Sunday we returned from a few days in Dearborn Michigan touring the Henry Ford Museum, Greenfield Village, and The Rouge Ford Factory. The Rouge Factory Tour was new to us. There was Bill Ford, the great grandson of Henry, up on the BIG screen telling us how Ford created this new Rouge factory to be friendly to the environment.

Much like our proposed Fountain Brook Crossing, The Rouge Ford Factory* has Gone Green. The roof is a garden roof, planted with sedum plants to absorb the rain water. They are increasing plantings wherever possible on the grounds; nets are strung up on the factory exterior for climbing vines.

Even their parking lots are water permeable. No more run-off. The paving material looks like asphalt but is a porous material that has sand and gravel below. The guide said that the water that runs through the pavement is filtered and very clean. It requires vacuuming twice a year to keep pores open and calcium chloride must be used instead of sodium chloride in winter.  The porous pavement is more expensive to install and maintain but lasts twice as long as conventional asphalt. Plus, no detention pond is needed...and it's good for the environment.

It seemed everything about The Rouge Factory was good for the environment or good for the employees. You could watch some of the assembly line in action. The workers were poetry in motion each doing their specific little jobs. While they are always under the time constraint of the moving line, it did not seem any were really hustling to keep up the pace. Some workers were on the cell phone, playing a hand held game, or even had newspapers there to catch a snippet of an article.

I asked a tour guide how much money these people made. She did not know specifically but said from what she read in the paper, it was around $20.00 per hour for new hires. Workers with more seniority were higher.

Another guide told us that Ford recently closed 2 other factories in other states, I believe, and now consolidated all of the work here at The Rouge. That sounded efficient. The Rouge's specialty was trucks**. Wonder where the other cars are made?

Monday's Investor's Business Daily answered part of that question: Movin' To Mexico!:  (My emphasis)

Ford's investment of $3 billion in two auto plants near Mexico City is the largest foreign company investment ever in Mexico. As oil prices soar and new climate-change rules are readied in Washington, Ford must shift from its reliance on trucks and SUVs to lighter, more energy-efficient vehicles.

This should be something that workers in Michigan and other Midwestern states with decades of automaking experience should excel at doing. Instead, Ford and other automakers are pushing more and more investment abroad — especially to Mexico.

The editorial cites reasons for an auto sales slump and the US losing jobs--mainly the UAW forcing higher wages and benefits--but increasing climate change rules and higher oil prices aren't helping the industry.

Like a coyote caught in a trap, U.S. automakers have been desperately gnawing off a leg to escape certain death. They're closing plants and slashing jobs in Michigan, Ohio and other U.S. union havens, in favor of non-union, foreign places. Like Mexico and China.

Meanwhile, foreign companies have no problem making cars here. They do it in the non-union South, where the UAW is weak.

So foreign companies can get around our high wages by being non-union, but even they and their products are subject to U.S. emission standards for factories and cars.

You would think that with our ailing auto industry our government would be doing all it could to help encourage instead of hinder. Yet Washington continues to hamper oil exploration and increase auto emission standards (i.e. new diesel emissions will be cleaner than intake air.) 

Add to automakers woes, both U.S. and foreign made here, the latest millstone around the neck: Cap-and-Trade, and I think we have the recipe for outsourcing more industry of all kinds.

Ford may have greened up its Dearborn plant and created an ideal work environment, but if more industry follows suit in exporting jobs to countries that don't care about workers or the environment, what good paying jobs will be left in America?

This was written before Tuesday's post Kohl, Feingold, and Doyle's reaction to GM closing Janesville plant

Related articles: Toyota workers in Kentucky plant made more than UAW members last year

More handwriting on the wall, GM closing Janesville assembly plant by 2010 

*The Rouge Factory was named for the Rouge River in Dearborn. The banks of the river were red clay, hence the name Rouge (French for red). 

**A guide told us this was the last year they would be making Mercury trucks. 

Links:

Last night I heard Senator Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) on the Mark Levin Show.  They were discussing S. 2191, the Senate "Lieberman/Warner Global Warming Bill and the disastrous effect this would have not on just the country as a whole, but the individual." (My emphasis throughout post.)

Wall Street Journal referred to Cap-and-Trade as Cap and Spend

As the Senate opens debate on its mammoth carbon regulation program this week, the phrase of the hour is "cap and trade." This sounds innocuous enough. But anyone who looks at the legislative details will quickly see that a better description is cap and spend. This is easily the largest income redistribution scheme since the income tax.

The Washington Post said, Just Call It "Cap-and-Tax" 

"...One of the bad ways [to control greenhouse gas] is cap-and-trade. Unfortunately, it's the darling of environmental groups and their political allies.

The chief political virtue of cap-and-trade -- a complex scheme to reduce greenhouse gases -- is its complexity. This allows its environmental supporters to shape public perceptions in essentially deceptive ways. Cap-and-trade would act as a tax, but it's not described as a tax. It would regulate economic activity, but it's promoted as a "free market" mechanism. Finally, it would trigger a tidal wave of influence-peddling, as lobbyists scrambled to exploit the system for different industries and localities. This would undermine whatever abstract advantages the system has.

...Call this "environmental pork," and it would just be a start. The program's potential to confer subsidies and preferential treatment would stimulate a lobbying frenzy. Think of today's farm programs -- and multiply by 10.

After listening to Senator Inhofe, I think we could also refer to it as Cap-and-Raid! If it passes, it will raid every worker in America's wallet!

Senator Inhofe said, Senator Barbara Boxer insists this is not a tax bill. But if you have looked into the bill itself and at the linked articles, it is difficult to understand how this could not be considered a tax bill.

Inhofe then quickly listed some points to ponder. He mentioned the Wall Street Journal referring to it as the most extensive reorganization since the 1930s. He called it worse than the Kyoto Treaty for the economy. Cap-and-Trade will need 45 more Big Government Bureaucracies to enforce the standards.

Using Boxer's figures, Inhofe pointed out that Cap-and-Trade would collect $6.7 Trillion dollars from industry (those costs will be passed onto us!). The maximum rebate to customers is $2.5 Trillion dollars. Do the math: That means $4.2 Trillion goes where?

That sounds like a tax to me!

He went on to remind us that the Democrats have killed every domestic drilling bill. The US relies on coal for 53% of all of its electricity production. Cap-and-Trade will tax coal fired electricity production. Consider that China "cranks out a new coal electric plant" every 3 days (?). (I think he said 3 days, which fits with this - certainly between India and China it would be true.)

Manufacturing jobs will go where there is (cheap) energy/power, Inhofe said. This is also what Congressman Sensenbrenner talked about at his Town Hall Meeting when he called Cap-and-Trade "Catastrophic for Wisconsin". I would add that manufacturing jobs will also go where environmental regulations are more lax.

Senator Inhofe suggested people take a look at Liberman-Warner Opposition Resource Center; Impacts of Costly Climate Bill Exposed  It is chock full of quotes, links and articles.

The Senate is debating this bill this week. While some say the bill will not pass, as you know, once the foot is in the door, the issue will not go away.  Considering all 3 Presidential candidates support the concept of Global Warming, I would just say, the bill probably won't pass...yet.

Our Senators' response to my emails: Not much hope of a NO vote here--unless they feel the heat from constituents.

This is important! Please contact them both: Senator Kohl (Phone: (414) 297-4451, (202) 224-5653) and Senator  Feingold (Office of Senator Russ Feingold | 202/224-5323) and let them know what you think about this bill.

More reading:

George Will's Cap-And-Trade: A Devious Tax Plan

Good chart of key players and terms explained at end: Senate taking up key climate-change bill 

The Heritage Foundation's Morning Bell: Carbon Capping in Bizarro World 

Links:

Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" is quoted a lot these days in regard to ethanol and rising food prices. There are many interpretations as to what she meant by it--some debate whether she said it at all.

The most interesting explanation I ever heard came from a UWM theater department teacher. She said that "cake" was the term for a gasket made from dough strips used to seal oven doors. When the baking was finished, the very over-baked, virtually inedible dough gaskets were scraped off and discarded. The poor would dig these out of the garbage and attempt to eat them. In other words, the bakers used food for a purpose other than human or animal consumption, and the insensitive Marie said the starving could always eat the gaskets.

I think that explanation fits in rather well with today's food for fuel fiasco. But I am adding to the travesty of diverting food into ethanol production, the misuse and abuse of water used for producing biofuel. Hence my version of Marie's statement, Let them eat and drink ethanol!

People are waking up to the fact that ethanol is not the answer to energy independence. Even Former President Clinton, at a campaign stop for his wife in Pennsylvania, said, "Corn is the single most inefficient way to produce ethanol because it uses a lot of energy and because it drives up the price of food."

Some people are aware that food-to-fuel mandates have increased demand on water resources. Corn in particular requires irrigation in most areas. We noted this on our last few trips out west--hundreds of acres of corn fields all being irrigated. Water is becoming a rare resource in some areas. (If you live west of the sub-continental divide on Sunnyslope Road, you have probably been paying attention to water rights issues.)

But what most people don't realize is that ethanol production causes water pollution too--both in the growing of corn and in the production of ethanol itself--regardless of the plant source. 

Corn is a nitrogen needy plant and is very soil depleting. (Remember how the Native Americans taught the Pilgrims to put a fish in each hill of corn?) Well today's farmers rely heavily on nitrogen rich fertilizers. The Washington Post stated, "Increased agricultural production also means increased fertilizer use. The National Academy of Sciences reported last month that meeting the congressional food-to-fuel mandate by 2022 would lead to a 10 to 19 percent increase in the size of the Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone" -- an area so polluted by fertilizer runoff that no aquatic life can survive there."

Polluting farmland runoff is not the worst of it. Ethanol factories also exude an alarming amount of polluted water. I have heard it described as a glycerin type effluent that causes fish die off.

Water Use and Pollution Syrup, batches of bad ethanol, and sewage are dumped into streams, threatening fish and plants with chloride, copper and other wastes which deprive waters of oxygen when they decompose. A state inspector in Iowa reported that a creek next to the ethanol plant in Sioux Center was milky and smelled like sewage.

Water Supply Can't Meet Thirst For New Industry ...Nowhere is the growing clash between economic development and water conservation more evident than in the push to build ethanol plants that typically guzzle 3½ to 6 gallons of water for every gallon of fuel produced. Minnesota's 15 ethanol plants together consume about 2 billion gallons of water per year.

Drunk on Ethanol MTBE pollutes ground and surface water, but so does ethanol. With each gallon of ethanol you get 12 gallons of sewagelike effluent produced by the fermentation/distillation process.

So, let's see... biofuel production causes local and world wide food prices to rise, food shortages, water shortages due to irrigation, pollution from fertilizer runoff, and pollution to waterways from ethanol production. (Don't forget air pollution from burning ethanol.)

And most politicians are still chanting the ethanol mantra in order to save the planet from supposed CO2 pollution? (Explanation: The corn grower / ethanol lobby is very influential.) 

Let's hope these increasingly anti-ethanol articles and news stories about world food shortages and pollution will embarrass our Federal and State legislators into voting against or better yet repealing global warming and ethanol mandates. Otherwise, I am afraid we won't have much choice but to eat and drink ethanol! 

Riots, instability spread as food prices skyrocket

Ethanol's Failed Promise

Let Them Eat Cake

Hunger fuels food riots in Haiti 

Go, Jim and Jeff, Go! Repeal Those Ethanol Mandates (links to legislators included)

Links: Don't forget, Free Pass To Movie Preview of "The Enemy God" Saturday at 3pm