Mayors and governors cannot say they weren’t adequately warned, not just once, but time and time again – in news stories, reports, photographs and graphic personal recollections. New York City was told in 1968 that it needed to protect its infrastructure from a potential 20-foot rise in water above sea level. Sandy was 14 feet.

Still more official reports by various agencies repeated these warnings over the next four decades – but with little or no action being taken by the city, even though the latest projection warned of water levels rising nearly 30 feet in the vicinity of John F. Kennedy Airport. The December 1992 nor’easter also foreshadowed Sandy flooding major sections of the PATH and subway systems.

Those reports and the accompanying photos provide merely the tips of the proverbial icebergs that these captains of titanic states and urban areas ignore at their citizens’ peril.…

In the wake of “Superstorm” Sandy, the political spin and distractions reached hurricane proportions. “It’s global warming, stupid,” declared Bloomberg BusinessWeek after monster winds and waves pounded New York and New Jersey. This storm should “compel all elected leaders to take immediate action” on climate change, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo added:

Anyone who says there’s no change in weather patterns is denying reality. The storms we’ve experienced in the last year or so are much more severe than before.

Former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman echoed:

We’ve had two 100-year storms in 14 months in this state, with a couple of nor’easters thrown in between for good measure. The climate is changing, whether people want to talk about it or not.”

“PURPA has been the most effective single measure in promoting renewable energy.”

–Union of Concerned Scientists

What if Congress passed a law that forced you to buy intermittent energy for the same price as reliable energy? What if, in an attempt to promote “alternative” energy sources such as wind power, Congress passed a law that enabled wind to crowd out reliable resources? Congress actually passed that law in 1978, the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA). Its role has changed and its scope has narrowed, but “PURPA is still alive and kicking.”

Background

President Jimmy Carter, working from the viewpoint that the federal government had to intervene in markets to reduce demand and increase supply, formulated PURPA as part of a five-part National Energy Plan.

Oil and gas were seen as wasting resources relative to plentiful coal, so public policy needed to transfer demand from the former to the latter.…

[Ed. note: This is the second in a continuing series at MasterResource, the first of which was published November 21st.]

The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations who are interested in improving national, state, and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that energy and environmental issues are technical matters that should be addressed by genuine science.

Instead of a science-based approach, our energy and environmental policies have become a playground, even a cookie jar, for those who stand to economically or politically profit from them. As a result, anything genuinely science-based in these policies is usually inadvertent and accidental.

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, we send out a newsletter every 2-3 weeks in the interest of balancing what the mainstream media too often conveys about energy and environmental matters.…