Republicans Ax the Budget $61 Million

The Proposed cuts sound good in theory while actually doing more harm than good. (Using Simple Math anyone can see)

Did the proposed cuts enacted by the House in the wee hours make any one else sick?  If your are not sick yet your Health may soon suffer. 

The newly elected Tea Party Republican Representatives lead the charge in Hand-Cuffing the EPA and their Pollution Control Measures.  The actions sound good in theory, but actually will create more harm than actual help.
   

Coal and Oil Industry backing- the House Republicans cut the only Regulating Agency the Fossil Fuel Industries are forced to conform to- The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency).

• The Republicans Claim: "The People have Spoken" "we are acting in their best interest."

 Who are they kidding?  Here are Dirty Coal Figures that contradict the proposed cuts and show the proposed cuts only benefit the Fossil Fuel Industry and Contribute the Harmful GHG Emissions that are causing- Climate Change and Global Warming.

• coal's costs in environmental and public health damage would triple the cost of coal-generated electricity ...best estimates of costs from coal's annual air pollution at $188 billion and costs from its contributions to global warming at $62 billion ($250 Billion Dollars Combined) (quote) 

Using Simple Math anyone can see: 

• $61 Billion Cut from Budget - $250 billion Coal Pollution Costs =  nets a negative-$189 Billion in Pollution Costs from Coal.

The Proposed cuts sound good in theory while actually doing more harm than good.  With Leadership like this it is no wonder why the US Budget is out of control.  When enacted programs net a negative numbers.  Who in their correct mind frame would continue to enact programs that do more harm than good?  Its not hard to figure out that steps should be made to correct the Actions to create a 

positive cash flow.

There are better ways to Balance an "Out of Control" Federal Spending Budget.

I suggest that future budget cuts should be made starting with the Politicians Salaries.

It seem that they want the Constituents to live on less-They should "Lead by Example" and cut their Salaries.

I think turn-a-round is fair play - Ax and Cut the Elected Leaders Salaries.  The majority of them are responsible for the mess we are in now anyway. Scotty 2/20/11

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I used to link and contacted: McCaskill, Carnahan, and Blunt- the elected officials for my area. 

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House passes sweeping cuts to domestic programs

(AP) – 2/19/11WASHINGTON —
{emphasis added by Scotty}
Jolted to action by deficit-conscious newcomers, the Republican-controlled House passed sweeping legislation early Saturday to cut $61 billion

• from hundreds of federal programs and 
• shelter coal companies
• oil refiners and 
• farmers from new government regulations.

The 235-189 vote to send the bill to the Senate was largely along party lines and defied a veto threat from President Barack Obama. It marked the most striking victory to date for the 87-member class of freshmen Republicans elected last fall on a promise to attack the deficit and reduce the reach of government. Three Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the measure.

"The American people have spoken. They demand that Washington stop its out-of-control spending now, not some time in the future," declared freshman Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan.

The $1.2 trillion bill covers every Cabinet agency through the Sept. 30 end of the budget year, imposing severe spending cuts aimed at domestic programs and foreign aid, including aid for schools, nutrition programs, environmental protection, and heating and housing subsidies for the poor.

The measure faces a rough ride in the Democratic-controlled Senate, even before the GOP amendments adopted Thursday, Friday and early Saturday morning pushed the bill further and further to the right on health care and environmental policy. Senate Democrats promise higher spending levels and are poised to defend Obama's health care bill, environmental policies and new efforts to overhaul regulation of the financial services industry.

Changes rammed through the House on Friday and Saturday would shield greenhouse-gas polluters and privately owned colleges from federal regulators, block a plan to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, and bar the government from shutting down mountaintop mines it believes will cause too much water pollution, siding with business groups over environmental activists and federal regulators in almost every instance.

"This is like a Cliff Notes summary of every issue that the Republicans, the Chamber of Commerce, and the (free market) CATO Institute have pushed for 30 years," said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass. "And they're just going to run them through here."

The gulf between the combatants ensures that difference on the measure won't be resolved soon, requiring a temporary spending bill when a current stopgap measure expires March 4. Senate Democrats and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, are already maneuvering for political advantage in anticipation of talks on a short-term extension that will be needed.

Democrats say Boehner's insistence that any stopgap measure carry spending cuts amounts to an ultimatum that could threaten a government shutdown like the episodes that played to the advantage of former President Bill Clinton in his battles with Republicans in 1995-1996.

The Obama administration upped the ante on Friday, warning that workers who distribute Social Security benefits might be furloughed if the GOP cuts go through.
Across four long days of freewheeling debate, Republicans left their conservative stamp in other ways.

They took several swipes at the year-old health care law, including voting for a ban on federal funding for its implementation. At the behest of anti-abortion lawmakers, they called for an end to federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

Republicans awarded the Pentagon an increase of less than 2 percent increase, but domestic agencies would bear slashing cuts of about 12 percent. Such reductions would feel almost twice as deep since they would be spread over the final seven months of the budget year.

Republicans recoiled, however, from some of the most politically difficult cuts to grants to local police and fire departments, special education and economic development. Amtrak supporters easily repelled an attempt to slash its budget.

About the only victory scored by Obama during the week came on a vote Wednesday to cancel $450 million for a costly alternative engine for the Pentagon's next-generation F-35 warplane. It was a top priority of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and passed with the votes of many GOP conservatives who opposed the $3 billion program, more than half of the 87 Republican freshmen elected last fall on promises to cut the budget.

Democrats overwhelmingly oppose the measure and Obama has threatened a veto if it reaches his desk, citing sweeping cuts that he says would endanger the economic recovery.
"The bill will destroy 800,000 American jobs," said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., citing a study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. "It will increase class sizes and take teachers out of the classrooms ... It will jeopardize homeless veterans, make our communities less secure, threaten America's innovation."

The Environmental Protection Agency was singled out by Republicans eager to defend business and industry from numerous agency regulations they say threaten job-creation and the economy. The EPA's budget was slashed by almost one-third, and then its regulatory powers were handcuffed in a series of floor votes.

Proposed federal regulations would be blocked on emission of greenhouse gases, blamed for climate change, and a proposed regulation on mercury emissions from cement kilns would also be stopped. Additionally, the bill also calls for a halt to proposed regulations affecting Internet service providers and privately-owned colleges, victories for the industries that would be affected.

The 359-page bill was shaped beginning to end by the first-term Republicans, many of them elected with tea party backing.

They rejected an initial draft advanced by the leadership and produced by Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., chairman of the Appropriations Committee, saying it did not cut deeply enough.

The revised bill added more reductions, and cut $100 billion from Obama's request for the current year, the amount Republicans had cited in their campaign-season Pledge to America.

But a tea party-backed amendment to slash $22 billion on top of the $60-billion-plus worth of steep cuts already made by the measure failed on Friday almost 2-1.

The heavily subsidized ethanol industry absorbed a pair of defeats Saturday at the hands of it many critics, including Rep. John Sullivan, R-Ohio, who won a vote to block the EPA from approving boosting the amount of ethanol in most gasoline to 15 percent.

On other regulatory issues, foes of the EPA won a 249-176 vote to block the agency from using its regulatory powers to curb greenhouse gases. EPA has already taken steps to regulate global warming pollution from vehicles and the largest factories and industrial plants and is expected to soon roll out rules that target refineries and power plants.

The move to stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse-gas polluters came from Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, who said his congressional district is home to more oil refineries than any other.

"We're in the midst of a massive economic downturn and the last thing we need to do is shoot ourselves in the foot with unnecessary, expensive new regulations that are on business and industry," he said.

Republicans also prevailed in more parochial issues, with Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., winning a close vote to block the government from removing hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, while Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., won a 230-195 vote to block an EPA plan for cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay that would cut pollution from runoff from farms and municipalities throughout the Chesapeake watershed.

And Florida agricultural interests won a vote to block EPA rules issued last year aimed at controlling fertilizer and other pollutants that stoke the spread of algae in the state's waters.
On Thursday, the House voted to block regulations governing the emission of mercury from cement plants and to stop the Federal Communications Commission from enforcing proposed regulations opposed by Verizon and other large Internet Service Providers.

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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USED WIND TURBINES FOR SALE? USED WIND TURBINES WANTED?

Are you planning to repower? Want to sell your exisiting wind turbines? Want to achieve the best sales price? Are you searching for a used wind turbine?...Post Continues

Read complete Guest Post at:  http://stlouisrenewableenergy.blogspot.com/p/guest-posts.html

Deficit Cuts-Nick,Editor, Energy and Capital

You want deficits cut?

Then you're a supporter of renewable energy — and you're not alone.

In a recent Gotham Research poll, 73% of Americans (that extrapolates to 226 million people) said they want half or all fossil fuel subsidies repurposed to support solar and other renewables.

Some of you will dismiss that result. Some of you will deny it. Some of you will say it's a lie.

To each his own.

But here are some things you can't argue with*:

1. The International Energy Agency's (IEA) chief economist has said phasing out billions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies "would trigger vast savings in energy consumption... and change the energy game quickly and substantially." He added that fossil fuel subsidies are "the appendicitis of the global energy system which need to be removed for a healthy, sustainable development future."

2. The IEA calculated that in 2008, 37 large developing countries spent about $557 billion in energy subsidies.

3. An Environmental Law Institute study estimated $72 billion in tax breaks to U.S. fossil fuel companies from 2002-2008.

4. An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study found direct subsidies that artificially lower the cost of fossil fuels amounted to $312 billion globally in 2009.

And yet, when a co-author of the U.S. Energy Information Administration's World Energy Outlook was recently asked "if someone has actually done a credible, comprehensive, definitive count of how much taxpayers underwrite fossil fuels in this country", he said there is no such widely accepted count or number available...

I guess it is pretty hard to count up all the:

• tax breaks

• subsidies

• the costs of government agencies that are set up to perform functions that these industries should pay full cost for doing — like figuring out how to stuff their pollution underground instead of wasting it on exorbitant, fantasy projects like "FutureGen"

• military expenditures to protect oil shipping lanes

• pollution forgiveness or remediation

• rock-bottom-price access to public property, such as mountains, subsurface property, aquifers, and ocean waters — all of which fossil energy companies routinely wreck and pay comparatively little to fix

If we want a discussion about wasteful spending, I think this is a pretty good place to start.

Just throwing it out there.

Call it like you see it,

Nick
Editor, Energy and Capital

(*Thanks to a Greentech Media guest post for the information in these lists.)

--
Scott's Contracting
scottscontracting@gmail.com
http://www.stlouisrenewableenergy.blogspot.com
http://scottscontracting.wordpress.com

NASAs latest Climate Change Mission- Glory Departs Feb 23,

The NASA satellite Glory is set to launch into the Earths Atmosphere.  The Glory Launch will further Climatologist study of Airborne Particles (Aerosols) and how they affect the the Earths Climate.  They will be studying the ubiquitous particles (existing or being everywhere, especially at the same time; omnipresent) that directly influence the Climate by absorbing and reflecting the Sun's Radiation.

The Aerosol Particles they will be examining are-" few nanometers, less than the width of the smallest viruses, to several tens of micrometers, about the diameter of human hair" The Aerosols are Created by: Aerosols, Gases that lead to Aerosol formation, Fossil Fuel Exhaust Gases, and Natural causes. -- the amount of energy entering and exiting Earth's atmosphere. An accurate measurement of these impacts is important in order to anticipate future changes to our climate and how they may affect human life.

Godspeed and Good Luck to all those involved.

Scott's Contracting
scottscontracting@gmail.com
http://www.stlouisrenewableenergy.blogspot.com
http://scottscontracting.wordpress.com

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Climatologists have known for decades that airborne particles called aerosols can have a powerful impact on the climate. However, pinpointing the magnitude of the effect has proven challenging because of difficulties associated with measuring the particles on a global scale.

Soon a new NASA satellite -- Glory -- should help scientists collect the data needed to provide firmer answers about the important particles. In California, engineers and technicians at Vandenberg Air Force Base are currently prepping Glory for a Feb. 23 launch.

Aerosols, or the gases that lead to their formation, can come from vehicle tailpipes and desert winds, from sea spray and fires, volcanic eruptions and factories. Even lush forests, soils, or communities of plankton in the ocean can be sources of certain types of aerosols.

The ubiquitous particles drift in Earth's atmosphere, from the stratosphere to the surface, and range in size from a few nanometers, less than the width of the smallest viruses, to several tens of micrometers, about the diameter of human hair.

The particles can directly influence climate by reflecting or absorbing the sun's radiation. In broad terms, this means bright-colored or translucent aerosols, such as sulfates and sea salt aerosols, tend to reflect radiation back towards space and cause cooling. In contrast, darker aerosols, such as black carbon and other types of carbonaceous particles, can absorb significant amounts of light and contribute to atmospheric warming.

Research to date suggests that the cooling from sulfates and other reflective aerosols overwhelms the warming effect of black carbon and other absorbing aerosols. Indeed, the best climate models available show that aerosol particles have had a cooling effect that has counteracted about half of the warming caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases since the 1880s.

"However, the models are far from perfect," said Glory Project Scientist Michael Mishchenko, a senior scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). "The range of uncertainty associated with the climate impact of aerosols is three or four times that of greenhouse gases," he said.

In comparison to greenhouse gases, aerosols are short-lived, and dynamic -- making the particles much harder to measure than long-lived and stable carbon dioxide. Aerosols usually remain suspended in the atmosphere for just a handful of days. Complicating matters, the particles can clump together to form hybrids that are difficult to distinguish.

In addition to scattering and absorbing light, aerosols can also modify clouds. They serve as the seeds of clouds, and can also affect cloud brightness and reflectivity, how long clouds last, and how much they precipitate. Reflective aerosols, like sulfates, for example, tend to brighten clouds and make them last longer, whereas black carbon from soot generally has the opposite effect.

Still, much remains unknown about aerosols and clouds. How do aerosols other than sulfates and black carbon affect clouds? How do aerosol impacts differ in warm and cold environments? Can infusions of aerosols near clouds spark self-reinforcing feedback cycles capable of affecting the climate?

The climate impact of clouds remains one of the largest uncertainties in climate science because of such unanswered questions. Some models suggest a mere 5 percent increase in cloud reflectivity could compensate for the entire increase in greenhouse gases from the modern industrial era, while others produce quite different outcomes.

Such unresolved issues prompted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to list the level of scientific understanding about aerosols as "low" in its last major report. Of the 25 climate models included by the IPCC in the Fourth Assessment Report, only a handful considered the scattering or absorbing effects of aerosol types other than sulfates.

"And less than a third of the models included aerosol impacts on clouds, even in a limited way, and those that did only considered sulfates," said Mian Chin, a physical scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who specializes in modeling aerosols.

Glory, which contains an innovative aerosol-sensing instrument called the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor (APS), aims to change this. By more accurately identifying a broad suite of aerosol types -- such as salt, mineral dust and smoke -- the instrument should help climatologists fill in key gaps in climate models.

While other NASA instruments -- including ground, aircraft, and satellite-based instruments -- have studied aerosols in the past, APS is NASA's first satellite-based instrument capable of measuring the polarization, the orientation of light-wave vibrations.

Raw sunlight, explained Mishchenko, is unpolarized. This means the waves oscillate in an unpredictable, random fashion as they move through space -- much like a rope would wiggle about if it had two people flapping its ends up and down in no particular pattern.

When light waves pass through certain types of filters called polarizers the waves are forced into a more ordered form. Imagine that wobbling rope trying to pass throw a narrow slit in a fence: only the waves vibrating at a certain angle could make it through. The result is polarized light, or light for which the waves only oscillate at specific angles. The surface of glass, sunglasses, even clouds of aerosol particles can polarize light.

APS's ability to measure the polarization of light scattered by aerosols and clouds is the key strength of the instrument. Other NASA satellite instruments have measured aerosols, but such instruments have typically done so by looking at the intensity of light -- the amplitude of the light waves -- not their polarization.

Yet, ground and aircraft-based studies, particularly those conducted with an aircraft instrument called the Research Scanning Polarimeter, which is quite similar to APS, show that polarized light contains the most information about aerosol features. "Earlier instruments can approximate the abundance of aerosol in general terms, but they leave much to be desired if you're trying to sort out the shape and composition of the particles," said APS Instrument Scientist Brian Cairns, also of GISS.

These scanning electron microscope images, which are not at the same scale, show the wide variety of aerosols shapes. From left to right: volcanic ash, pollen, sea salt, and soot. Credit: USGS, UMBC, Arizona State University

Large, spherical particles -- sea salt, for example -- leave a very different imprint on light in comparison to smaller and more irregularly-shaped particles such as black carbon. As a result, much like forensic scientists might study the details of blood droplets at a crime scene to reconstruct what happened, climatologists using Glory data will look to the polarization state of scattered light to work backwards and deduce the type of aerosol that must have scattered it.

Glory will not be the first Earth-observing satellite instrument to study polarization. French instruments that launched in 1996 and 2002 have as well, but the APS promises to be far more accurate and will look at the same particles from many more angles.

Nonetheless, interpreting Glory's APS data will be an extremely complex task. The mission will provide such a vast amount of new polarization data about aerosols that, in order to make sense of it, scientists will first have to validate APS science products with ground-based sensors scattered around the globe. Likewise, they will have to adapt and update mathematical techniques developed for an aircraft instrument to ensure they work well in a space environment.

All of this will take some time to refine and perfect. Mishchenko's team expects to release preliminary results as soon as possible after Glory launches, but he also expects to release improved and enhanced versions of Glory's APS data products over time.

A great deal of work lies ahead of Glory's science team and the aerosol science community more broadly, but the mission has the potential to produce profound advancements in understanding the perplexing particles. "Glory has the potential to offer a critical view of aerosols that we have never had from space before," said Glory's Deputy Project Scientist Ellsworth Welton.