Obama: Let’s spend $2 billion to create 5100 jobs
And I thought Barack Obama’s response to the jobs numbers yesterday was clueless. Obama proposed spending $800 million to create 5,000 jobs, which would install broadband technology where it hasn’t already expanded because of demand, which will cost $160,000 per job. Today, Obama has refined his approach in his weekly address, proposing to spend even more money to create jobs that will mainly disappear:
"That’s one of the reasons why we’re accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy and doubling our use of renewable energy sources like wind and solar power – steps that have the potential to create whole new industries and hundreds of thousands of new jobs in America.
In fact, today, I’m announcing that the Department of Energy is awarding nearly $2 billion in conditional commitments to two solar companies.
The first is Abengoa Solar, a company that has agreed to build one of the largest .....
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/07/03/obama-lets-spend-2-billion-to-create-5100-jobs/

Could be worse.

He could've handed over at least $50 Billion in illegal contracts to companies he, his friends and family own like his predecessor.


But you don't give a schit about that, do you?

Jack off.

Some of those "private sector" jobs need to go, Hank...maybe that good ol' mythical "free market" is showing its invisible hand by replacing 2.2 inefficient workers with one better one?

Fish on...

Todd

Todd, you must be fishing with that remark, because you seem smarter than that.

Ducker!

Spanish study at Juan Carlos is false BS, Spanish green job study myth

Fish on...

Todd

Whether I agrees wid you or not, Aunty, I certainly see your point. Well, taken!

Adding green jobs has other benefits besides creating more jobs than fossil fuel jobs. Don't have to worry about windmill workers getting black lung. Therefore health care costs will decrease. Look at all the money being spent from the oil gusher in the Gulf.

7 Questions about green jobs

Plenty'o'sun right out in Sacto...and a bonus of a full array of windmills or solar panels is that if they're placed correctly you could virtual block any view of Sacramento from anywhere, and we can all agree that there's nothing wrong with that

Maybe George Lucas would let you put a couple hundred on his ranch out in Marin?

Fish on...

Todd

If the State owns the rain, does it own the wind? Sun? Oxygen?

Green has mostly shown itself to be only for the well to do. You know, the same folks that drag their $60K boat behind their $50K truck to every bubble fishery in the State, putting who knows how many miles on the truck and boat and burning who knows how much fuel.....and then go home to their 5000 square foot house, etc. Then puff it out and talk about how Green we all should be.

Wish that was me. Meanwhile...bring on the oil!

In his recent trip to Racine, Wisconsin, President Obama claimed that his stimulus policies worked and “saved jobs.” He also said that his policies staved off another Great Depression. But lets take a look at some of the graft, waste and pointless, useless, wild-eyed spending that was in his so-called stimulus.



•$5 million to create a geothermal energy system for a shopping mall in Tennessee. The mall is over half empty of tenants and has had falling shopper attendance for years *
•$1.57 million to Penn State University study fossils in Argentina *
•$100,000 to a puppet theater in Minnesota *
•$2 million to build a replica railroad tourist trap in Carson City, Nev. *
•A boat cruise company in Chicago got almost $1 million to “combat terrorism” *
•$500,000 went to Ariz. State Univ. to study ant genetics *
•Another $450,000 went to Uinv. of Arizona to study ants *
•Almost $400,000 went to Univ. of New York to pay students to drink beer and smoke marijuana for a study there *
•$219,000 to the Nat’l Institute of Health to study if young people “hook-up” after getting drunk *
•$210,000 to the Univ. of Hawaii to study bees *
•$700,000 to crab fishermen in Oregon to pay for lost crab pots *
•$5,000 a person tax rebate if you buy a new electric golf cart (Wall Street Journal)
•Up to $1 million went to prisoners in $250 stimulus checks (FoxNews)
•$54 mil to a New York Indian tribe to run its casino (New York Post)
•$1 billion for a power plant in Mattoon, Illinois that is based on speculative science and may not even work **
•$15 million to back-road bridges that get little traffic in Wisconsin **
•$800,000 for a practically unused airport in Pennsylvania **
•$3.4 million for an animal walk way under a road in Florida **
•$1.15 million to install a guard rail for a lake that doesn’t even exist in Oklahoma **
•$10 million to renovate a rail station that has stood unused for a decade **
•$578,000 to battle homelessness in Union, New York even though the town says they have no homeless people there **
•$233,000 to the Univ. of Calif. to study why Africans vote… in Africa ***
•$2 million to build a new fire house in a Nevada town that has no firemen ***
•North Carolina schools got $4.4 million for literacy and math coaches… to teach their teachers! ***
•$54 million for a railroad project in Napa Valley went to a minority-owned company that then hired a local construction company for half the price, pocketing the rest ***
•A California company was given $15 million in stimulus money to monitor water quality in a stream it was under indictment for polluting previously***

Well, obviously this is just a tiny list of the graft, waste, and useless spending in Obama’s so-called stimulus bill but it serves to illustrate the fact that stimulating the economy was far from the minds of those congressmen that voted for the bill. It was more about paying off constituents than stimulating the economy.

so glad we're so worried about birds... and yet it only seems to be when it comes to green energy.

birds deaths from
window strikes - 97-976 million birds
communication towers - 4-5 million (possibly ten times higher)
power lines - as high as 174 million
cars - as high as 60 million
pesticides - 72 million (low estimate)
oil spills - hundreds of thousands (no good estimates)
oil and wastewater pits - up to 2 million
cats - hundreds of millions (39 million in Wisconsin)
by-catch - tens to hundreds of thousands (limited monitoring)
wind farms - 33,000 estimated

USFWS Link



carbon neutral does not always equal green.

Well Hank, should the wind turbines go ahead and operate and just illegally kill those eagles anyway since other sources of mortality are also happening?

Sg

I think his point Salmo is why in the hell was the money wasted to build them in the first place if they're going to be out of commission a great portion of the time? If this is indicative of wind farms in general,......it seems that the benefits of their use may need to be revisited and revised to better reflect the time they spend idle due to wildlife impact concerns.

I don't know anything about the Altamont wind turbines, but here in WA state wind is considered a cost-effective part of an energy companies resource portfolio. No one expects a wind turbine to run all the time. Local utility PSE told me the threshold wind speed is something like 18 mph. What matters is the levelized cost of energy from any source, wind, solar, hydro, nuke, etc. Wind is competitive with other sources of "new" energy, even new hydro. PNW utilities might try nuke again, but most of them got badly burned financially by it in the late 70s and early 80s (WPPSS). I haven't heard what the cost of a new nuke is in $/MW turnkey. Even if someone says they can do it for less than $2,000,000/MW, the industry tradition of cost over-runs of 2X or 3X aren't likely to attract savy private investors in the near term.

I think energy is going to come from a variety of sources that form a resource pool for utilities for quite a while yet.

Sg

Aunty,

Its the same in the gorge and at other locations, wind towers and birds and bats do not mix.

Methinks we have hit the high-water mark for wind power at this point. I would be curious to see the production level of the parts (wings, etc) now compared to 2 years ago. The amount of real-estate required for a windfarm is huge compared to the requirements for many other power generation methods. I figure once the green-power subsidies run out, wind farms will fall out of vogue completely. Plus they kill little birdies.

They fit nuclear reactors inside submarines. Most of you are sitting within 60 miles of no less than <classified> of them. IMO each jurisdiction should have a small reactor right next to their sewage plant. Take up less room than a city block and provide safe reliable power.

amen, but the anti-green energy camp will use one windfarm against all.

"Since the mid-1980's, a number of research organizations, universities, and consultants have conducted studies on avian mortality due to wind turbines. In the U.S., these studies were prompted because of the relatively high number of raptors that were found dead at the Altamont Pass Wind Farms near San Francisco.

After dozens of studies spanning nearly two decades, we now know that the Altamont Pass situation is unusual in the U.S. The high raptor mortality there was the result of a convergence of factors, some of which were due to the bad siting in the local ecosystem while others were due to the wind turbine and tower technology used at the time. In fact, a very different situation exists not far away at the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farms near Palm Springs. A 1986 study found that 69 million birds flew though the San Gorgonio Pass during the Spring and Fall migrations. During both migrating seasons, only 38 dead birds were found during that typical year, representing only 0.00006% of the migrating population.

A report recently prepared for the Bonneville Power Administration in the Northwest U.S. states that "raptor mortality has been absent to very low at all newer generation wind plants studied in the U.S. This and other information regarding wind turbine design and wind plant/wind turbine siting strongly suggests that the level of raptor mortality observed at Altamont Pass is quite unique."12

The National Wind Coordinating Committee (NWCC) completed a comparison of wind farm avian mortality with bird mortality caused by other man-made structures in the U.S.

The NWCC did not conduct its own study, but analyzed all of the research done to date on various causes of avian mortality, including commercial wind farm turbines. They report that "data collected outside California indicate an average of 1.83 avian fatalities per turbine (for all species combined), and 0.006 raptor fatalities per turbine per year. Based on current projections of 3,500 operational wind turbines in the US by the end of 2001, excluding California, the total annual mortality was estimated at approximately 6,400 bird fatalities per year for all species combined."13"

LINK

so the problem hank cites about wind power having to be shut down due to birds is one wind farm.

Hank's forte' IS copy/pasting lame-brained, right-wing propaganda composed for his cognitively-challenged, conservative compadres, thinking that it somehow bolsters his ALWAYS untenable positions though topwater... so you can't really be all that surprised.

Ah not just shut down but siting. The local funded Radar Ridge project is about to be scrapped due to perceived impacts to the Marbled Marred which nest in the area. Back East it was the NIMBY's in the highbrow section the coast, ruined the view. Our PUD rates are to go up 8% for three years in a row meeting the Green requirements.

So we don't want drilling, OK , don't want nukes, OK, wind is under fire, OK, ocean generation brings out the fishers tooth and nail, and DAM"s !!!!!!!!!!!, solar farms wipe out the desert, ...........well I assume the point is made.

So it looks like we we have a problem. ALL HUMAN ACTIVITIES IN MODERN SOCEITY HAVE A PRICE to the environment. To get away from fossil fuels will require about a tripling of energy prices in the economy as fossil fuels go and alternates are developed and put in place. A all out effort is said would require a minimum of 10 years for easy basic implementation, 20 for problems requiring new technologies AND IT WOULD CREATE A LOT OF JOBS. It would also get rid of a lot of jobs and jobs created would not necessarily be in the same places. Massive shift in the economy. Massive shift in the states and the NE states will do the poorest, or so I read, as few of the industries are projected to locate in high labor / high tax states. Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana bit hits but the natural gas thing might save their asses.

Sorry about rambling on, little to much Bud. But just so one can dwell on it, try this. If you make all cars electric how do you collect a gas tax? Anyone ever wonder why government is not pushing harder? Jobs, big biz, all that crap as all do the CYA dance but it is this guys, THEY DON"T KNOW HOW TO GET THE TAX ON CARS DRIVING. Oh yes transponders will work, ( new technology ) could be put on all roads and pay as you go but investment and all pay the same. As the blogger put it then we have the same problem we have with regressive sales tax and the poor.

Get the drift guys? WE ARE THE PROBLEM....... ALL OF US. It is what it is.