The Obama Business Failures Keep Piling Up

There's never been an administration that has been as anti-business as the current one. From collusion with unions in the GM/Chrysler debacle to Solyndra and the myriad other "green" entities that have squandered billions and crashed and burned leaving us holding the bag, it seems that everything the Obama folks touch turns to shit.

The latest example comes to us from Consumer Reports' testing facility:

DETROIT (Reuters) -- A $100,000-plus Fisker Automotive luxury car died during Consumer Reports speed testing for reasons that are still unknown, leaving the struggling electric car startup with another blow to its image.

"It is a little disconcerting that you pay that amount of money for a car and it lasts basically 180 miles before going wrong," David Champion, senior director for the magazine's automotive test center, told Reuters.

Fisker has benefited from the publicity generated when actor Leonardo DiCaprio was handed the first Karma last summer and pop idol Justin Bieber received one as a gift this month.

The breakdown of the Consumer Reports car is more bad news for a company that already recalled some Karmas. Fisker also has changed its CEO and halted production over the past month as it seeks to renegotiate the terms of a $529 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy.

I'm guessing that the word "renegotiate' will mean what it did with the aforementioned Solyndra and Jon Corzine: It means give bonuses to execs and claim bankruptcy. There's no way they can survive this and not enough bleeding heart actors like Leonardo DiCaprio to keep them in business. And note that Fisker is a foreign company seeded with American tax dollars. Not that Obama's results have been any better at home.

But no, the Obama failures don't end there, we also have example #204,986,835 showing that government has no business intruding in business:

The U.S. government has awarded appliance-maker Philips $10 million for devising an “affordable” alternative to today’s standard 60-watt incandescent bulb. That standard bulb sells for around $1. The Philips alternative sells for $50.

Of course, the award-winner is no ordinary bulb. It uses only one-sixth the energy of an incandescent. And it lasts 30,000 hours–about 30 times as long. In fact, if you don’t drop it, it may last 10 years or more.

But only the U.S. Government (in this case, the Department of Energy) could view a $50 bulb as cheap.

See how that works? Your hard-earned tax dollars were paid to a company to design a lightbulb that will cost you 20-times what you paid for your last one while helping solve an environmental crisis that may or may not actually exist. That's called Obamanomics and it's the reason we're in the fiscal shape we are in today.

Volt Lacks Spark, Chevy Scales Back Production

Americans have always loved our cars. During the 50's and 60's, boys dreamed of owning a Bel Air or T-Bird and roaring down the highway. Then came the 70's and 80's where the big three turned out horrible cars like the Vega, the Chevette and the Buick revamped Mustangs. I won't even mention the GMC Gremlin and Pacer. The unions gained enormous clout, the designers had a tin ear when it came to creating what people wanted and gas prices became a factor.

From the 80's until the 00's we saw some innovative designs released. Ford and the Japanese companies designed stylish cars that were built to last with Hyundai offering 100,000 mile warranties.

Now here we are in the 21st century and we may as well be back in the bad years again. Now, unions own two of the big three (gifted to them by Obama) and they've politicized the business to the point that they are back resisting what we actually want to buy and trying to force us into cars we have no desire to be seen in.

At the top of that list is the Chevy Volt:

General Motors has told 1,300 employees at its Detroit Hamtramck that they will be temporarily laid off for five weeks as the company halts production of the Chevrolet Volt and its European counterpart, the Opel Ampera.

“Even with sales up in February over January, we are still seeking to align our production with demand,” said GM spokesman Chris Lee.

Lee said employees were told Thursday that production would put on hold from March 19 to April 23.

The Chevrolet Volt, an extended-range electric car, is both a political lightning rod and a symbol of the company’s technological capability.

Chevrolet sold 1,023 Volts in the U.S. in February and has sold 1,626 so far this year.

In 2011, Chevrolet sold 7,671 Volts, but fell short of its initial goal of 10,000.

GM had planned to expand production of its Volt plug-in hybrid to 60,000 this year, with 45,000 earmarked for the U.S.

Will Americans buy an alternative fuel vehicle? Yes they will. But one that is priced right from the outset and doesn't require government subsidies to afford. 80 miles just isn't cutting it and the public isn't buying it because of that. Add to the cost the fact that GM and Chrysler accepted government funding that they will never pay back and you have the exact reasons why the Volt is not selling.

Democrats demagogue the oil companies while the majority of the public blame Obama's policies for skyrocketing prices. Green jobs and green tech have failed to materialize and be self-sufficient in the way Obama planned and the Volt is just the latest case on top of Solyndra and the myriad other "green" companies propped up by our dollars.

Americans want style, comfort and quality above all else and the Volt is none of those.

Picture borrowed from a guy in my profession.

Judge Voids Lease in Mercury-Tainted Daycare Case

I was curious to see how this played out as it will have far-reaching effect in the business of buying, selling and remediating contaminated sites in the state that has the most:

A New Jersey Superior Court judge's decision last week to void the deed to a contaminated day-care building, freeing the owner from cleanup costs, has sparked a wide range of reactions and debate about its implications.

The decision infuriated parents who sued the building owner after their children breathed poisoned air in the now-shuttered Kiddie Kollege. But it was applauded by some lawyers because it took up the cause for investors who buy contaminated industrial sites without fair warning of the pollution.

In the nine-page opinion, Judge James E. Rafferty said a Franklin Township real estate broker who acquired a bankrupt thermometer factory and then rented it to the day care was not properly informed of the contamination.

Jim Sullivan III, under the auspices of family companies Navillus Group and Jim Sullivan Inc., had bought tax liens and later foreclosed on the property, saying he did not know it harbored mercury vapors.

This is a complex case to be sure. The children were shown to have elevated mercury levels--some as much as four-times what is considered safe. The buyer of the property did not perform his due diligence to determine past activities at the site and the lessees did not ask either.

I feel for the parents who deserve recourse as their children were exposed to a very hazardous substance. The hazards on mercury can be found here (link in pdf but chock full of info)

I tend to agree with the ruling. When a person or firm buys a property, the seller must come clean on any potential contamination but in many cases don't because of the liability issues, cleanup costs that can easily go into the high hundreds of thousands and the endless red tape of declaring a site contaminated. The buyer was not advised of the former uses of the property-even though they should have inquired--thereby they can not be held liable. I make my living partially by cleaning up these impacted sites that can be contaminated with anything from hexavalent chrome, lead, PCB's to volatile organic compounds such as benzene or xylene.

In the Northeast, virgin land is disappearing so townships must build on existing land. developers but the land and in cases where the property has contamination, clean it up and sell it. The sites are called brownfields. But when a property is sold and the potential for contamination is not disclosed, it leads us to circumstance such as this case.

Again, I'm not clearing the buyer of all liability, in this region, a phase one assessment must be done on any property. But legally, they are in the clear if the seller didn't disclose--in writing--the past uses and possible residual waste at the site.

Global Warming Places Last on Priorities List

I mentioned yesterday that more people now think global warming is naturally occurring and not man-made as has been pushed by the global warming lobby. I also mentioned that Al Gore was "losing hearts and minds" when it came to the global warming issue. It seems I was a little too reserved in my assessment:

That's amazing to say the least. The global warming swindle perpetrated by those who were looking to cash in has been a monumetal bust. One can easily see why the economy and jobs would rank at the very top but I find it interesting that terrorism is third considering we have not been hit and the media downplayed it significantly during the election.

Only 3 out of every 10 people now rank global warming as a priority and that's simply because people are getting the facts and seeing through the cheap facade constructed by those who subscribe to the theory.

Think about what a catastrophic result this is for Al Gorites; immigration, lobbyists and "moral decline" all placed well ahead of global warming. I'm guessing that global warminests overplayed their hands by predicting rising oceans, melting ice, balmy temperatures in places like Minnesota and all around calamity. In other words, they played the scare card and it backfired dramatically. All it takes is for people to step outside and feel the sub-zero temps or slip on the ice to know it's a bunch of bullshit.

Exit question: Would this be vindication for those of who signed The List?

Does the AP Have Any Credibility Left on Global Warming?

Short answer, no...on any topic

Today they published the single most alarmist global warming piece I've read. Read this if you can stomach it:

"We need to start in January making significant changes," Gore said in a recent telephone interview with The Associated Press. "This year coming up is the most important opportunity the world has ever had to make progress in really solving the climate crisis."

Scientists are increasingly anxious, talking more often and more urgently about exceeding "tipping points."

"We're out of time," Stanford University biologist Terry Root said. "Things are going extinct."

U.S. emissions have increased by 20 percent since 1992. China has more than doubled its carbon dioxide pollution in that time. World carbon dioxide emissions have grown faster than scientists' worst-case scenarios. Methane, the next most potent greenhouse gas, suddenly is on the rise again and scientists fear that vast amounts of the trapped gas will escape from thawing Arctic permafrost.

The amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere has already pushed past what some scientists say is the safe level.

And on and on and on...

The piece could have been written by Al Gore himself and gives zero credence to sceptics. Plus, we have this little trick: temps are dropping but it's because of global warming. Check out the pretzel logic:

Mother Nature, of course, is oblivious to the federal government's machinations. Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it's thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.

The average global temperature in 2008 is likely to wind up slightly under 57.9 degrees Fahrenheit, about a tenth of a degree cooler than last year. When Clinton was inaugurated, 57.9 easily would have been the warmest year on record. Now, that temperature would qualify as the ninth warmest year.

The inconvenient truth--to borrow a phrase I heard somewhere--is that the planet has been cooling for much of the decade and that sunspot activity was responsible for the increases seen before. Once the activity ceased, temperatures decreased.

What global warming hysterics fail to recognize is that most people believe that yes, the planet was warming, but no, it was not man-made.

It's well past time to take a pin to the warminists balloon of rhetoric and hot air and take a common sense approach to the environment. Emissions of soot, illegal dumping of hazardous waste and discharging harmful effluent into streams is the greater danger and one that will have immediate impact to developing nations. But alarmists like Gore and the AP won't report on that because they can't blame the US. We have our emissions and disposal issues in check and have strict laws regulating them. Besides, stories of hazardous waste are so 1980 and don't lead to unearned Nobels and Pulitzers anymore. Global warming makes it easy to blame the US and you don't need a shred of proof, plus you can say cool shit like "cooling is actually another example of the danger of warming" and uneducated morons believe it. It doesn't even have to make sense to get the idiots who believe this bullshit to eat it up.

Unfortunately, one of those people appears to be the President-elect. If he thinks the bailout costs alot, wait'll he sees how much joining a Kyoto-like pact would cost. China will make billions and we'll lose trillions.

More on the Great Global Warming Swindle here.

Global Warming: Anatomy of a Worldwide Swindle Part 1

Years from now, college classes will look back at the rise of global warming as an issue that swept across the planet. They will examine how a frightening few developed a strategy to make an unproven issue into one of the biggest issues facing the world and became one of the most-costly mistakes in modern times.

Let's go back and examine just how this issue came to become gospel to many throughout the world.

Back in the late 1960's, it became evident that we had serious environmental problems. For decades, the world had not been good environmental stewards disposing of sewage, chemical waste and other byproducts of a burgeoning industrial age wherever was convenient at the time. Industrial effluent was discharged to the nearest body of water with no thought of what would happen downstream. We buried drums of hazardous waste in any available landfill or created them for just such a purpose. At Love Canal, NY, 27,000 tons of highly toxic, corrosive and flammable waste was buried in the remnants of the canal the town was named for. There existed no laws dictating what the proper disposal techniques should be.

The US took the initiative and passed the initial Federal Water Quality Control Act (amended as the Clean Water Act in 1977), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and the Clean Air Act. Eventually the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (also known as Superfund) was passed and we started to get a handle on our hazardous waste disposal and emissions problems. Note that the majority of the legislation was signed by a Republican president.

The environment became a major focus of most Western governments as it should have but environmental awareness was long in coming in Eastern nations--especially those under the oppressive thumb of the Soviet Union. We worked to clean up the mess we had made and environmental awareness was at an all-time level. Corporations were fined for mishandling waste and people who broke the laws went to jail. Industry soon got the message that being a good environmental steward was the only option. We were at a point where we had a nice agreement between industry, government and consumers.

Enter the environmental coalitions who found themselves left out in the cold. They lost cache and were essentially ignored. That was unacceptable to them and they needed a new issue. At roughly the same time, a small uptick in global temperatures was recorded by weather scientists that could easily be explained as an anomaly or a cyclical increase when compared to historical data. But environmentalists looked at the data and misconstrued it. They started making noise about holes in the ozone layer and they paid scientists to write stories about impending doom if the issue was not rectified. Newspapers started reporting on the story and they were given gravitas way beyond what was warranted. They were relevant again and people stopped ignoring them.

But how to keep the public interested? How to maintain their position as the go-to people on environmental issues? How to keep their name in the papers? They had one choice; ratchet up the rhetoric and make the issue one in which everyone would made aware and become believers. It was a strategy that called for propaganda and that was easy with a compliant media. They belittled scientists who disagreed with their findings as frauds and worse, pawns of the political right. Grant money flowed to those who wrote studies showing catastrophic and irreversible damage to the planet within one, ten or fifty years. As every new report was released, the dire consequences of inaction were said to be so destructive as to inundate every major coastal city. Those who took a contrarian approach saw grant money dry up like the dust bowl during the early part of last century. Voices who were even remotely sceptical or who showed the flawed thinking for what it was, shoddy science, were quickly buried under an unstoppable torrent of bad press and were not given any credible press outside of the blossoming Internet.

Enter Al Gore. The former VP glommed onto the issue and to the world left and the press (but I'm redundant) they had a voice that would seal the deal. He made a video that was adamant that global warming was man-made, possibly unstoppable and could not be dispelled.

More later.

Putting the Global Warming Myth On Ice

Global warming hysterics have been screaming for years about the nightmare world that awaits us anywhere from ten to one hundred years from now if we don't start controlling carbon dioxide emissions asap.

Interestingly, it seems there's a definite shift in sentiment away from the enviroloons to some more rational thinking:

It has plagued scientists and politicians for decades, but scientists now say global warming is not the problem.

We are actually heading for the next Ice Age, they claim.

British and Canadian experts warned the big freeze could bury the east of Britain in 6,000ft of ice.

...And what's more, the experts blame the global change on falling - rather than climbing - levels of greenhouse gases.

Lead author Thomas Crowley from the University of Edinburgh and Canadian colleague William Hyde say that currently vilified greenhouse gases – such as carbon dioxide – could actually be the key to averting the chill.

These guys are not some scrubs just throwing numbers out there in attempts to scare people and cash in (paging Al Gore), no, they are respected members of the scientific community who have been studying the data and have drawn the above conclusions. You know, actually looking at it realistically and scientifically.

No wonder they changed it from "global warming" to "climate change", now they can say this coming ice age is man made and caused by "climate change" as well and start cashing in on the other side. Yet, it sure will be fun to see Al Gore trying to make his case when half of Great Britain is taking dog sleds to work and trying to plant crops in ice.

Exit question: Does this mean Newsweek will have to apologize for believing the global warming hype after apologizing for their global cooling piece from the 1970's?

Calling the Dems Bluff: GOP Should Propose "Green" Jobs

The Democrats have been calling for so called "green" jobs for awhile now yet haven't been too precise in defining exactly what those jobs are. I think it's time we define those jobs for them.

We can knock 1% off the unemployment rate immediately by fast-tracking these projects and it will have an affect in all areas of the country.

First, anyone with a half a brain knows that we are going to need oil for the foreseeable future--I'd say at least thirty more years for diesel, jet fuel, home heating oil, solvents and other fuels used by power plants such as #6 fuel oil. Gasoline use will be severely curtailed in fewer years based on the newest production vehicles coming on line. We should propose a 10-year plan to extract all the oil we can in the most environmentally safe manner science and cost effectiveness allow. Second, we set out an ambitious plan to build new, high tech refineries in every region of the country, for instance: North Jersey/New York, South Jersey/Philly/Delaware, Baltimore/Washington, Boston, Chicago, etc. Say thirty new refineries using the best available technology and designed to meet the strictest environmental standards (see this proposed refinery in S.Dak). The refineries will be able to handle light, sweet crude, high sulfur oil such as that from Venezuela as well as oil sands or shale oil (as much as I hate the bailout bill, there is some good in it). The trickle-down effect would be dramatic as suppliers would immediately revamp and ramp up to supply all the parts needed. The government or whatever banks remain after the financial meltdown offer the oil companies loans at a fair rate and since we know they are much more solvent than the financial sector, those loans will be paid back.

The construction would take three to five years for each facility and would shore up a flagging construction industry at a time it's sorely needed. The Dems would face fierce blow back from the labor unions were they to fight this as they are starting to see huge percentages of their membership "sitting on the bench". Non-working members means no money flowing into the unions, which means that union leaders will have to explain why they are still raising their salary while the rank and file are sitting home out of unemployment benefits while still having to pay inflated dues.

Next, we push hard for new nuclear power plants throughout the country but allowing the individual states the right to say yes or no to construction. Again we streamline the process to ensure the newest technology will be utilized while also cutting the red tape for approvals. Today's plants are smaller, more efficient and safer. We also set strict security guidelines that would make them safer than any existing facilities in the world. With the anticipated opening of the Yucca Mountain site, we have a disposal option for spent fuel available soon.

Next we push for the creation of a natural gas pipeline that can distribute natural gas around the nation. It's clean and plentiful.

Finally, we should propose to shore up the existing electrical grids we have and build or repair those that are in poor condition. A joint effort between the various regional utilities and the federal government would go far to attaining this goal. Again, the loans will be at a fair-market rate and the government could guarantee a portion if need be (but only a portion).

Add to this idea the construction of more wind energy facilities, solar collection centers and research the idea of hydro power through tides or other water sources, we could put a good amount of Americans to work quickly on long-term projects.

FDR did this in the 30's and 40's but paid with government funds, I would propose it be accomplished all with private funds with cooperation between banks, energy companies and the various agencies of the government that stand in the way of progress as a mater of course.