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American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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EPA glorifies mass murderer Che on “Hispanic Heritage Month”

The Environmental Protection Agency is outdoing itself,
EPA Honors Hispanic Heritage Month With Poster Of Che Guevara And A Bit Of Plagiarism

The Environmental Protection Agency commemorated the start of Hispanic Heritage Month with a picture of Che Guevara and a bit of plagiarism.

An internal email obtained by BuzzFeed and distributed to agency employees marking the start of the celebration of Hispanic culture this Saturday, featured the above image of a horse and buggy passing a billboard of the Marxist revolutionary, in addition to a listing of facts about Hispanic culture.

“Hispanic people are vibrant, socializing and fun loving people,” one entry reads. “Among various facts associated to this culture is that they have a deep sense of involvement in their family traditions and cultures.”

Which they plagiarized from Buzzle.com. Go read the whole thing about us, “vibrant, socializing and fun loving people,” and,

To add insult to injury the photo in question was taken in Cuba, a country with a dismal environmental record thanks to the government that was installed with the help of the above pictured Che Guevara.

But fret not, it was an “inadvertent error“.

I’m sure they’ll send a retraction right away…


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Crucify the oil companies! UPDATED

Last night I was having a quiet evening at home when the doorbell rang. An earnest young woman was gathering signatures for a petition against fracking. To the best of my knowledge there is no fracking in Princeton (and if there was, I would probably support it), so I told her I wasn’t interested.

She insisted that I sign, since the petition was “against the fracking companies in Pennsylvania sending their radioactive waste to New Jersey.” Again I declined, again she persisted. I wished her a good evening and shut the door. She yelled something to the effect of “the evil must be stopped,” and moved on.

She ought to get a job with Al Armendariz’s Region 6 EPA office:
EPA Official Not Only Touted ‘Crucifying’ Oil Companies, He Tried It

The Armendriz video (which appears to have been taken off YouTube late late night) was shot around the same time he was preparing the action against Range. Here’s the highlights of what he said.

The Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.

And so you make examples out of people who are in this case not compliant with the law. Find people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there. And, companies that are smart see that, they don’t want to play that game, and they decide at that point that it’s time to clean up.

And, that won’t happen unless you have somebody out there making examples of people. So you go out, you look at an industry, you find people violating the law, you go aggressively after them. And we do have some pretty effective enforcement tools. Compliance can get very high, very, very quickly.

That’s what these companies respond to is both their public image but also financial pressure. So you put some financial pressure on a company, you get other people in that industry to clean up very quickly.

The former professor at Southern Methodist University is a diehard environmentalist, having grown up in El Paso near a copper smelter that reportedly belched arsenic-laced clouds into the air. (Here’s a profile of him in the Dallas Observer.) Texas Monthly called him one of the 25 most powerful Texans, while the Houston Chronicle said he’s “the most feared environmentalist in the state.”

Nevermind that he couldn’t prove jack against Range. For a year and a half EPA bickered over the issue, both with Range and with the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas drilling and did its own scientific study of Range’s wells and found no evidence that they polluted anything. In recent months a federal judge slapped the EPA, decreeing that the agency was required to actually do some scientific investigation of wells before penalizing the companies that drilled them. Finally in March the EPA withdrew its emergency order and a federal court dismissed the EPA’s case

The video has been pulled but you can watch a snippet at a Fox News report,

UPDATE,
found the YouTube with Almendariz’s statements here,

As Steven Hayward explains,

It is important to grasp why this kind of excessive zeal is the rule rather than the exception from federal regulators, and always will be. Armendariz is wholly typical of the regulator mentality, and we won’t prevent future “crucifixions” until we make fundamental changes to revive the rule of law and restore some kind of democratic accountability to the administrative state.

Let the snark flow!

UPDATE, 30 April,
Top EPA official resigns after ‘crucify’ comment


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Spinach: The Popeye energy policy

The USA is the only nation in the world that prohibits itself from exploring and exploiting its own oil resources, by decree. Now, this,

First algae, now spinach to be green energy source

President Obama recently touted algae as a potential source of energy, and now the Environmental Protection Agency has invested in converting spinach into an energy source.

The EPA awarded a $90,000 grant over the weekend to Vanderbilt University students “who designed a biohybrid solar panel that substitutes a protein from spinach for expensive silicon wafers that are energy intensive to produce, and is capable of producing electricity.”

The team of engineering students — Eric Dilbone, Phil Ingram, Trevan Locke, Paul McDonald and Jason Ogg — “also won the Marketplace Innovation Award from Paladin Capital, a private equity firm, and the Student Choice Award, a special nod from their peers in competition,” according to Vanderbilt.

The idea is that “a miniature bio-cell can produce minute electricity from Photosystem I (PSI), the protein in plant chloroplasts that converts light to electrochemical energy.”

We’re not talking megawatts here:

They won the grant despite “nagging doubts about how the slight power from the panel would convince the judges,” one Vanderbilt professor explained.

Heck, when my son was little, Santa gave him a potato clock for Christmas. I wonder how much I could get from the EPA if a canister of Pringle’s could pass for a “biohybrid solar panel”.

As far as spinach goes, Mr. Bingley’s got the gold standard. For those who remember Popeye, here’s Symphony in Spinach,

UPDATE,
Linked by WyBlog. Thanks!

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EPA pays to upgrade unsafe Mexican trucks

First the US is lending Brazil’s Petrobras $2billion for offshore drilling; now the EPA is paying to upgrade mufflers with catalytic converters in old Mexican trucks that won’t meet US safety standards anyway,
U.S. Pays To Upgrade Mexican Trucks

In the latest effort to accommodate its cherished trade partner in the south, the U.S. government is paying to upgrade outdated Mexican trucks that hemorrhage illegal amounts of exhaust on their trips north to deliver merchandise.

The Mexican trucks enter the U.S. under a 17-year-old international trade pact known as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and they’ve created an air pollution crisis. The air quality in border towns has been especially impacted by the exorbitant levels of exhaust released by the Mexican trucks, which also fail to meet American safety standards.

Since the Mexican truckers have no intention of fixing the problem, Uncle Sam has stepped in to save the environment. U.S. taxpayers have picked up the cost to replace old mufflers on dozens of trucks and many more are scheduled to be upgraded by the middle of this year. The unbelievable story was reported this week by an Arizona newspaper that says replacing the old mufflers with new catalytic converters will reduce harmful diesel emissions by up to 30%.

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality is running the operation but the money is actually coming from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),

And how much is that costing?

Each truck costs U.S. taxpayers about $1,600.

Probably more than the market value of some of the trucks.

a few years ago the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General determined that Mexican trucks that regularly travel throughout American highways are rarely checked for safety by U.S. authorities despite a provision requiring it. Rules requiring that every Mexican truck undergo a thorough safety compliance check and that every driver has a valid license and is proficient in English have been virtually ignored, according to the IG’s findings.

Doug Ross

I swear to all that’s holy: someone in the Obama administration has a dastardly sense of humor. Just when you think they can’t do anything more completely, utterly insane, they bust out a brand new comedy sketch.

Gateway Pundit:

The fact that Obama’s EPA is punishing US industry with a slew of new business-killing regulations is one thing… The fact that Obama’s EPA is paying the Lung Association to defeat Republicans is somethnig else… But, this takes the cake.

Photo via IOwnTheWorld.

Via Memeorandum

25875
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Yegads! Al Gore, poet?

poet_poster

Ooooh yeah, babeee….

Vanity Fair heaps praise on the Vanderbilt Divinity School drop-out and self-ordained pope of the cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming: Al Gore: The Poet Laureate of Climate Change

Among the brilliance shared by Gore is this (not sure what to call it),

The shepherd cries
The hour of choosing has arrived
Here are your tools

Vanity Fair asks “Is Gore himself that shepherd?” He probably sees himself as the sheperd who will lead us like meek sheep to the promised land, along with the help of countless media tools like Vanity Fair, and other ones like the people who awarded him the Nobel Prize, and the hardcore believers who don’t want us to breathe because we exhale CO2.

On the breathing, Roger Kimball urges us, Don’t Hold Your Breath! Humans for Respiration, Unite! While you’re still allowed to breathe, hold on to your wallet: The AGW farce will cost us plenty, as you can see in these two articles,

James Pethokoukis writes on The EPA and Obama’s Uncertainty Tax

the only thing certain about the EPA ruling is more regulatory uncertainty leading to less economic growth and fewer jobs. Bad news, to be sure, for American businesses already flummoxed by the mercurial state of healthcare, financial and tax reform. Call it Obama’s Uncertainty Tax.

While a cap-and-trade bill has already passed the House of Representatives, few Capitol Hill observers expected the Senate to approve one, even by the end of 2010 thanks to the anemic economy and political risks for incumbent Democrats facing midterm elections. What’s more, expectations of a more Republican-leaning congress after 2010 made it seem like economy-wide carbon caps were sliding off the Obama agenda for the foreseeable future.

But now it’s conceivable carbon restrictions would be implemented as early as next year – even though the EPA itself admits its efforts would be more disruptive and less efficient than congressional action. Such an optimistic timetable assumes no legal challenges. But there will be plenty of those. Already, business groups are preparing to file suit against the EPA. It could fall to U.S. courts to determine the future of the nation’s approach to climate policy. This is a nightmare scenario for the private sector when it comes to planning for new expansion or hiring. Note that the big problem with the job market at the moment is not so much job losses and zippo new jobs being created. It will take a year of 4 percent growth adding 250,000 jobs a month to lower the unemployment rate to 9 percent.

Of course, about the only thing worse than regulatory uncertainty would be for the EPA to follow through with its top-down, command-and-control approach to dealing with perceived climate change.

While we’re dealing with that, the tools at the UN want our money: William Jacobson has the details, UN Climate Chief to US: “Show Me The Money”

Jacobson points out,

None of this is surprising. The global climate change industry is all about shaking the dollars and cents out of our pockets. From Al Gore’s profiteering off of the hysteria he has created, to the large corporate interests involved in selling “green” as a marketing tool, to researchers willing to stifle debate and tamper with data so as to justify funding, to an internationalist movement interested in transfer of wealth as a social policy, the global climate change debate is all about showing the money.

The “show me the money” line is from the movie Jerry Maguire, about a desperate sports agent willing to do anything. So fitting that the UN climate change guru now uses such a crass phrase

Perhaps the UN guy’s been reading Shakespeare, where Iago, one of the great villains, says,

Put money in thy purse; follow thou the wars; defeat thy favor with an usurp’d beard. I say put money in thy purse.

Thing is, that’s our money he’s talking about.

UPDATE, Thursday 10 December
Defused Lethal Al Gore Poem Released by Government

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