We continue to be scammed | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: Jim Bispo's weekly column appears in the Beaufort Observer.

    The other day I was reading the monthly magazine produced by my electric co-op (Carolina Country July, 2012). In it there was an interesting opinion piece written by Mr. Michael Burnette, Senior VP and COO for power supply at North Carolina Electric Membership Corporation. In the article he explained why the Electric Cooperatives opposed proposed new EPA standards aimed at reducing greenhouse gasses, mainly CO2.

    What I found more than just a little scary is that the EPA (together with the rest of the environmental movement) seems to have succeed in changing the game from "controlling global warming" to reducing CO2 in the atmosphere. What is really scary about that is that we seem to be letting them get away with it. What started our as the need to rein in "global warming" seems to have morphed into "reduce CO2" in the atmosphere. Of course by doing that there is no need to be bothered with what James Lovelock, godfather of global warming, had to say in a recent interview where he acknowledged that he had been unduly alarmist about climate change. Click here to read the report. Guess what - no more arguments over the "forced" conclusions we were fed by the so called "climate scientists" in England. In the face of all the "leaked" e-mails etc, it may not be too prosperous to continue to argue over their findings or perhaps more to the point, their veracity. Forget about the hoax that was perpetuated on us, let's talk about CO2. Much easier to move the target and talk about CO2 in the atmosphere than to try to explain the dishonesty to which we were exposed by those faux scientists. And don't forget, if EPA is against it, it must be something bad. Yeah, right.

    The same thing was allowed to happen in our rush to supplant petroleum based fuels with corn based ethanol. We dumped all sorts of money on the fledgling ethanol industry to help get it started. And guess what; we continue to do so. Not only do we pour money on the industry, we mandate the use of it's product. This in spite of the discovery that it takes more energy to produce ethanol that we get out of it. Even the environmentalists have come to agree with this fact.- and yet we continue to pour money on the industry. It never fails to amaze me how quickly faux capitalists, aided and abetted by faux environmentalists are able to get a seemingly unending stream of taxpayer money out of the government. And, of course once it starts, it's life seems to be eternal. In the meantime, both the cost of fuel and the cost of our corn flakes go up. Both needlessly. What's wrong with that picture??

    It seems to be reaching the point that no matter what we want to do, the justification boils down to just a few things: Reduce CO2 in the atmosphere; Decrease unemployment; Improve the economy.

    Reducing CO2 in the atmosphere has become an end in itself. We no longer are forced into the increasingly uncomfortable (for the faux "scientists") discussion about controlling so called "global warming". Now all we have to do is reduce CO2. This is an area where we may have to be fairly careful. We must tread softly on that issue because so much of what we learned in school a long time ago is apparently not so. We have a lot of "relearning" to do.

    We learned things like that there have been four separate and distinct ice ages and have been suffering from the misconception that they receded by themselves (i.e. without intervention by man). Turns out that must have been wrong, because we now know that "meltdowns" (i.e. global warming) are caused by CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. It turns out that there is nothing "cyclical" about our climate, so it surely is the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere that is causing the so called global warming phenomenon. The retreat of the ice surely had nothing to with a normal cyclical process. Since there were no petroleum based fuels in use all those eons ago, and the "meltdown had could not possibly have been related to the cyclical nature of the climate. The only other sources of CO2 must have been the exhaled breath of the dinosaurs or their flatulence (or both). That seems a bit far fetched, but you never know... Maybe. Maybe not.

    With respect to improving the employment picture (and thus the economy), We learned that there were other economists besides John Maynard Keynes and that many of them offered theories that disagreed with his. That must have been wrong because we hardly acknowledge them any longer much less give their notions any credence (think F. A. Hayak, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell). Actually, it turns out that the only way to decrease unemployment is through increasing taxes so we can sprinkle money over all the unemployed. We've been doing that since FDR brought us out of the depression with his CCC, WPA, PWA and the like. (Yeah, right!!) Well, actually we've moved on from those sorts of projects where we gave everybody a shovel and told half of them to dig a hole and told the other half to fill it back up. You've got to admit, it did create a lot of "work" for everyone. But then we graduated from that to "shovel ready" projects. The problem was that someone forgot the shovels. There are those who conjecture that they could have been misappropriated by someone who needed them to shovel the BS we were being fed before it got too deep. Whatever. In any case "shovel ready" didn't turn out to be "shovel ready". Keynes economics didn't work in FDR's day and it hasn't worked in Obama's day. But that certainly is no reason to suggest that maybe Keynes was wrong (or at least, not right). We continue to claim that increasing taxes and creating "make work projects" or dumping tons of our money down "green" rat holes on to projects that are not technologically capable of becoming self sustaining anytime in the near future is going to improve our economic well being. Hmmm...

    We learned silly things like we had a God given right to compete and that through hard work we had a chance of being successful. It turned out that too was wrong. What we apparently missed was that the government is in charge or our "rights" and they have given us the right of equal results. Nothing to do with "God given". Nothing to do with equal opportunity to compete. Equal results. There is a rather significant difference between opportunity and results. It doesn't matter how hard we worked, how much we saved or how much we followed any of those other "Protestant Ethic" virtues, we are not entitled to any more than those went to Acapulco for Easter break (or is it "spring break") while we stayed home and worked?? To think otherwise is clearly not being fair.

    Obviously a lot of the early education received by a lot of folks was lacking.

    In the meantime, we should not question why we continue to throw good money after bad in pursuit of anything and everything the environmentalists or the Keynesian believers think of. We have been scammed and we should simply accept it. Of course we should... (Not.)

    There are growing numbers of folks who believe that it may be time to start "pushing back" on a lot of the environmental madness that seems to have enveloped our country in the last twenty or thirty (or more) years. The number is growing (despite the brainwashing our kids are getting in school) and the volume is growing. It's time some sanity was injected in to the system.

    D'ya think??