— and costs them more than their to­tal for­eign debt of $1.8 tril­lion, re­search­ers say.

So con­cludes a study billed as the first glob­al ac­count­ing in dol­lar terms of na­t­ions’ toll on the en­vi­ron­ment.

A graph­ic sum­ma­rizes find­ings of a new study on the en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pacts of rich, middle-income and poor na­tions on each oth­er. (Graph­ic cour­te­sy Tha­ra Sri­ni­va­san/UC Berke­ley)
At least to some ex­tent, “rich na­t­ions have de­vel­oped at the ex­pense of the poor… in ef­fect, there is a debt to the poor,” said Rich­ard B. Nor­gaard, an ec­o­log­i­cal econ­o­mist at the Uni­ver­s­ity of Ca­li­for­nia-Berkeley, one of the re­search­ers. “That, per­haps, is one rea­son that they are poor.”

There will be much “con­tro­ver­sy,” he ad­mit­ted, “about wheth­er you can even do this kind of study and wheth­er we did it right.” Nor­gaard said he’d like to of­fer a chal­lenge to any re­search­ers who may doubt its find­ings: “do [the stu­dy] your­self and do it bet­ter.” This first one, he added, is mainly meant to get peo­ple think­ing.

The cal­cula­t­ions drew on more than a dec­ade of as­sess­ments by en­vi­ron­men­tal econ­o­mists who have tried to at­tach mon­e­tary fig­ures to en­vi­ron­men­tal dam­age, plus da­ta from the re­cent U.N. Mil­len­ni­um Ec­o­sys­tem As­sess­ment and World Bank re­ports.

To sim­pli­fy the monumen­tal task, re­search­ers fo­cused on just six types of en­vi­ron­men­tal dam­age: farm­ing in­ten­sifica­t­ion and ex­pan­sion, de­for­esta­t­ion, over­fish­ing, loss of man­grove swamps and forests, ozone de­ple­tion and cli­mate change. Oth­er types of dam­age seen as harder to ap­praise were ig­nored, such as in­dus­t­ri­al pol­lu­tion and loss of hab­i­tat and bio­divers­ity.

Thus, the re­sult is a low-end es­ti­mate of costs, the in­vest­i­ga­tors said. Giv­en that, “the num­bers are very strik­ing,” said lead re­search­er Thara Sri­ni­va­san, of the Pa­cif­ic Eco­in­for­mat­ics and Com­puta­t­ional Ecol­o­gy Lab Berke­ley, Calif., an in­sti­tute that calls it­self by the ac­ro­nym PEaCE. The in­ves­ti­ga­tors re­ported the find­ings this week in the early on­line edi­tion of the re­search jour­nal Pro­ceed­ings of the Na­t­ional Acad­e­my of Sci­ences.

“Hu­man­ity has trans­formed our nat­u­ral en­vi­ron­ment at an un­prec­e­dent­ed speed and scale,” Srini­vasan said, not­ing that the Earth’s popula­t­ion dou­bled in the past 50 years to 6.5 bil­lion as the av­er­age per-capita gross world prod­uct al­so dou­bled. “What we don’t know is which na­t­ions around the world are really driv­ing the ec­o­log­i­cal dam­ages and which are pay­ing the price.”

Nor­gaard said the larg­est en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact by far is from cli­mate change, which has been as­sessed in pre­vi­ous stud­ies. The new study broad­ens the as­sess­ment and thus pro­vides a con­text for the ear­li­er work, he added.

The study found, for ex­am­ple, that while de­for­esta­t­ion and farm­ing in­ten­sifica­t­ion pri­marily im­pact the host coun­try, the im­pacts from cli­mate change and ozone de­ple­tion are spread widely over all. “Low-in­come coun­tries will bear sig­nif­i­cant bur­dens from cli­mate change and ozone de­ple­tion. But these en­vi­ron­men­tal prob­lems have been overwhelmingly driv­en by emis­sion of green­house gas­es and ozone-depleting chem­i­cals by the rest of the world,” Sri­ni­va­san said.

Sci­en­tists pre­dict cli­mate change will in­crease the sev­er­ity of storms and ex­treme weath­er, in­clud­ing pro­longed droughts and flood­ing, with an in­crease in in­fec­tious dis­eases. Ozone de­ple­tion mostly im­pacts health, with in­creases ex­pected in can­cer rates, cataracts and blind­ness. Over­fish­ing and con­ver­sion of man­grove swamps to shrimp farm­ing were oth­er ar­eas in which rich na­t­ions were judged to be bur­den­ing poor ones.

“Seafood de­rived from de­plet­ed fish stocks in low-in­come coun­try wa­ters ul­ti­mately ends up on the plates of con­sumers in middle-in­come and rich coun­tries,” Sri­ni­va­san said. Man­grove de­struc­tion elim­i­nat­ed storm pro­tec­tions, the group added, which some say was a ma­jor fac­tor in the huge cas­u­al­ty foll from 2005’s South­east Asian tsu­na­mi.

When all the im­pacts are added up, the por­tion of the “foot­print” of high-in­come na­t­ions fall­ing on low-in­come coun­tries is great­er than the fi­nan­cial debt rec­og­nized for low-in­come coun­tries, with a net pre­s­ent val­ue of $1.8 tril­lion in 2005, Sri­ni­va­san said. (This was cal­cu­lated in in­terna­t­ional dol­lars, U.S. dol­lars ad­justed to ac­count for dif­fer­ent cur­ren­cies’ pur­chas­ing pow­er.) “The ec­o­log­i­cal debt could more than off­set the fi­nan­cial debt of low-in­come na­t­ions,” she said.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, middle-in­come na­t­ions may have an im­pact on poor na­t­ions equiv­a­lent to that of rich na­t­ions, the study con­cluded. While poor na­t­ions im­pact oth­er in­come tiers al­so, their ef­fect on rich na­t­ions was found to be less than a third of the im­pact in the op­po­site di­rec­tion.

The nanny state of the Democrats becoming stronger everyday:

The conceit in the 1960s show “The Outer Limits” was that outside forces had taken control of your television set.

Next year in California, state regulators are likely to have the emergency power to control individual thermostats, sending temperatures up or down through a radio-controlled device that will be required in new or substantially modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages.

The proposed rules are contained in a document circulated by the California Energy Commission, which for more than three decades has set state energy efficiency standards for home appliances, like water heaters, air conditioners and refrigerators.

The changes would allow utilities to adjust customers’ preset temperatures when the price of electricity is soaring. Customers could override the utilities’ suggested temperatures. But in emergencies, the utilities could override customers’ wishes.

Final approval is expected next month.

My guess? Save your old thermostats, they will be selling for big prices on ebay in the future.

But seriously this is a case of the state telling the people how cold or how warm they can be because its too hard to actually build more power generators. Why? Because of the environmentalists. No drilling for more oil because it might hurt some rat. No building of nuclear reactors because it might harm people. No building of new refineries because they are too dirty.

So the result?

The government tells you when you can be comfortable in your own home.