Schwarzenegger to host governors' climate summit

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is to host an international summit next week to discuss and develop strategies aimed at combating climate change, his office said in a statement Tuesday.

Schwarzenegger will be among five US governors due to attend the two-day session in Los Angeles on November 18 and 19.

Officials from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Indonesia, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom have also been invited to the Governors' Global Climate Summit, a statement said.

"Leaders from around the world are taking action to combat global warming, and this summit reflects our common desire to work together to solve a problem that affects all of us," Schwarzenegger said in a statement.

In a survey conducted by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), several utility executives have begun to express fears that the cancellation of coal-fired power plants and the implementation of carbon reduction policies could make it difficult to deliver power in some regions.

Carbon policies will have to take into account the problems that will come with switching over from a coal infrastructure. The power grid will also have to be upgraded to allow electricity to be consumed more efficiently.

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If “green jobs” mandates are such a swell idea — and indeed, taxes and subsidies in their name are now increasingly touted as the way forward to economic recovery — how is it that they require a bailout . . . before the program has even started?

Reading today’s CCNet, we see an item from the Financial Times noting that China has upped its price for continuing its lucrative Kyoto role as carbon-offset bank for the EU (and, as many hope, for the U.S., as well). China wants $300 billion in “green technologies” — $130 billion from the U.S. (1 percent of our GDP), though we aren’t even Party to the pact, which begs the question why we would not only join this economy-killing treaty, but pay through the nose to do so.

The green technologies might come from American companies, or maybe not; they might be made here, or maybe not, but the presumption is that we will pay China in exchange for their promise to use the money to buy such products, instead of buying economically viable products that they want and need, on their own. Or, slightly less insane, possibly the U.S. taxpayer could just pay to make these green things no one wants, and then send them to China. This smacks of the worst of the WPA and foreign aid rolled into one.

T. Boone Pickens

“Honestly, I’m here for America,” T. Boone Pickens told Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes last night.

“What’s the balance between doing something for America and doing something for Boone?” retorts Rose.

“Oh, let’s not talk about that,” replies Pickens.

Oh, but let’s do. And, thankfully — finally — a mainstream journalist wanted to talk about it, too.

Pickens has received months of glowing coverage from shills like the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman and others in the MSM who seem blind to Pickens’ enormous self-interest as a wind and natural-gas mogul in mandating a wind and natural gas-powered America.

Florida has embarked on a noble mission to cool the globe and cut dependence on fossil fuels.

But can we ask people in danger of losing their jobs and homes to pay for saving the world, even if that includes Miami Beach?

Because the cost will be arriving in electric bills. The amount is noticeably absent from a report released by the Governor's Action Team on Energy and Climate Change formed by Charlie Crist. It details a series of policies required to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions but never mentions paying for it.

The tab will depend, in large part, on the speed at which we pursue various goals.

Perhaps the most ambitious of them is a requirement that power utilities get 20 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2020.

Canadian Oil Sands

Bad decisions by CEOs are at the core of our economic crisis.

Throwing caution to the wind, chief executives in the financial industry took enormous risks by placing huge bets on financial instruments based on mortgages. Abandoning common sense and basic economic principles, CEOs failed to execute proper risk management by contemplating the consequences of a downturn in the housing market.

The harm caused by incompetent CEOs extends well beyond shareholders – it also threatens the conservative principles of limited government and free markets.

Failures of this magnitude frequently result in calls for increased government control. This crisis has led to a huge expansion of government through the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which allows the Secretary of Treasury to purchase up to $ 700 billion of distressed assets from banks.