What would Myron buy?

Another year another United Nations Climate Change conference, this time in Mexico.

The silence from Myron Ebell is uncanny.

He has still received no gifts from his place on the Freedom Action Network, that lame CEI offshoot which tried desperately to market itself to the corporate money supply that pays for other (cough cough) grassroots organizations, like FreedomWorks· The team still has at its core the same set of CEI stallwarts Myron Ebell, Julie Walsh, Sam Kazman, Fred Smith, Sam Kazman, and looks like a failure.

The latest blogpost there to bring Xmas cheer to the world is by CEI-er Hans Bader is a screed about how unemployment benefits keep people from working, and how the economic stimulus spending destroys jobs. Way to go, Mr Bader. If poverty is good for the economy, maybe we would be better without a good economy -- at least by your measure of what is a good economy.

These fake political front groups, like the CEI, need to inflate themselves, so it is always possible that Myron has already been laid off. If so, one hopes he is enjoying his unemployment benefits, which you are entitled to -- even if your job for the past ten years has been fighting for the destruction of such expressions of civilization.

In any case, we leave you with some Christmas cheer:

The sheep look up

The Republican Party apparatchik, Myron Ebell, who is a living lie every time he is described as being employed by a "non-partisan public policy group" outlines his plan for bringing misery, death and poison to millions of Americans:

The 2009 stimulus plan has done little besides pile up national debt, and a further stimulus would be equally useless. The fact is that the U.S. economy is going to struggle as long as the Obama administration keeps piling on new regulations that are strangling investment.

The environmental and energy regulations are the worst. They include

• EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act,


• the forthcoming SOX-NOX transport and ozone rules to shut down coal-fired power plants,


• the arbitrary use of the Clean Water Act to stop surface coal mining in central Appalachia,


• the de facto moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration,


• the boiler MACT rule, the coal ash rule,


• the cooling water intake structures rule,


• the delay in approving the pipeline from the Alberta oil sands,


• the cancellation of oil exploration leases on federal land in the Rocky Mountains, and


• higher fuel efficiency standards for cars, pickups and SUVs, and heavy-duty trucks.


• The administration is also rushing to develop regulations to limit natural gas production using hydraulic fracturing.

Myron just loves the smell of toxic pollution in the morning.

No regulation. Never. Any. Good.

Except last May when Myron spoke of the need for more scrutiny of the industry and regulations.

I guess it's quite easy to forget that event if you don't actually live on the shores of the Gulf and don't detect the diseases and cancers that are brewing.

Myron concludes with his extinct support for technological retreat back to the 20th century:

The Obama administration with strong support from the Democratic leadership in Congress is engaged in a multi-front war on coal, oil, and natural gas. At the same time, it is wasting tens of billions of dollars on dead-end renewables that raise energy prices. Taken together, the Obama administration is making consumers poorer and pricing U.S. manufacturing out of existence.

That is why investment capital is fleeing the U.S. There are undoubtedly many people who would like to invest in the American economy, but who in their right mind would take a chance that the Obama administration’s regulatory strangulation is going to be reversed. The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives faces an enormous challenge to limit and undo the damage done by President Obama to America’s long-term economic prospects.

To balance Mr Ebell's awesome fear and ignorance, it's necessary to include the contribution from Dean Baker, the man who knows the numbers and recognized the 6 trillion dollar property bubble when no one else bothered:

The stimulus has performed pretty much as projected. It created 2-3 million jobs and lowered the unemployment rate by between 1-2 percentage points. It also is coming to an end.

I'm not sure why anyone would have expected it to offset a downturn of this magnitude. The collapse of the housing bubble and the bubble in non-residential real estate cost us about $600 billion in annual construction demand. The loss of more than $6 trillion in housing wealth and an equal amount of stock wealth led to a drop in annual consumption of around $600 billion.

Pulling out technical fixes (the alternative minimum tax) and money to be spent in later years, the stimulus came to about $300 billion a year for 2009 and 2010. This was offset by declines in state and local government spending of around $150 billion a year, leaving a net government stimulus of around $150 billion a year.

Outside of Washington, it is not hard to understand that $150 billion in stimulus from the government sector cannot offset a $1.2 trillion loss in demand from the private sector. Unfortunately the reporters who cover economic policy aren't very good with arithmetic so they somehow can't get this.

Ram this up your Key-hole

You don't call yourself "For Fairness, Balance and Accuracy in News Reporting" and then quote a nonsensical piece of scaremongering by Myron Ebell, like this:

Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute [said] "As a candidate President Obama promised to work to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But the Obama Administration’s announcement of a moratorium on offshore drilling in the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf is only the latest in a string of policies designed to make us more dependent on foreign oil by reducing domestic production. President Obama is dishonestly pursuing policies that are the opposite of what he promised and that are against America’s economic interests and opposed by a strong majority of Americans. The United States is the only country in the world with potential major offshore oil resources that is not actively exploiting them. The Obama Administration has decided that it is better for Cuba to bring in China, Russia, and Venezuela to drill a few miles off the Florida Keys than to allow American companies to drill in American waters."

Oh, I get it. All oil anywhere in the world belongs to the United States -- even if it happens to be under someone else's territory. Maybe if the US put a bit more effort into the thousands of its own wells it already has there wouldn't be so much spillage.

Maybe if you hadn't spent so much time invading Iraq, you could have pulled off your coup d'etat in Venezuala in 2002 and completely starved Cuba into submission with that blockade.

The man who thinks Ebell deserves more exposure and is Editor of the ridiculously named Accuracy in Media Report is Cliff Kincaid, who has appeared on...

The Today Show, Hannity & Colmes, The O’Reilly Factor, The CBS Evening News, Lou Dobbs Tonight, and The Glenn Beck Show. He holds a B.A. in Journalism and Communications from the University of Toledo and previously wrote for Human Events, Oliver North’s Freedom Alliance, and served as a guest co-host on CNN’s Crossfire. Mr. Kincaid is also founder and president of America’s Survival (http://www.usasurvival.org/).

Oh dear, oh dear.

That USA survival has a lot of fun paranoia:

Appendix One: AIM Report on I.F. Stone August 1994

Newly-declassified FBI archives have provided smoking gun confirmation of a suspicion we and other conservatives harbored for decades: dispite his porturing as a non-political gadfly, journalistic icon I.F.Stone was an active member of the Communist Party, USA, at one stage of his career.

The rest of Cliff's site just gets better.

All I can say is Myron Ebell is in good company here.

Same can be said of a similar article over at the Washington Times:

"We are the only country in the world that has major, known, offshore energy resources that we are not exploiting," explains Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. A survey of oil executives reported Tuesday that the moratoria and regulatory slowdowns of western Gulf drilling - after the BP rig blowout - already was expected to hurt for many years to come. Before the ban, government was granting nearly 15 new Gulf permits per month; since the April explosion, it has issued only 16 total, even in shallow water. The result, according to the Energy Information Administration, will be a loss of 170,000 barrels per day in 2011 - which, in turn, will cause a greater dependence on foreign oil.

What do you mean "loss of 170,000 barrels per day"? The only way you do that is to leak it into the ocean. Seems to me that if you don't take it out, then it's still there, isn't it? Nothing is lost.

Or, to put it another way: If I don't eat my cake, then I still have it! Eh?

The Myron Ebell Climate says "Get Stuffed, Mr Kincaid and your UN-free zone." What are you frightened of? That they will send in their black helicopters and abduct you?