Milking The Cash Cow Dry

A few days back, we reviewed the REINS bill, designed to rein in the federal administrative agencies and their czars and get control back into the hands of elected, accountable representatives. Now in case you're wondering, that's a stack of money equaling $10.6 million. And what is that? It's the amount of your hard-earned dollars that is spent every single day on "global warming/climate change/climate disruption."

Now I know that $10.6 million sounds like chump change, even when translated into $3.8 billion annually. At least next to our $14 trillion federal deficit. But it establishes the point of just how much Congress allows in merely one example to be frittered away be agencies whose only purpose is self-perpetuation. That money is being spent on "global warming research," not on anything that actually stops it. They're just spending it to prove their untenable position about anthropomorphic weather effects. Cap 'n Tax was supposed to be the solution, but without that crazy scheme, all that's left is to continue useless research.

First, they posit that climate is changing. Oh, you mean the thing that has been changing with or without human beings for 4 billion years? But the 2011 "Advancement of Science" budget item has a chapter 15, which requests even more "study" money based on its previous junk-science research which concludes that "humans are very likely responsible for most of the well-documented increase in global average surface temperatures over the last half century." And for the benefit of the profligate and arrogant EPA, "that further greenhouse gas emissions, particularly of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, will almost certainly contribute to additional widespread climate disruptions."

Now how's that for asking for gobs of money to research what you have already decided is a fact? A spurious fact, of course. There has been no global warming since 1998, so they changed to "climate change." The climate has remained somewhat stable, so to explain an occasional hurricane or tornado, they added "climate disruption." All of it based on debunked junk science, particularly the methodology for measuring ground surface temperatures. And there's always that beautiful hockey stick graph.

And on it goes: "This climate disruption poses considerable risk to society because it can be expected to cause major negative consequences for most nations and to a wide range of species." Talk about boot-strapping. Since they've already done all the studying of climate necessary, and decided that mankind is causing global climate disruption, why do we need to spend millions of dollars a day to research it further? It's like the fifty-year old grad student working on his sixth advanced degree in order to avoid actually having to do something with them.

The few solutions they have proposed answer that question. Solar power and wind power, which are wasteful and ineffective can survive only with big federal subsidies. Lighting your house with the entire roofline covered with solar panels that provide nearly enough power is not the same thing as providing power to major cities with millions of houses. Mo' money, mo' money.

So who are the big winners of federal largess? The National Science Foundation is requesting an additional $1.6 billion, including $766 million for their "Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability" project. That's a 15.9 percent increase over last year. And lest the mission be forgotten, they are asking for $370 million for the US Global Change Research Program. They also want another $955 million for the Geosciences Directorate, whatever that is.

Coming in a close second is the US Department of Energy. They want an additional $627 million for renewable energy (is hot air a renewable form of energy?). And joining hands with the EPA, the DOE wants to eliminate $2.7 billion in subsidies for industries that emit "large amounts of carbon dioxide." In order to put it into their own coffers, I assume.

The list of gummint farmers wanting to milk this cash cow goes on and on, including NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the source of the debunked ground temperature increase studies), the Department of the Interior, and, of course, the EPA itself. If you want to know where to start gutting the outrageously bloated budget that produces the unsustainable deficits, this would be as good a place as any. How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time.