Why do our putative leaders never study their history.
From Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris writing at PJ Media:
Obama-Style Climate and Energy Programs Have Failed Everywhere They’ve Been Tried
President Obama’s recently announced energy and environment policies have been tried in many countries, always with the same result: abject failure. Yet when critics point this out, explaining that “the U.S. economy will lose millions of jobs and billions of dollars in growth,” Obama simply waves their objections away:
“Let’s face it,” the president answers. “That’s what [critics] always say. … Every time… the warnings of the cynics have been wrong.”
Other leaders, especially those in Europe who are further down the green path than is America, know better.
The deputy leader of the German Green Party in the Bundestag, Oliver Krischer, summed up the dangers of relying on green power when he said,
A few years ago the renewable sector was the job miracle in Germany; now nothing is left of all of that.
Every European economy that followed the green agenda has faltered badly. Consequently, Germany is building coal plants to replace both failed wind power sources and even clean nuclear plants that are a casualty of irrational phobia after the Fukushima nuclear accident. In 2013 alone Germany built six more coal plants. China and India build four new ones every week, rendering Ontario’s coal shutdown, as well as those planned for the U.S., completely irrelevant from a climate perspective no matter what one believes about the science.
Much more at the site - they go on to talk about Maurice Strong and his role in turning Ontario from an economic powerhouse to, as Canadian Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty said in 2008:
And it will be Premier (Dalton) McGuinty’s legacy that he in two terms took Ontario from being the strongest economic province in the federation to a “have not” province.
And the Obama Administration is looking at doing the same thing here. I remember Albert Einstein's definition of insanity:
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Parker Gallant has an excellent writeup on Ontario's problems at the Financial Post:
Ontario’s Power Trip: Irrational energy planning has tripled power rates under the Liberals’ direction
In the summer of 2003, just before Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals gained power in Ontario, 50 million people in the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and Ontario suffered an electricity blackout caused “when a tree branch in Ohio started an outage that cascaded across a broad swath from Michigan to New England and Canada.” Back in 2003 Ontario’s electricity prices were 4.3 cents a kilowatt hour (kWh) and delivery costs added 1.5 cents per kWh. An additional charge of 0.7 cents — known as the debt retirement charge to pay back Ontario Hydro’s legacy debt of $7.8-billion — brought all-in costs to the average consumer to 6.5 cents per kWh.
Now it's over 15 cents per kWh and is planned to rise by 42% over the next five years. And we are heading down the same path...
