Speaking of Newspeak — how about Kerry and Boxer on energy?
Even working together, Babs Boxer and John Kerry are still unable to beat Palin’s clear message and, instead, come out with meaningless government speak. I can’t resist a very light fisking of their opinion piece for the WaPo, which does precisely what my blog slogan says Democrats do: they take conclusions and try to sell them as facts. I’ll be so light that I won’t dive into underlying facts. I’ll just expose the nonsense on the face of the document. Also, out of deference for fair use principles, I’m not going to fisk the whole thing, just bits and pieces. And with those caveats, here goes:
Palin argues that “the answer doesn’t lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive!” The truth is, clean energy legislation doesn’t make energy scarcer or more expensive; it works to find alternative solutions to our costly dependence on foreign oil and provides powerful incentives to pursue cutting-edge clean energy technologies. [Objection your honor: non-responsive! Have Babs and the French-looking guy said anything here that belies the claim that new energy will be scarcer and more expensive? They’ve said they’d like to cut spending on foreign oil, but that has nothing to do with scarcity or cost. They’ve also said the government will provide financial incentives for new energy, but that sounds costly — and there’s no guarantee that there is affordable and clean new energy to be had, at least in the short term. In other words, they’ve said nothing at all that counters Palin’s claim that new government clean energy proposals will make energy scarce and costly.]
Palin asserts that job losses are “certain.” Wrong. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and American Clean Energy and Security legislation will create significant employment opportunities across the country in a broad array of sectors linked to the clean energy economy. Studies at the federal level and by states have demonstrated clean energy job creation. A report by the Center for American Progress calculated that $150 billion in clean energy investments would create more than 1.7 million domestic and community-based jobs that can’t be shipped overseas. [Again, Babs and Kerry take the known problems expensive energy creates (inflation, job loss, a slowing economy and, against those history-proven facts, make the groundless promise that they’ll make some new jobs in a private sector devoted to trying to figure out ways to come up with a better solution than fossil fuel. As to that dream, it would help if, at the very least, they’d work out how to make fossil fuel cleaner and more efficient. But noooo. This wagon is hooked to stars such as biofuels, which take food out of the mouths of poor people; electric cars, which use lots of fossil fuel to create the electricity and which work only in densely populated areas where people can tank up quickly; solar energy, which works only where the sun shines (tough luck for those in cold, foggy areas); wind energy, which has proven to be spectacularly unreliable, etc. One day, alternative energies may be the answer, but to make traditional energy sources impossibly expensive, while sucking money out of the economy to fund pie-in-the-sky “alternatives” is certain to lose jobs.]
[snip]
Take the acid rain program established in the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. The naysayers said it would cost consumers billions in higher electricity rates, but electricity rates declined an average of 19 percent from 1990 to 2006. Naysayers said the cost to business would be more than $50 billion a year, but health and other benefits outweighed the costs 40 to 1. Naysayers predicted it would cost the economy millions of jobs. In fact, the United States added 20 million jobs from 1993 to 2000, as the U.S. economy grew 64 percent. [This may true. However, since I don’t trust the source, how am I do know that, but for the Clean Air Act Amendments, the economy wouldn’t have grown by a vastly greater amount. As it is, I happen to enjoy clean fresh air. I’m interested in reasonable, market-driven responses to cleaner energy that doesn’t fund terrorists. That doesn’t justify crap-and-tax, though, does it?]
The carefully crafted clean energy bill that we will present to the Senate [pardon me while I laugh hysterically as Babs uses the phrase “carefully crafted” to describe anything that’s coming out of the House right now], building on the Waxman-Markey legislation passed by the House, will jump-start our economy, protect consumers, stop the ravages of unchecked global climate change and ensure that the United States — not China or India — will be the leading economic power in this century. [And this will work because we’re sending to China and India, countries unconstrained by these bills, all the jobs that American employers can no longer afford to pay for? Help me. I’m confused.]
Anyway, you get the idea. Go to the WaPo, and read the article for yourself. See if you find it more convincing than I do.
