From the Freakonomics blog:
The environment has taken a back seat to the economy this election season. But timely new research looks at the intersection of politics, economics and the environment: the actual cost of environmental regulations.
Read the rest of the post and let us know what you think.
Showing posts with label green conservatism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label green conservatism. Show all posts
Friday, September 21, 2012
Thursday, September 20, 2012
PBS Attacked for Allowing Global Warming Skeptic to Speak
You'll want to read more about this, click here for the whole story, complete with video.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Climate Change Is A Hoax, Obama, Like Your Presidency
This scathing piece by Investor's Business Daily is worth reading in its entirety.
In Charlotte, N.C., the president noted that we have "a hundred-year supply of natural gas that's right beneath our feet." He did not say the Environmental Protection Agency and environmentalists have opposed fracking and the natural gas boom is being led by private companies on private or state-owned land.
Climate change is a hoax, and so is the president's energy policy. China has passed us as the world's largest carbon emitter and builds the equivalent of a coal-fired power plant big enough to power a city the size of San Diego every seven to 10 days.Read the rest of the column here.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Today's Read: Common Sense Environmental Policy
By Wesley Coopersmith
The importance of keeping our environment clean and safe is an issue agreed upon by most Americans. We want a clean environment that is not going to pose a threat for us or for future generations. The importance of not only a healthy environment, but a healthy economy is also shared amongst most if not all Americans. Both of these issues, the environment and the economy, need to be considered when evaluating EPA regulatory decisions. Despite the claims of the Obama administration that the EPA is taking common sense approaches to regulatory decisions, both their words and actions suggest otherwise.
The importance of keeping our environment clean and safe is an issue agreed upon by most Americans. We want a clean environment that is not going to pose a threat for us or for future generations. The importance of not only a healthy environment, but a healthy economy is also shared amongst most if not all Americans. Both of these issues, the environment and the economy, need to be considered when evaluating EPA regulatory decisions. Despite the claims of the Obama administration that the EPA is taking common sense approaches to regulatory decisions, both their words and actions suggest otherwise.
Read the rest of the column here.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Interesting in Today's London Telegraph
Global warming: second thoughts of an environmentalist
Fritz Vahrenholt, one of Germany's earliest green energy investors, is not convinced that humanity is causing catastrophic global warming.
Friday, April 20, 2012
Move Earth Day To Dec. 7 To Highlight The EPA's Victory Over Liberty
This op-ed appeared in today's Investor's Business Daily:
By BILL WILSON
Posted 04/19/2012 06:29 PM ET
Like the day Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, Dec. 7, 2009, might too be recalled by history as a day that shall live in infamy.
That was the day Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson issued the carbon endangerment finding, a rule defining carbon dioxide, a gas necessary for the existence of life itself, as a harmful pollutant under the terms of the Clean Air Act.
While Earth Day marks the April 22 celebration worldwide of the radical environmentalist agenda, Dec. 7, 2009, was the day the greens scored their most significant victory to date over free markets and, indeed, over liberty itself. As a result, it would only be fitting if Earth Day were moved to Dec. 7.
The nation has to hope a future Congress and president will undo this rule, because the alarmist decision greatly understates the impact of restricting CO2 emissions on global population sustainability and economic growth.
The fact is, the modern world depends on petroleum, gasoline, diesel, coal and natural gas to do just about everything, including getting to work, delivering goods and services, heating and cooling homes, and providing hot water.
But it goes deeper than that.
The population explosion over the past 200 years has been entirely predicated on the Industrial Revolution that was fueled in large part by increased energy output. The necessary consequence of dramatically reducing energy consumption — and the food production, medical advancement and economic expansion that depends on it — will be a commensurate, significant decrease in the human population.
Really, it all depends on just how draconian the agency's restrictions of carbon emissions are. How much of a price will be placed on CO2 emissions? If it's too high, the impact could be devastating, resulting in the means of sustaining the world's population being suddenly restricted or gradually reduced. Either way, people will die.
Ironically, in its finding, the agency claimed that it was the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and not government regulation, that "threaten(s) the public health and welfare of current and future generations" if carbon emissions were not reduced.
It promised increased heat waves, more intense hurricanes, floods, storm surges, rising sea levels, erosion, wildfires, drought and even allergens and pathogens. The EPA also predicts the displacement of indigenous populations, the eventual decrease of food production and agriculture, and the reduction of forest productivity if we do not commit to their economic suicide pact.
With predictions that dire, one expects that the finding will soon become the foundation for the EPA to incrementally regulate, restrict, and eventually prohibit every aspect of modern life. Emissions of carbon dioxide by motor vehicles and industry will just be the beginning.
Perhaps, if the people are very lucky, the air we all exhale shall remain unregulated, although given the broad nature of the finding, unless things change in Washington, D.C., there certainly would be nothing to stop regulation in that arena.
Making matters worse, in its finding the EPA disregarded the downward trend in global temperatures over the past decade despite higher CO2 emissions, as documented by APS Physics' Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.
It ignored the failed projections of increased temperatures by the International Panel on Climate Change and other proponents of the man-made global warming hypothesis. It suppressed internal dissent at the agency, as when Dr. Alan Carlin submitted comments against the EPA's finding.
The EPA even overlooked the impact of the Climategate scandal where it was revealed that global temperature data were manipulated and exaggerated by climatologists.
That alone should be cause for Congress to rescind the EPA's endangerment finding, but Congress won't act unless the people demand it.
In the end, the finding — and whatever tyrannical restrictions on energy use result from it — will ultimately prove more dangerous than man-made global warming ever could have been. As Lord Monckton wrote, "The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing."
But that does not mean the country should sit by idly now. That is why Americans for Limited Government is launching FreeMarketAmerica.org on the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day to combat this and other incursions by the radical environmentalist agenda.
The EPA and its environmental extremist cohorts are serious in their attack on our capitalist system. The question is will they be allowed to hide their agenda behind green eyeshades? For the sake of our nation, let's hope not.
By BILL WILSON
Posted 04/19/2012 06:29 PM ET
Like the day Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, Dec. 7, 2009, might too be recalled by history as a day that shall live in infamy.
That was the day Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson issued the carbon endangerment finding, a rule defining carbon dioxide, a gas necessary for the existence of life itself, as a harmful pollutant under the terms of the Clean Air Act.
While Earth Day marks the April 22 celebration worldwide of the radical environmentalist agenda, Dec. 7, 2009, was the day the greens scored their most significant victory to date over free markets and, indeed, over liberty itself. As a result, it would only be fitting if Earth Day were moved to Dec. 7.
The nation has to hope a future Congress and president will undo this rule, because the alarmist decision greatly understates the impact of restricting CO2 emissions on global population sustainability and economic growth.
The fact is, the modern world depends on petroleum, gasoline, diesel, coal and natural gas to do just about everything, including getting to work, delivering goods and services, heating and cooling homes, and providing hot water.
But it goes deeper than that.
The population explosion over the past 200 years has been entirely predicated on the Industrial Revolution that was fueled in large part by increased energy output. The necessary consequence of dramatically reducing energy consumption — and the food production, medical advancement and economic expansion that depends on it — will be a commensurate, significant decrease in the human population.
Really, it all depends on just how draconian the agency's restrictions of carbon emissions are. How much of a price will be placed on CO2 emissions? If it's too high, the impact could be devastating, resulting in the means of sustaining the world's population being suddenly restricted or gradually reduced. Either way, people will die.
Ironically, in its finding, the agency claimed that it was the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and not government regulation, that "threaten(s) the public health and welfare of current and future generations" if carbon emissions were not reduced.
It promised increased heat waves, more intense hurricanes, floods, storm surges, rising sea levels, erosion, wildfires, drought and even allergens and pathogens. The EPA also predicts the displacement of indigenous populations, the eventual decrease of food production and agriculture, and the reduction of forest productivity if we do not commit to their economic suicide pact.
With predictions that dire, one expects that the finding will soon become the foundation for the EPA to incrementally regulate, restrict, and eventually prohibit every aspect of modern life. Emissions of carbon dioxide by motor vehicles and industry will just be the beginning.
Perhaps, if the people are very lucky, the air we all exhale shall remain unregulated, although given the broad nature of the finding, unless things change in Washington, D.C., there certainly would be nothing to stop regulation in that arena.
Making matters worse, in its finding the EPA disregarded the downward trend in global temperatures over the past decade despite higher CO2 emissions, as documented by APS Physics' Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.
It ignored the failed projections of increased temperatures by the International Panel on Climate Change and other proponents of the man-made global warming hypothesis. It suppressed internal dissent at the agency, as when Dr. Alan Carlin submitted comments against the EPA's finding.
The EPA even overlooked the impact of the Climategate scandal where it was revealed that global temperature data were manipulated and exaggerated by climatologists.
That alone should be cause for Congress to rescind the EPA's endangerment finding, but Congress won't act unless the people demand it.
In the end, the finding — and whatever tyrannical restrictions on energy use result from it — will ultimately prove more dangerous than man-made global warming ever could have been. As Lord Monckton wrote, "The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing."
But that does not mean the country should sit by idly now. That is why Americans for Limited Government is launching FreeMarketAmerica.org on the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day to combat this and other incursions by the radical environmentalist agenda.
The EPA and its environmental extremist cohorts are serious in their attack on our capitalist system. The question is will they be allowed to hide their agenda behind green eyeshades? For the sake of our nation, let's hope not.
• Wilson is the president of Americans for Limited Government
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
EDITORIAL: Abrupt climate-change reversal
New U.N. report blows cold on human causes for weather extremes
"The injection of politics into the global-warming hypothesis has made it difficult to know where facts end and falsehoods begin. While alarmists have been blaming their fellow man for every hurricane, tornado and other ill wind whipped up by Mother Nature, science is now concluding that the cause of these damaging storms has nothing to do with human activity."Read the rest of the Washington Times editorial here.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
How Green Became Obama's Albatross
A must read article from the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday:
The president is trapped by his own rhetoric amid America's energy boom.
by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Barack Obama may believe a lot of things, but he probably doesn't believe the Sierra Club is key to his re-election. His decision to nix the Keystone XL pipeline will cost him votes but he did it anyway.
We'll admit that Mr. Obama's global warming talk has often seemed to us perfunctory. Perhaps we mistook his lack of heat for a lack of conviction. He just released his first 2012 campaign ad and it's a paean to green energy. Maybe he's no less a believer than Al Gore, for all the problems this might seem to pose for what we thought we knew about our president.
For one thing, he's not given to unrealistic goals. He knows China and India are opening a new coal plant every week. He knows the huge amounts of fossil energy lying at humanity's feet won't be abandoned just because an American president says so. He can't fail to notice that Canada's oil sands won't remain undeveloped; the oil will go to the Far East.
Mr. Obama also seems enough of a free thinker to entertain the possibility at least that global warming theory may be wrong. In a telling exchange with interviewer Charlie Rose a few years ago, Al Gore was asked to describe the evidence of man's role in climate change. Each time Mr. Gore recurred to some version of a "consensus of scientists" or "the most respected scientists whose judgment I think is the best."
The truth is, the theory may be popular, but the evidence has thus far eluded the tens of billions spent on climate science. The temperature data are so noisy that they reveal no pattern connecting rising CO2 in the industrial age with temperature trends. Some say because CO2 is a "greenhouse" gas, shut up, case closed. But the known relationship between carbon and climate doesn't actually indicate a big reason to worry.
To produce worrisome scenarios, climate models must posit "feedbacks" that magnify the impact of CO2 by 300% to 500%. A cynic notices that these models became especially popular in the '90s, when measured warming exceeded what could be attributed to CO2, so new fudge was needed to preserve CO2 as the culprit.
Mr. Gore is not smart (no matter what the Nobel committee thinks) whereas Mr. Obama is smart and all these things have likely occurred to him. But he's also a political operator and an acolyte of radical theorist Saul Alinksy. He understands politics as a matter of power, and democratic politics as a matter of powerful coalitions cultivated and maintained with self-interest (aka money, money, money).
Oil, in Mr. Obama's world, is a "Republican" interest group; anything that's good for the oil industry is bad for the alternate power structure he's been trying to build with handouts and mandates for green energy.
Mr. Obama's relationship with global warming may indeed be perfunctory, but he understands the necessity of shibboleths to rationalize and justify the "investments" he's dishing out to manufacture a support base whose need for subsidies and regulatory favors jibes with the Democratic Party's need for donations. Oil sands are the "dirtiest" fossil energy, requiring great releases of CO2. To approve Keystone, then, not only would undermine his side's crucial shibboleths. It would compromise his own credibility as a leader who can be trusted to deny advantage to "Republican" industries and deliver it to "Democratic" ones.
Not for nothing did Canadian Resources Minister Joe Oliver, after Mr. Obama's Keystone decision, gripe about the influence of "billionaire socialists from the United States." Not for nothing did Mr. Obama's own supporters crow about Mr. Obama's ruling as a triumph over the industrialist Koch brothers, an allusion to whom even opens the new Obama campaign spot.
Presidents make traps for themselves: Signature initiatives cannot fail; they can only be doubled down on, as Mr. Obama was expected to do in Tuesday's State of the Union even as he also tried to make peace with the natural-gas fracking boom. Only fresh waves of rhetoric praising electric cars will suffice when taxpayers are figuring out that Obama policy has them subsidizing electric playthings for the affluent. Solyndra must be defended all the more fiercely now that solar is collapsing globally as countries repent of foolish subsidies. Green energy must be hugged to Mr. Obama's breast all the more tightly as the shale revolution renders hopeless any chance of wind and solar becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels.
Mr. Obama is engaged in a "long game," says Andrew Sullivan, writing in Newsweek, making a point that no one doubted. But there's a difference between playing the long game and playing it well. The Obama long game is exactly how green energy metamorphosed from a policy notion into a political strategy and then into a dead weight his campaign must lug to November.
Still, let us admire the high-rolling political risk Mr. Obama takes in spurning affordable, strategically convenient energy from Canada. That risk includes, between now and Election Day, looking like a chump if oil prices surge because of the world's vulnerability to the narrowness of the Strait of Hormuz.
The president is trapped by his own rhetoric amid America's energy boom.
by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Barack Obama may believe a lot of things, but he probably doesn't believe the Sierra Club is key to his re-election. His decision to nix the Keystone XL pipeline will cost him votes but he did it anyway.
We'll admit that Mr. Obama's global warming talk has often seemed to us perfunctory. Perhaps we mistook his lack of heat for a lack of conviction. He just released his first 2012 campaign ad and it's a paean to green energy. Maybe he's no less a believer than Al Gore, for all the problems this might seem to pose for what we thought we knew about our president.
For one thing, he's not given to unrealistic goals. He knows China and India are opening a new coal plant every week. He knows the huge amounts of fossil energy lying at humanity's feet won't be abandoned just because an American president says so. He can't fail to notice that Canada's oil sands won't remain undeveloped; the oil will go to the Far East.
Mr. Obama also seems enough of a free thinker to entertain the possibility at least that global warming theory may be wrong. In a telling exchange with interviewer Charlie Rose a few years ago, Al Gore was asked to describe the evidence of man's role in climate change. Each time Mr. Gore recurred to some version of a "consensus of scientists" or "the most respected scientists whose judgment I think is the best."
The truth is, the theory may be popular, but the evidence has thus far eluded the tens of billions spent on climate science. The temperature data are so noisy that they reveal no pattern connecting rising CO2 in the industrial age with temperature trends. Some say because CO2 is a "greenhouse" gas, shut up, case closed. But the known relationship between carbon and climate doesn't actually indicate a big reason to worry.
To produce worrisome scenarios, climate models must posit "feedbacks" that magnify the impact of CO2 by 300% to 500%. A cynic notices that these models became especially popular in the '90s, when measured warming exceeded what could be attributed to CO2, so new fudge was needed to preserve CO2 as the culprit.
Mr. Gore is not smart (no matter what the Nobel committee thinks) whereas Mr. Obama is smart and all these things have likely occurred to him. But he's also a political operator and an acolyte of radical theorist Saul Alinksy. He understands politics as a matter of power, and democratic politics as a matter of powerful coalitions cultivated and maintained with self-interest (aka money, money, money).
Oil, in Mr. Obama's world, is a "Republican" interest group; anything that's good for the oil industry is bad for the alternate power structure he's been trying to build with handouts and mandates for green energy.
Mr. Obama's relationship with global warming may indeed be perfunctory, but he understands the necessity of shibboleths to rationalize and justify the "investments" he's dishing out to manufacture a support base whose need for subsidies and regulatory favors jibes with the Democratic Party's need for donations. Oil sands are the "dirtiest" fossil energy, requiring great releases of CO2. To approve Keystone, then, not only would undermine his side's crucial shibboleths. It would compromise his own credibility as a leader who can be trusted to deny advantage to "Republican" industries and deliver it to "Democratic" ones.
Not for nothing did Canadian Resources Minister Joe Oliver, after Mr. Obama's Keystone decision, gripe about the influence of "billionaire socialists from the United States." Not for nothing did Mr. Obama's own supporters crow about Mr. Obama's ruling as a triumph over the industrialist Koch brothers, an allusion to whom even opens the new Obama campaign spot.
Presidents make traps for themselves: Signature initiatives cannot fail; they can only be doubled down on, as Mr. Obama was expected to do in Tuesday's State of the Union even as he also tried to make peace with the natural-gas fracking boom. Only fresh waves of rhetoric praising electric cars will suffice when taxpayers are figuring out that Obama policy has them subsidizing electric playthings for the affluent. Solyndra must be defended all the more fiercely now that solar is collapsing globally as countries repent of foolish subsidies. Green energy must be hugged to Mr. Obama's breast all the more tightly as the shale revolution renders hopeless any chance of wind and solar becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels.
Mr. Obama is engaged in a "long game," says Andrew Sullivan, writing in Newsweek, making a point that no one doubted. But there's a difference between playing the long game and playing it well. The Obama long game is exactly how green energy metamorphosed from a policy notion into a political strategy and then into a dead weight his campaign must lug to November.
Still, let us admire the high-rolling political risk Mr. Obama takes in spurning affordable, strategically convenient energy from Canada. That risk includes, between now and Election Day, looking like a chump if oil prices surge because of the world's vulnerability to the narrowness of the Strait of Hormuz.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Thursday, December 22, 2011
WSJ: Lisa Jackson's Power Play
Harming the economy, degrading the U.S. grid: another day at the EPA.
At an unusual gala ceremony on the release of a major new Environmental Protection Agency rule yesterday, chief Lisa Jackson called it “historic” and “a great victory.” And she’s right: The rule may be the most expensive the agency has ever issued, and it represents the triumph of the Obama Administration’s green agenda over economic growth and job creation. Congratulations.
The so-called utility rule requires power plants to install “maximum achievable control technology” to reduce mercury emissions and other trace gases. But the true goal of the rule’s 1,117 pages is to harm coal-fired power plants and force large parts of the fleet—the U.S. power system workhorse—to shut down in the name of climate change. The EPA figures the rule will cost $9.6 billion, which is a gross, deliberate underestimate.
In return Ms. Jackson says the public will get billions of dollars of health benefits like less asthma if not a cure for cancer. Those credulous enough to believe her should understand that the total benefits of mercury reduction amount to all of $6 million. That’s total present value, not benefits per year—oh, and that’s an -illion with an “m,” which is not normally how things work out in President Obama’s Washington.
The rest of the purported benefits—to be precise, 99.99%—come by double-counting pollution reductions like soot that the EPA regulates through separate programs and therefore most will happen anyway. Using such “co-benefits” is an abuse of the cost-benefit process and shows that Cass Sunstein’s team at the White House regulatory office—many of whom opposed the rule—got steamrolled.
As baseload coal power is retired or idled, the reliability of the electrical grid will be compromised, as every neutral analyst expects. Some utilities like Calpine Corp. and PSEG have claimed in these pages that the reliability concerns are overblown, but the Alfred E. Newman crowd has a vested interest in profiting from the higher wholesale electricity clearing prices that the EPA wants to cause.
Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is charged with protecting reliability, abnegated its statutory responsibilities as the rule was being written.
One FERC economist wrote in a March email that “I don’t think there is any value in continuing to engage EPA on the issues. EPA has indicated that these are their assumptions and have made it clear that are not changed [sic] anything on reliability . . . [EPA] does not directly answer anything associated with local reliability.” The EPA repeatedly told Congress that it had “very frequent substantive contact and consultation with FERC.”
The EPA also took the extraordinary step of issuing a pre-emptive “enforcement memorandum,” which is typically issued only after the EPA determines its rules are being broken. The memo tells utilities that they must admit to violating clean air laws if they can’t retrofit their plants within the EPA’s timeframe at any cost or if shutting down a plant will lead to regional blackouts. Such legal admissions force companies into a de facto EPA receivership and expose them to lawsuits and other liabilities.
Original column here.
At an unusual gala ceremony on the release of a major new Environmental Protection Agency rule yesterday, chief Lisa Jackson called it “historic” and “a great victory.” And she’s right: The rule may be the most expensive the agency has ever issued, and it represents the triumph of the Obama Administration’s green agenda over economic growth and job creation. Congratulations.
The so-called utility rule requires power plants to install “maximum achievable control technology” to reduce mercury emissions and other trace gases. But the true goal of the rule’s 1,117 pages is to harm coal-fired power plants and force large parts of the fleet—the U.S. power system workhorse—to shut down in the name of climate change. The EPA figures the rule will cost $9.6 billion, which is a gross, deliberate underestimate.
In return Ms. Jackson says the public will get billions of dollars of health benefits like less asthma if not a cure for cancer. Those credulous enough to believe her should understand that the total benefits of mercury reduction amount to all of $6 million. That’s total present value, not benefits per year—oh, and that’s an -illion with an “m,” which is not normally how things work out in President Obama’s Washington.
The rest of the purported benefits—to be precise, 99.99%—come by double-counting pollution reductions like soot that the EPA regulates through separate programs and therefore most will happen anyway. Using such “co-benefits” is an abuse of the cost-benefit process and shows that Cass Sunstein’s team at the White House regulatory office—many of whom opposed the rule—got steamrolled.
As baseload coal power is retired or idled, the reliability of the electrical grid will be compromised, as every neutral analyst expects. Some utilities like Calpine Corp. and PSEG have claimed in these pages that the reliability concerns are overblown, but the Alfred E. Newman crowd has a vested interest in profiting from the higher wholesale electricity clearing prices that the EPA wants to cause.
Meanwhile, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is charged with protecting reliability, abnegated its statutory responsibilities as the rule was being written.
One FERC economist wrote in a March email that “I don’t think there is any value in continuing to engage EPA on the issues. EPA has indicated that these are their assumptions and have made it clear that are not changed [sic] anything on reliability . . . [EPA] does not directly answer anything associated with local reliability.” The EPA repeatedly told Congress that it had “very frequent substantive contact and consultation with FERC.”
The EPA also took the extraordinary step of issuing a pre-emptive “enforcement memorandum,” which is typically issued only after the EPA determines its rules are being broken. The memo tells utilities that they must admit to violating clean air laws if they can’t retrofit their plants within the EPA’s timeframe at any cost or if shutting down a plant will lead to regional blackouts. Such legal admissions force companies into a de facto EPA receivership and expose them to lawsuits and other liabilities.
Original column here.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
WSJ: The EPA's Fracking Scare
Breaking down the facts in that Wyoming drinking water study.
The shale gas boom has been a rare bright spot in the U.S. economy, so much of the country let out a shudder two weeks ago when the Environmental Protection Agency issued a "draft" report that the drilling process of hydraulic fracturing may have contaminated ground water in Pavillion, Wyoming. The good news is that the study is neither definitive nor applicable to the rest of the country.
"When considered together with other lines of evidence, the data indicates likely impact to ground water that can be explained by hydraulic fracking," said the EPA report, referring to the drilling process that blasts water and chemicals into shale rock to release oil and natural gas. The news caused elation among environmentalists and many in the media who want to shut down fracking.
More than one-third of all natural gas drilling now uses fracking, and that percentage is rising. If the EPA Wyoming study holds up under scrutiny, an industry that employs tens of thousands could be in peril.
But does it stand up? This is the first major study to have detected linkage between fracking and ground-water pollution, and the EPA draft hasn't been peer reviewed by independent scientific analysts. Critics are already picking apart the study, which Wyoming Governor Matt Mead called "scientifically questionable."
The EPA says it launched the study in response to complaints "regarding objectionable taste and odor problems in well water." What it doesn't say is that the U.S. Geological Survey has detected organic chemicals in the well water in Pavillion (population 175) for at least 50 years—long before fracking was employed. There are other problems with the study that either the EPA failed to disclose or the press has given little attention to:
• The EPA study concedes that "detections in drinking water wells are generally below [i.e., in compliance with] established health and safety standards." The dangerous compound EPA says it found in the drinking wells was 2-butoxyethyl phosphate. The Petroleum Association of Wyoming says that 2-BE isn't an oil and gas chemical but is a common fire retardant used in association with plastics and plastic components used in drinking wells.
• The pollution detected by the EPA and alleged to be linked to fracking was found in deep-water "monitoring wells"—not the shallower drinking wells. It's far from certain that pollution in these deeper wells caused the pollution in drinking wells. The deep-water wells that EPA drilled are located near a natural gas reservoir. Encana Corp., which owns more than 100 wells around Pavillion, says it didn't "put the natural gas at the bottom of the EPA's deep monitoring wells. Nature did."
• To the extent that drilling chemicals have been detected in monitoring wells, the EPA admits this may result from "legacy pits," which are old wells that were drilled many years before fracking was employed. The EPA also concedes that the inferior design of Pavillion's old wells allows seepage into the water supply. Safer well construction of the kind normally practiced today might have prevented any contaminants from leaking into the water supply.
• The fracking in Pavillion takes place in unusually shallow wells of fewer than 1,000 to 1,500 feet deep. Most fracking today occurs 10,000 feet deep or more, far below drinking water wells, which are normally less than 500 feet. Even the EPA report acknowledges that Pavillion's drilling conditions are far different from other areas of the country, such as the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania. This calls into question the relevance of the Wyoming finding to newer and more sophisticated fracking operations in more than 20 states.
***
The safety of America's drinking water needs to be protected, as the fracking industry itself well knows. Nothing would shut down drilling faster, and destroy billions of dollars of investment, than media interviews with mothers afraid to let their kids brush their teeth with polluted water. So the EPA study needs to be carefully reviewed.
But the EPA's credibility is also open to review. The agency is dominated by anticarbon true believers, and the Obama Administration has waged a campaign to raise the price and limit the production of fossil fuels.
Natural gas carries a smaller carbon footprint than coal or oil, and greens once endorsed it as an alternative to coal and nuclear power. But as the shale gas revolution has advanced, greens are worried that plentiful natural gas will price wind and solar even further out of the market. This could mean many more of the White House's subsidized investments will go belly up like Solyndra.
The other big issue is regulatory control. Hydraulic fracturing isn't regulated by the EPA, and in 2005 Congress reaffirmed that it did not want the EPA to do so under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The states regulate gas drilling, and by and large they have done the job well. Texas and Florida adopted rules last week that followed other states in requiring companies to disclose their fracking chemicals.
But the EPA wants to muscle in, and its Wyoming study will help in that campaign. The agency is already preparing to promulgate new rules regulating fracking next year. North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple says that new EPA rules restricting fracking "would have a huge economic impact on our state's energy development. We believe strongly this should be regulated by the states." Some 3,000 wells in the vast Bakken shale in North Dakota use fracking.
By all means take threats to drinking water seriously. But we also need to be sure that regulators aren't spreading needless fears so they can enhance their own power while pursuing an ideological agenda.
Original column here.
The shale gas boom has been a rare bright spot in the U.S. economy, so much of the country let out a shudder two weeks ago when the Environmental Protection Agency issued a "draft" report that the drilling process of hydraulic fracturing may have contaminated ground water in Pavillion, Wyoming. The good news is that the study is neither definitive nor applicable to the rest of the country.
"When considered together with other lines of evidence, the data indicates likely impact to ground water that can be explained by hydraulic fracking," said the EPA report, referring to the drilling process that blasts water and chemicals into shale rock to release oil and natural gas. The news caused elation among environmentalists and many in the media who want to shut down fracking.
More than one-third of all natural gas drilling now uses fracking, and that percentage is rising. If the EPA Wyoming study holds up under scrutiny, an industry that employs tens of thousands could be in peril.
But does it stand up? This is the first major study to have detected linkage between fracking and ground-water pollution, and the EPA draft hasn't been peer reviewed by independent scientific analysts. Critics are already picking apart the study, which Wyoming Governor Matt Mead called "scientifically questionable."
The EPA says it launched the study in response to complaints "regarding objectionable taste and odor problems in well water." What it doesn't say is that the U.S. Geological Survey has detected organic chemicals in the well water in Pavillion (population 175) for at least 50 years—long before fracking was employed. There are other problems with the study that either the EPA failed to disclose or the press has given little attention to:
• The EPA study concedes that "detections in drinking water wells are generally below [i.e., in compliance with] established health and safety standards." The dangerous compound EPA says it found in the drinking wells was 2-butoxyethyl phosphate. The Petroleum Association of Wyoming says that 2-BE isn't an oil and gas chemical but is a common fire retardant used in association with plastics and plastic components used in drinking wells.
• The pollution detected by the EPA and alleged to be linked to fracking was found in deep-water "monitoring wells"—not the shallower drinking wells. It's far from certain that pollution in these deeper wells caused the pollution in drinking wells. The deep-water wells that EPA drilled are located near a natural gas reservoir. Encana Corp., which owns more than 100 wells around Pavillion, says it didn't "put the natural gas at the bottom of the EPA's deep monitoring wells. Nature did."
• To the extent that drilling chemicals have been detected in monitoring wells, the EPA admits this may result from "legacy pits," which are old wells that were drilled many years before fracking was employed. The EPA also concedes that the inferior design of Pavillion's old wells allows seepage into the water supply. Safer well construction of the kind normally practiced today might have prevented any contaminants from leaking into the water supply.
• The fracking in Pavillion takes place in unusually shallow wells of fewer than 1,000 to 1,500 feet deep. Most fracking today occurs 10,000 feet deep or more, far below drinking water wells, which are normally less than 500 feet. Even the EPA report acknowledges that Pavillion's drilling conditions are far different from other areas of the country, such as the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania. This calls into question the relevance of the Wyoming finding to newer and more sophisticated fracking operations in more than 20 states.
***
The safety of America's drinking water needs to be protected, as the fracking industry itself well knows. Nothing would shut down drilling faster, and destroy billions of dollars of investment, than media interviews with mothers afraid to let their kids brush their teeth with polluted water. So the EPA study needs to be carefully reviewed.
But the EPA's credibility is also open to review. The agency is dominated by anticarbon true believers, and the Obama Administration has waged a campaign to raise the price and limit the production of fossil fuels.
Natural gas carries a smaller carbon footprint than coal or oil, and greens once endorsed it as an alternative to coal and nuclear power. But as the shale gas revolution has advanced, greens are worried that plentiful natural gas will price wind and solar even further out of the market. This could mean many more of the White House's subsidized investments will go belly up like Solyndra.
The other big issue is regulatory control. Hydraulic fracturing isn't regulated by the EPA, and in 2005 Congress reaffirmed that it did not want the EPA to do so under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The states regulate gas drilling, and by and large they have done the job well. Texas and Florida adopted rules last week that followed other states in requiring companies to disclose their fracking chemicals.
But the EPA wants to muscle in, and its Wyoming study will help in that campaign. The agency is already preparing to promulgate new rules regulating fracking next year. North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple says that new EPA rules restricting fracking "would have a huge economic impact on our state's energy development. We believe strongly this should be regulated by the states." Some 3,000 wells in the vast Bakken shale in North Dakota use fracking.
By all means take threats to drinking water seriously. But we also need to be sure that regulators aren't spreading needless fears so they can enhance their own power while pursuing an ideological agenda.
Original column here.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Today's Reading
The Green Agenda is Green With Envy
Senator Inhofe Dances On the Climate Change Grave (Includes Video)
A farewell to alarms.
Senator Inhofe Dances On the Climate Change Grave (Includes Video)
A farewell to alarms.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Wind Farms Disrupting Radar, Scientists Say
Rainstorm or wind farm? The circled area contains a wind farm, making it unclear whether it is also raining there.
The full story here.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Cult of Global Warming Is Losing Influence
A Commentary By Michael Barone
Original article found here.
Religious faith is a source of strength in many people's lives. But religious faith when taken too far can prove ludicrous -- or disastrous.
Original article found here.
Religious faith is a source of strength in many people's lives. But religious faith when taken too far can prove ludicrous -- or disastrous.
On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered "the great disappointment" when it didn't happen.
In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children's Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn't, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery.
In 1898, the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years, went into the Battle of Omdurman armed with swords, believing that they were impervious to bullets. They weren't, and they were mowed down by British Maxim guns.
A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global warming alarmists.
They have an unshakeable faith that manmade carbon emissions will produce a hotter climate, causing multiple natural disasters. Their insistence that we can be absolutely certain this will come to pass is based not on science -- which is never fully settled, witness the recent experiments that may undermine Albert Einstein's theory of relativity -- but on something very much like religious faith.
All the trappings of religion are there. Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.
The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, which will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.
Ritual, from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.
Indulgences, like those Martin Luther railed against: private jet-fliers like Al Gore and sitcom heiress Laurie David can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.
Corporate elitists, like General Electric's Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not to. And if you're clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.
Believers in this religion have flocked to conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto and Copenhagen, just as Catholic bishops flocked to councils in Constance, Ferrara and Trent, to codify dogma and set new rules.
But like the Millerites, the global warming clergy has preached apocalyptic doom -- and is now facing an increasingly skeptical public. The idea that we can be so completely certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves in the meantime seems increasingly absurd.
If carbon emissions were the only thing affecting climate, the global-warming alarmists would be right. But it's obvious that climate is affected by many things, many not yet fully understood, and implausible that SUVs will affect it more than variations in the enormous energy produced by the sun.
Skepticism has been increased by the actions of believers. Passage of the House cap-and-trade bill in June 2009 focused politicians and voters on the costs of global-warming religion. And disclosure of the Climategate emails in November 2009 showed how the clerisy was willing to distort evidence and suppress dissenting views in the interest of propagation of the faith.
We have seen how the United Nations agency whose authority we are supposed to respect took an item from an environmental activist group predicting that the Himalayan glaciers would melt in 2350 and predicted that the melting would take place in 2035. No sensible society would stake its economic future on the word of folks capable of such an error.
In recent years, we have seen how negative to 2 percent growth hurts many, many people, as compared to what happens with 3 to 7 percent growth. So we're much less willing to adopt policies that will slow down growth not just for a few years but for the indefinite future.
Media, university and corporate elites still profess belief in global warming alarmism, but moves toward policies limiting carbon emissions have fizzled out, here and abroad. It looks like we'll dodge the fate of the Millerites, the children's crusaders and the Mahdi's cavalrymen.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
COPYRIGHT 2011 THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
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Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Hugh Asks, I Answer: How to Talk About Climate Change on the Campaign Trail
This appeared at Power Line Blog, but I felt it was worth posting in its entirety here.
June 8, 2011 Posted by Steven Hayward at 7:11 AM
This is a long post; better get yourself a cup of coffee. Brother Hugh Hewitt takes note of one of Mitt Romney's potential tergiversations about climate change last Friday and made a shout out to me for guidance on how GOP candidates should think and talk about the issue on the stump (and suggesting I post the answer here). Hugh got a lot of e-mails attacking Mitt as a RINO for saying that the earth has warmed and that we should be looking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I'm with Hugh in thinking people are mistaken about the first part of that criticism, but think Romney blew it in embracing climate orthodoxy of near-term fossil fuel suppression.
Climate change is a complex matter, not easily tackled in the short sound-byte format of modern campaigns and inch-deep political reporters. It is possible both to acknowledge the potential seriousness of the issue while going on the attack at the same time against the badly flawed conventional wisdom. Herewith a primer on the short answers candidates should give, along with supplemental commentary and additional facts. Even these answers are probably too long for the campaign trail, but is necessary for candidates to at least master this much of the outline of the issue, and have the confidence to speak with authority on it.
Question: Do you believe that climate change is taking place?
Answer: "Yes, the earth has clearly warmed since the end of the "Little Ice Age" roughly 200 years ago, by a little less than 1 degree Celsius. I accept the opinion of the large number of scientists who conclude that human activity has helped cause the warming we've experienced so far. The question for scientists is how much further warming might occur, and for policy makers the question is what should be done about it. Both scientists and the environmental community have done a poor job on both questions."
Comment: This last sentence could be put even stronger, such as "The climate science community and environmental advocates have approached this issue disastrously, wasting 20 years and leading the entire world to a dead end on climate policy." And add as a twist of the knife: "The environment is much too important to be left to environmentalists. They'll just make an even bigger mess of everything, like they have on climate change."
Analysis: To be sure, there are problems with the temperature record on which the finding of 0.8 degrees Celsius warming since the early 1800s is based, and as the "Climategate" scandal revealed, many scientists have abused the data or acted in bad faith, undermining their credibility. But too many of the visible signs of a warmer world, such as retreating arctic glaciers, shrinking arctic sea ice mass, and permafrost melting earlier in the spring, are apparent to deny that warming has taken place. This view has been affirmed by no less a certified non-RINO than Sarah Palin.
Can these changes be attributed to natural climatic changes, such as long-wave ocean current and temperature oscillations, solar activity, and the end of a long-wave climate cycle that gave us the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age? Yes, but the research on these potential explanations is incomplete, often purposely so (that is, the mainstream climate science community suppresses or ignores inquiries into these factors), to be sure. Moreover, the warming effect of changes in greenhouse gas concentrations can be demonstrated in a laboratory, though that is just the beginning of the matter. The effect of current and projected levels of greenhouse gases alone is quite modest--a doubling of carbon dioxide would give you about a 1.1 degree rise in temperature. That's about it. Not much to write home about. Most of the so-called climate "skeptics," such as Richard Lindzen and Pat Michaels, agree with this much of the so-called "consensus." All of the action in the catastrophic climate scenarios--the oft-heard projections of a 3 to 5 degree Celsius temperature increase over the next century--is in the "feedback" effects of warming oceans that greatly magnify warming, changing atmospheric moisture levels, melting ice caps, altered cloud and jet stream behavior, changes in land cover (deforestation), etc. All of these projections may have a plausible basis in theory, but for now must be produced by complicated computer models that assume many of the conditions they set out to prove. The empirical basis for the suite of "feedback" effects is woefully inadequate, and many real world observations so far do not match up with many of the climate models.
Question: So, you do agree that humans have caused climate change? [Most journalists will ask this thinking it's a "gotcha" question. Go on offense.]
Answer: "I just said that. The question is how much more warming might be expected. The late scientist Carl Sagan once said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is even more true when politicians and advocacy groups are demanding a huge increase in government control of energy resources. The climate science community has badly bungled the entire effort to explore climate change, allowing the UN process to become wholly politicized and slave to a single misguided policy agenda. So far the "evidence" we're given is computer models trying to predict the entire planet's condition 100 years from now. The track record of this kind of computer forecasting is very very poor. In my own line of work [if this is Romney talking] I can recall back in the 1970s how a large number of expert economists, academic institutions, and private sector banks produced very complicated computer models of the economy that were utterly unable to predict interest rates or anything else just six months ahead. No one does this kind of economic forecasting any more, though I am sure if there were large government grants available people would still be fine tuning computer models that don't work. Just look at the Obama Administration's projections for how the Stimulus program would keep unemployment under 8 percent."
Comment and analysis: The theme that there is an iron-clad scientific "consensus" behind the idea of catastrophic global warming is the most pernicious aspect of this issue, and continues to do great damage to the scientific community. Numerous recent opinion surveys bear this out: the public is tuning out the whole subject, and increasingly skeptical of environmental alarms. Two of the more shrewd environmentalists, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, have coined a great phrase: "apocalypse fatique."
While most scientists may agree with the basic theory of climate change, that number drops considerably when the issue comes to whether climate change will be extreme or catastrophic. More importantly, there are contrarian or confounding findings published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature almost every week (despite attempts to suppress these findings by journal editors and highly politicized scientists) that challenge the main points of the alarmist narrative, but the media only reports the alarmist studies and seldom reports on the contrarian studies.
Question: If you agree that human activity have played a role in the recent warming of the planet, why don't you support cap and trade/emissions reductions/the UN agenda/putting a price on carbon/(pick your own form of this question)?
Answer: "The climate campaign's monomania for near-term suppression of greenhouse gas emissions through cap and trade or carbon taxes or similar means is the single largest environmental policy mistake of the last generation. The way to reduce carbon emissions is not to make carbon-based energy more expensive, but rather make low- and non-carbon energy cheaper at a large scale, so the whole world can adopt it, not just rich nations. This is a massive innovation problem, but you can't promote energy innovation by economically ruinous taxes and regulation. We didn't get the railroad by making horse-drawn wagons more expensive; we didn't get the automobile by taxing the railroads; we didn't get the desktop computer revolution by taxing typewriters, slide-rules, and file cabinets. It is time to stop ending the charade that we can enact shell game policies like cap and trade that will do nothing to actually solve the problem, but only increase the price of energy and slow down our already strangled economy. I support sensible efforts for government to promote energy technology breakthroughs, but am against subsidizing uncompetitive technologies."
Comment: If you really want to go on offense, you could use my opening statement from testimony two weeks ago to the House Foreign Affairs Committee's oversight subcommmittee:
Keep two basic facts of climate arithmetic in mind. First, the emissions targets for the year 2050 that climate policy orthodoxy requires--an 80 percent reduction by the year 2050--would require reducing fossil fuel use to a level last seen in the U.S. in the year 1910, and on a per capita basis (since the U.S. only had 92 million people in 1910, but will have over 400 million in 2050), would require taking us back to a level of fossil fuel use last seen in 1875. This. Is. Loony. Toons. It will not happen. Climate campaigners, who usually contest every tiny deviation from orthodoxy, simply change the subject or spout mindless clichés when presented with the arithmetic on this. (Or, more often, display their total innumeracy about the matter.) I have been presenting the arithmetic on this inconvenient truth for nearly four years now, and have not once had my math challenged on the subject. By anyone. Usually the climate campaigners will challenge every small point to the bitter end. But not this one.
Second, even if the U.S. did somehow achieve this target (by shutting down the whole country perhaps?), it would make no difference to future global warming projections, unless every other nation (especially China and India) achieved the same low level of emissions. This is also not going to happen. Let me put this more starkly: The United States could cease to exist, and it will make no difference in the projected warming 100 years from now for the simple reason that China's emissions growth alone in the next 25 years is going to be greater than U.S. emissions are today. In other words, if the U.S. disappeared, our emissions will be "replaced" by China's.
So the simple question is, why should we hobble our economy to the benefit of our competitors? When the Senate faced this question in 1997, it voted 97 - 0 against such a stupid climate policy. They would vote much the same way today if the question is put to them in the same way. GOP candidates should put the question exactly that way now, because the basic factors have not changed one bit.
Finally, while most environmental advocates are walking examples of Churchill's definition of a fanatic as someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject, but here and there are a few environmentalists who are starting to face up to the ruinous and fruitless path they've been on. Dave Roberts of Grist.com, one of the original "climate hawks" as he calls himself, is a good example; see his recent article in The American Prospect, in which he admits that "After 20 years, it may be time to admit that the climate movement's fundamental strategy, not a deficit of personal courage or heroic striving, is behind the lack of progress."
So here, I think, you can see Romney's fundamental mistake last week: why offer aid and comfort to a dying agenda?
For further reading: On the subject of energy innovation as an alternative to carbon energy suppression, see the Post-Partisan Power report I collaborated on with the Brookings Institution and the Breakthrough Institute. Not perfect or without problems, but a good starting point for approaching this issue in a more sensible way. Second, if you haven't already done so, I'll repeat my recommendation made here before to see Roger Pielke Jr's book The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell You About Global Warming. It is the most thorough treatment of the daunting arithmetic of the failing climate orthodoxy. Third, this post is already too long, but the alternative strategies in the event of warming are adaptation and resiliency. (As Japan's recent experience proves, there are other large threats to our well being; ask youself, who was better able to deal with this kind of disaster--Haiti, or Japan? Now you have some idea of what to do.) And maybe geoengineering, though I have my doubts about this. Romney and other candidates should get up to speed on all of this. In the meantime, may I recommend that Romney's team acquaint themselves with my Almanac of Environmental Trends, especially the climate change section starting on page 103, and the accompanying website environmentaltrends.org?
Now, a note to commenters: Everyone likes to split hairs on every fine point of this massive subject, highlight their favorite contrarian theory or study, attack the bad faith of environmentalists or corrupt scientists, or--if you incline to climate alarmism--stamp your feet and complain about the moral blindness of heretics like me. My own view, just to be clear, is that global warming is a real phenomenon, but almost certainly exaggerated like most prior environmental scares; I think Lindzen and Michaels will eventually be proven correct that we've seen most of the warming we're likely to see from greenhouse gas emissions. But even if it not exaggerated, it is no excuse for enabling the authoritarian agenda of the environmental movement. The salient question Hugh Hewitt poses is how the political fight on this issue is best fought and won. Refighting all the tired battles over the fine points of climate science is not especially helpful to this purpose.
June 8, 2011 Posted by Steven Hayward at 7:11 AM
This is a long post; better get yourself a cup of coffee. Brother Hugh Hewitt takes note of one of Mitt Romney's potential tergiversations about climate change last Friday and made a shout out to me for guidance on how GOP candidates should think and talk about the issue on the stump (and suggesting I post the answer here). Hugh got a lot of e-mails attacking Mitt as a RINO for saying that the earth has warmed and that we should be looking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I'm with Hugh in thinking people are mistaken about the first part of that criticism, but think Romney blew it in embracing climate orthodoxy of near-term fossil fuel suppression.
Climate change is a complex matter, not easily tackled in the short sound-byte format of modern campaigns and inch-deep political reporters. It is possible both to acknowledge the potential seriousness of the issue while going on the attack at the same time against the badly flawed conventional wisdom. Herewith a primer on the short answers candidates should give, along with supplemental commentary and additional facts. Even these answers are probably too long for the campaign trail, but is necessary for candidates to at least master this much of the outline of the issue, and have the confidence to speak with authority on it.
Question: Do you believe that climate change is taking place?
Answer: "Yes, the earth has clearly warmed since the end of the "Little Ice Age" roughly 200 years ago, by a little less than 1 degree Celsius. I accept the opinion of the large number of scientists who conclude that human activity has helped cause the warming we've experienced so far. The question for scientists is how much further warming might occur, and for policy makers the question is what should be done about it. Both scientists and the environmental community have done a poor job on both questions."
Comment: This last sentence could be put even stronger, such as "The climate science community and environmental advocates have approached this issue disastrously, wasting 20 years and leading the entire world to a dead end on climate policy." And add as a twist of the knife: "The environment is much too important to be left to environmentalists. They'll just make an even bigger mess of everything, like they have on climate change."
Analysis: To be sure, there are problems with the temperature record on which the finding of 0.8 degrees Celsius warming since the early 1800s is based, and as the "Climategate" scandal revealed, many scientists have abused the data or acted in bad faith, undermining their credibility. But too many of the visible signs of a warmer world, such as retreating arctic glaciers, shrinking arctic sea ice mass, and permafrost melting earlier in the spring, are apparent to deny that warming has taken place. This view has been affirmed by no less a certified non-RINO than Sarah Palin.
Can these changes be attributed to natural climatic changes, such as long-wave ocean current and temperature oscillations, solar activity, and the end of a long-wave climate cycle that gave us the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age? Yes, but the research on these potential explanations is incomplete, often purposely so (that is, the mainstream climate science community suppresses or ignores inquiries into these factors), to be sure. Moreover, the warming effect of changes in greenhouse gas concentrations can be demonstrated in a laboratory, though that is just the beginning of the matter. The effect of current and projected levels of greenhouse gases alone is quite modest--a doubling of carbon dioxide would give you about a 1.1 degree rise in temperature. That's about it. Not much to write home about. Most of the so-called climate "skeptics," such as Richard Lindzen and Pat Michaels, agree with this much of the so-called "consensus." All of the action in the catastrophic climate scenarios--the oft-heard projections of a 3 to 5 degree Celsius temperature increase over the next century--is in the "feedback" effects of warming oceans that greatly magnify warming, changing atmospheric moisture levels, melting ice caps, altered cloud and jet stream behavior, changes in land cover (deforestation), etc. All of these projections may have a plausible basis in theory, but for now must be produced by complicated computer models that assume many of the conditions they set out to prove. The empirical basis for the suite of "feedback" effects is woefully inadequate, and many real world observations so far do not match up with many of the climate models.
Question: So, you do agree that humans have caused climate change? [Most journalists will ask this thinking it's a "gotcha" question. Go on offense.]
Answer: "I just said that. The question is how much more warming might be expected. The late scientist Carl Sagan once said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is even more true when politicians and advocacy groups are demanding a huge increase in government control of energy resources. The climate science community has badly bungled the entire effort to explore climate change, allowing the UN process to become wholly politicized and slave to a single misguided policy agenda. So far the "evidence" we're given is computer models trying to predict the entire planet's condition 100 years from now. The track record of this kind of computer forecasting is very very poor. In my own line of work [if this is Romney talking] I can recall back in the 1970s how a large number of expert economists, academic institutions, and private sector banks produced very complicated computer models of the economy that were utterly unable to predict interest rates or anything else just six months ahead. No one does this kind of economic forecasting any more, though I am sure if there were large government grants available people would still be fine tuning computer models that don't work. Just look at the Obama Administration's projections for how the Stimulus program would keep unemployment under 8 percent."
Comment and analysis: The theme that there is an iron-clad scientific "consensus" behind the idea of catastrophic global warming is the most pernicious aspect of this issue, and continues to do great damage to the scientific community. Numerous recent opinion surveys bear this out: the public is tuning out the whole subject, and increasingly skeptical of environmental alarms. Two of the more shrewd environmentalists, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, have coined a great phrase: "apocalypse fatique."
While most scientists may agree with the basic theory of climate change, that number drops considerably when the issue comes to whether climate change will be extreme or catastrophic. More importantly, there are contrarian or confounding findings published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature almost every week (despite attempts to suppress these findings by journal editors and highly politicized scientists) that challenge the main points of the alarmist narrative, but the media only reports the alarmist studies and seldom reports on the contrarian studies.
Question: If you agree that human activity have played a role in the recent warming of the planet, why don't you support cap and trade/emissions reductions/the UN agenda/putting a price on carbon/(pick your own form of this question)?
Answer: "The climate campaign's monomania for near-term suppression of greenhouse gas emissions through cap and trade or carbon taxes or similar means is the single largest environmental policy mistake of the last generation. The way to reduce carbon emissions is not to make carbon-based energy more expensive, but rather make low- and non-carbon energy cheaper at a large scale, so the whole world can adopt it, not just rich nations. This is a massive innovation problem, but you can't promote energy innovation by economically ruinous taxes and regulation. We didn't get the railroad by making horse-drawn wagons more expensive; we didn't get the automobile by taxing the railroads; we didn't get the desktop computer revolution by taxing typewriters, slide-rules, and file cabinets. It is time to stop ending the charade that we can enact shell game policies like cap and trade that will do nothing to actually solve the problem, but only increase the price of energy and slow down our already strangled economy. I support sensible efforts for government to promote energy technology breakthroughs, but am against subsidizing uncompetitive technologies."
Comment: If you really want to go on offense, you could use my opening statement from testimony two weeks ago to the House Foreign Affairs Committee's oversight subcommmittee:
"The international diplomacy of climate change is the most implausible and unpromising initiative since the disarmament talks of the 1930s, and for many of the same reasons; the Kyoto Protocol and its progeny are the climate diplomacy equivalent of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 that promised to end war (a treaty that is still on the books, by the way), and finally, future historians are going to look back on this whole period as the climate policy equivalent of wage and price controls to fight inflation in the 1970s."Analysis: Forget about the argument over the science of global warming for a moment, because the Achilles' heel of the whole issue is the idiotic policy prescription of the climate campaign. As a thought experiment, consider this basic fact: if we could wave the proverbial magic wand and prove with absolute certainty that the earth was in store for 4 degrees of warming from greenhouse gases, it would not make the climate campaign's idiotic agenda any less idiotic. In other words, put bluntly, the scientific argument, interesting as it is, no longer matters very much for the politics and policy of the matter.
Keep two basic facts of climate arithmetic in mind. First, the emissions targets for the year 2050 that climate policy orthodoxy requires--an 80 percent reduction by the year 2050--would require reducing fossil fuel use to a level last seen in the U.S. in the year 1910, and on a per capita basis (since the U.S. only had 92 million people in 1910, but will have over 400 million in 2050), would require taking us back to a level of fossil fuel use last seen in 1875. This. Is. Loony. Toons. It will not happen. Climate campaigners, who usually contest every tiny deviation from orthodoxy, simply change the subject or spout mindless clichés when presented with the arithmetic on this. (Or, more often, display their total innumeracy about the matter.) I have been presenting the arithmetic on this inconvenient truth for nearly four years now, and have not once had my math challenged on the subject. By anyone. Usually the climate campaigners will challenge every small point to the bitter end. But not this one.
Second, even if the U.S. did somehow achieve this target (by shutting down the whole country perhaps?), it would make no difference to future global warming projections, unless every other nation (especially China and India) achieved the same low level of emissions. This is also not going to happen. Let me put this more starkly: The United States could cease to exist, and it will make no difference in the projected warming 100 years from now for the simple reason that China's emissions growth alone in the next 25 years is going to be greater than U.S. emissions are today. In other words, if the U.S. disappeared, our emissions will be "replaced" by China's.
So the simple question is, why should we hobble our economy to the benefit of our competitors? When the Senate faced this question in 1997, it voted 97 - 0 against such a stupid climate policy. They would vote much the same way today if the question is put to them in the same way. GOP candidates should put the question exactly that way now, because the basic factors have not changed one bit.
Finally, while most environmental advocates are walking examples of Churchill's definition of a fanatic as someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject, but here and there are a few environmentalists who are starting to face up to the ruinous and fruitless path they've been on. Dave Roberts of Grist.com, one of the original "climate hawks" as he calls himself, is a good example; see his recent article in The American Prospect, in which he admits that "After 20 years, it may be time to admit that the climate movement's fundamental strategy, not a deficit of personal courage or heroic striving, is behind the lack of progress."
So here, I think, you can see Romney's fundamental mistake last week: why offer aid and comfort to a dying agenda?
For further reading: On the subject of energy innovation as an alternative to carbon energy suppression, see the Post-Partisan Power report I collaborated on with the Brookings Institution and the Breakthrough Institute. Not perfect or without problems, but a good starting point for approaching this issue in a more sensible way. Second, if you haven't already done so, I'll repeat my recommendation made here before to see Roger Pielke Jr's book The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell You About Global Warming. It is the most thorough treatment of the daunting arithmetic of the failing climate orthodoxy. Third, this post is already too long, but the alternative strategies in the event of warming are adaptation and resiliency. (As Japan's recent experience proves, there are other large threats to our well being; ask youself, who was better able to deal with this kind of disaster--Haiti, or Japan? Now you have some idea of what to do.) And maybe geoengineering, though I have my doubts about this. Romney and other candidates should get up to speed on all of this. In the meantime, may I recommend that Romney's team acquaint themselves with my Almanac of Environmental Trends, especially the climate change section starting on page 103, and the accompanying website environmentaltrends.org?
Now, a note to commenters: Everyone likes to split hairs on every fine point of this massive subject, highlight their favorite contrarian theory or study, attack the bad faith of environmentalists or corrupt scientists, or--if you incline to climate alarmism--stamp your feet and complain about the moral blindness of heretics like me. My own view, just to be clear, is that global warming is a real phenomenon, but almost certainly exaggerated like most prior environmental scares; I think Lindzen and Michaels will eventually be proven correct that we've seen most of the warming we're likely to see from greenhouse gas emissions. But even if it not exaggerated, it is no excuse for enabling the authoritarian agenda of the environmental movement. The salient question Hugh Hewitt poses is how the political fight on this issue is best fought and won. Refighting all the tired battles over the fine points of climate science is not especially helpful to this purpose.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
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