The withdrawal of the proposed EPA rule comes three days after the White House identified seven such regulations that it said would cost private business at least $1 billion each
Obama Abandons EPA And Green Campaigners
By Guest Column Benny Peiser——Bio and Archives--September 3, 2011
President Barack Obama on Friday scrapped his administration's controversial plans to tighten smog rules, bowing to the demands of congressional Republicans and some business leaders. Obama overruled the Environmental Protection Agency — and the unanimous opinion of its independent panel of scientific advisers. The announcement came shortly after a new government report on private sector employment showed that businesses essentially added no new jobs last month — and that the jobless rate remained stuck at a historically high 9.1 percent. --Associated Press, 2 September 2011
Solyndra, the showcase firm, is now filing for Chapter 11 in an embarrassing blow to the premises of Obamanomics. At least the Obama administration can’t be accused of practicing industrial policy the old-fashioned way and picking winners. It is evidently quite ready to pick losers, too. –Rich Lowry, National Review, 2 September 2011
Solarworld AG, Germany’s largest module maker, plans to close a factory to cut costs and compete against Chinese manufacturers that its chief executive officer says are subsidized by the state. Solarworld will shutter a California manufacturing plant and some production lines in Germany, the Bonn-based company said yesterday in a statement. --Bloomberg, 3 September 2011
What motivates the president’s fanaticism? Is it simply blind faith in green technology, or is he chasing another shade of green — namely, cash for his campaign coffers? In 2008, Obama raised twice as much as his Republican opponent from those in the green-tech businesses. Republicans are routinely accused of being the pawns of big oil, but where is the concern that Obama is beholden to the green machine? Whatever his motivation, the real issue is that government cannot “create” jobs — other than those on its own payroll. –-Linda Chavez, Chicago Sun-Times, 2 September 2011
While the green-jobs dream is collapsing, Mr. Obama has the opportunity, with Keystone XL, to prove commitment to genuine jobs, which must always ultimately be based on profitable private enterprise. --Peter Foster, Financial Post, 3 September 2011
The cost of investing in renewable energy in Britain is 105 billion pounds ($170 billion) higher than building the same capacity using gas-fired power plants, an economics professor said in a report published [by the Global Warming Policy Foundation] on Friday. The extra investment cost of building power plants such as offshore wind farms is equivalent to nearly 10 percent of overall British business investment in the next 10 years, Gordon Hughes of the University of Edinburgh said in his study "The Myth of Green Jobs." --Reuters, 2 September 2011
Dr Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Centre in Copenhagen has pioneered the study of the effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation. The GWPF put a series of questions to him concerning the recent results from CERN's CLOUD experiment. --David Whitehouse, The Observatory, 2 September 2011
