Write your Senator

I am snail mailing this to my senator. Even though she is a hopeless greenie democrat, I will invest a 44 cent stamp. If enough of us write our senators maybe we can stop this catastrophe in the Senate.

US Senator Jeanne Shaheen,
520 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator,

Please vote against the Cap & Tax energy bill that just passed the house.
First of all, you haven’t read it and your staff hasn’t read it. The bill is 1200 pages of legal gobbledygook, and no one has a clue as to how bad it will be. Or what bad things lurk in the darker corners of a document written with an eye to obfustication.
Second, raising the cost and reducing the availability of energy is a jobs killer. Industry creates jobs, and industry uses energy. It needs process heat, electro chemistry power, transportation fuels, electricity for machinery, lights, ventilation, and furnaces. Make energy scarce and expensive and industries go out of business, scale back operations or move over seas, throwing people out of work.
Third, raising the price of heating oil, gasoline, electricity and firewood hurts people like me, and especially people living on fixed incomes.
Fourth, global warming ended in 1999. World temperatures have been falling since then. Carbon dioxide is not the main greenhouse gas, water vapor is. The atmosphere holds between 10000 and 40000 parts per million of water vapor, where as carbon dioxide is 360 parts per million, too small to make a difference. Of that 360 parts per million, only 60 parts per million comes from burning fossil fuels. Even reducing man made carbon dioxide emissions to zero will have no effect on global warming.
Fifth, the cap & tax bill will subject us to oceans of expensive government mandated paperwork and create an army of government bureaucrats with power to forbid new construction, forbid purchase of vehicles, forbid repair of heating plants, forbid road construction and repair, forbid logging, forbid farming, and who knows what else. Economic activity will be slowed or stopped by bureaucrats armed with 1200 pages of vaguely written federal law.
Please vote against this disastrous bill because it will throw people out of work, raise prices, slow economic growth, and will not do a thing about global warming. Let’s not kneecap the economy for no reason.

Sincerely,

New Hampshire spends porkulus money

Drove down I93 to Manchester and back. They are resurfacing I93 again. Big signs around Ashland explaining how all this goodness is brought to us by the American R-something and R-something-else Act, otherwise known as the $787 billion porkulus bill. I didn't slow down enough to read all the fine print on the signs.
Of course this stretch of I93 was resurfaced only three summers ago and is in pretty good shape. But if Uncle Sam offers free money you might as well spend it.

Cap & Tax will create green jobs. Right

David Axelrod was on the Sunday pundit shows explaining that the Cap & Tax bill, that just squeaked thru the house was going to create "green jobs". Sure it will. Alternate energy supplies about 1 percent of US energy consumption. Grow it by a factor of 10 and it's still only 10 percent. Is that going to equal the jobs lost from the one hundred times larger conventional energy industries, plus the job losses that will occur when the price of all kinds of energy goes up? Industry needs energy, for process heat, to run the machines, to heat and light the factories, to synthesize and refine materials, to fuel the transportation, just about everywhere. Raise the price of energy and the industry will leave for overseas, cut back, or go out of business.
Industry is what supplies the jobs. Hurt industry and you get unemployment.
No way will the jobs making windmills and installing solar collectors come anywhere near to the jobs lost thruout the rest of the economy.

Waxman Markey is to Smoot Hawley as ?

Yesterday the House passed the Waxman Markey cap & tax bill by a mere 7 votes. Eight RINO's voted for this disastrous bill. They are:

The eight Republicans registering 'yes' votes are likely to draw heat from their party's leadership. Those members are Reps. Mary Bono Mack (CA), Mike Castle (DE), Steven Kirk (IL), John McHugh (NY), Leonard Lance (NJ), Frank LoBiondo (NJ), Dave Reichert (WA), and Chris Smith (NJ).

Voters in CA,DE,IL,NY,NJ, and WA should remember in November.

Words of the Weasel Part 9

"Budget Cut". Used by politicians to distract attention from the fact that they will spend more this year than last year. Has no objective definition. The more they spend the more "budget cuts" they announce.

"Passed away" or more crudely "Passed". Used by people too squeamish to say "died". Farrah Fawcett "passed" today. The TV newsies never say die.

Trash the international space station in 2016?

From Aviation Week:
"NASA hopes it can use untested commercial vehicles to fill a 60 metric ton cargo shortfall in resupplying the International Space Station until 2016 when it plans to drop the $100 billion orbiting lab in the Pacific Ocean for lack of funding."

One hell of a lead sentence. Two bombshells before we get to the period at the end of the sentence. There are plenty of fully tested commercial vehicles. They launch commercial communications satellites every other week. NASA could use those. Then announcing plans to scrap the frightfully expensive ISS in just 7 years is a real bombshell too. First I'd heard of it. Seems a shame to waste all that money. They just finished the station last week and now they say it's toast in just seven years? If we dump ISS you can scratch any plans for a Mars trip. Any space craft large enough to go to Mars is too large to blast off from Cape Canaveral. It needs to be hauled up to orbit in pieces and assembled in free fall. No ISS, no in orbit assembly.

"Gary P. Pulliam, vice president of civil and commercial operations at The Aerospace Corp., briefed the panel on his organization's finding that it will be possible to human rate a Delta IV heavy launch vehicle to carry the Orion crew exploration vehicle for about $3 billion LESS than it will cost to finish Aries I."

Buzz Aldrin agrees that Aries is a bad deal.

Aries is a new rocket design to support manned space missions after the Space Shuttle is retired next year. Despite using Shuttle engines and solid rocket boosters, Aries is not expected to fly for 5 years. Right now Aries has a serious vibration problem, serious enough to shake the rivets out of it, and no fix in sight. In the mean time the US will purchase rocket tickets to the ISS from Russia.
Delta IV is in service right now, has as much or more lift than Aries I. The price of Delta IV will go down if NASA buys some of them, economies of scale. The "human rating" means doing a lot of NASA paperwork, it doesn't mean changing anything real in Delta IV. Due to the company ruining cost of a failed satellite launch, commercial satellite launchers are built as reliably as we know how. The early astronauts rode ballistic missiles (Atlas, Thor, Titan) into space. Delta IV in 2009 is a whole bunch safer ride than an Atlas in 1962. In fact, given Aries vibration problem, Delta IV will be a safer ride than Aries I.
Many in the industry think NASA has lost it's way. And under an Obama administration it is unlikely to find it any time soon.

Nuclear power science fiction

Wall St Journal today had an op ed extolling the virtues of a new type of nuclear fission reactor. It's small and wonderful and the author, a Mr. Metcalfe is a venture capital guy involved in the development somehow.
According to Metcalfe conventional nuclear plants use weapons grade fuel. Actually they don't. And Mr. Metcalfe and the WSJ should know that. Metcalfe is a trustee at MIT and recipient of the National Medal of Technology, a venture capitalist involved in nuclear power, and he lacks the faintest idea how power reactors are built. I took two semesters of reactor design many years ago, and I know what's possible and what's science fiction. Mr. Metcalfe is pushing science fiction.

Remind me not to invest with Mr. Metcalfe's firm (Polaris Venture Partners in Waltham Mass).