April 2008

As food prices soars to new heights, researchers at Texas A&M makes a potentially revolutionary discovery. They discover a plant gene for saline tolerance in Arabidopsis. Arabidopsis is the trusty old model organism for plant scientists, and this discovery will help us produce new plants using molecular plant breeding methods (PMB’s), if the environmentalists will let us.

Although some of our current ailments are based on ill conceived ethanol mandates, subsidies that skew the food markets, and increased consumption in India and China, a recent op ed in the Telegraph joins a more and more unified Brittish demand for adopting PMB’s. The op ed also points the finger in the direction of OPEC, and the hypocrisy of leaders like Hugo Chavez. Chavez is supposedly a champion of the poor, but the high oil prices caused by the cartel’s price fixing are part of the problem with the rise in the cost of food.

Parts of the Arab world are harvesting the riches from the price fixing, it is important to remember that not all countries in the Arab world have oil. The region is balancing on a precarious edge between civil unrest and political chaos by choosing either of the options available to alleviate the situation.

Zimbabwe is again looking at starvation, not only due to the food prices, but also due to new bouts of drought. Last time they faced this situation, about 6 years ago, the government in Zimbabwe refused to accept aid shipments of maize because the grains came from PMB’s. This is the same corn that Americans eat every day. Luckily the starving population would not stand for this decision, spurred on by jet-setting environmental activists from Europe and USA. They raided the food containers, so the grain eventually got the people it was intended for, but what will the misguided leaders in Zimbabwe do this time around?

On the good news side, Ethopia opened up its first commodity exchange last week, which will lower the transaction cost for several major commodities in the country. Hopefully that will help Ethiopian farmers and consumers with lower cost for important foodstuffs.

Yesterday, a listener on the Michael Medved show challenged me that (I paraphrase), "Denmark has adopted wind power at no cost."

I said that I was no expert on Denmark but that there were significant subsidies involved. As this Economist article makes clear, it is certainly not correct to say that Denmark has adopted wind power at no cost:

Researchers in Denmark have gone a step further and put a value on this effect. They believe that wind power shaved 1 billion kroner ($167m) off Danish electricity bills in 2005. On the other hand, Danish consumers also paid 1.4 billion kroner in subsidies for wind power.

The Danish government cut wind power subsidies that year. The result:

The building of wind turbines has virtually ground to a halt since subsidies were cut back.

Meanwhile, compared with others in the European Union, Danes remain above-average emitters of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. For all its wind turbines, a large proportion of the rest of Denmark's power is generated by plants that burn imported coal.

Moreover, because you cannot store any wind power that is generated when no-one wants to use it, Denmark has to sell excess wind-power to Sweden at a price of 0c per KWh. This has caused some trouble:

Much has been written about Denmark's success as the world's wind power pioneer. But the regularly repeated claim – that Denmark generates 20 percent of its electricity demand from wind sources – is highly misleading. That 20 percent of electricity is not supplied continuously from wind power. Denmark’s wind supply is so variable that it relies heavily on neighbors Norway and Sweden, taking their excess production.

In 2003 its export figure for wind power electricity production was as high as 84 percent, as Denmark found it could not absorb its own highly variable wind output capacity into its domestic system. The scale of Denmark’s subsidies was such that in 2006-07 the government increasingly came under scrutiny from the Danish media, which claimed the subsidies were out of control.

Overall, Denmark, a small, flat, windy country of about 5.5 million souls cannot be a model for the US to follow, even if they had succeeded in making wind power work efficiently.

The plan advocated by global warming zealots to limit access to proven, affordable energy sources "would have a far worse impact on poor and vulnerable populations around the world than any expected rise in average global temperatures," says the Competitive Enterprise Institute's senior fellow Marlo Lewis. But we don't expect the new billion-dollar, global warming think tank to think much about that.

Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch

The Beacon Hill Institute, the economics think tank that has written peer reviews of global warming policy recommendations coming out of the state climate commissions (as advanced by the Center for Climate Strategies), has now done some of their own analysis — for North Carolina. The results are pretty ugly and contradict the economic fantasy promoted by CCS and the NC Climate Action Plan Advisory Group:

North Carolina would lose more than 33,000 jobs and face a $4.5 billion hit to its Gross State Product by 2011, if lawmakers adopt just a fraction of the policies under consideration now to address climate change. A Boston-based economist who has analyzed the policy proposals will deliver that message Tuesday to a legislative study group.

The policies studied also would cost the state more than $502 million in investment, lower real disposable income by $2.2 billion, and reduce state and local revenue by more than $184 million, said David Tuerck, chairman of the Suffolk University Department of Economics and executive director of the department’s research arm, the Beacon Hill Institute. Tuerck is scheduled to testify to the N.C. Legislative Commission on Global Climate Change during its meeting 11 a.m. Tuesday in Raleigh.

The climate commission is considering 56 policy proposals developed by the Climate Action Plan Advisory Group. The proposals aim to limit global warming by cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Supporters contend those policy proposals would help North Carolina’s economy. A report from the Appalachian State University Energy Center suggests the policies would generate more than 300,000 jobs by 2020 and boost Gross State Product by nearly $1.5 billion.

Tuerck explains further CCS's and ASU's disconnect from reality here, for the John Locke Foundation.

Sometimes, bad economic policies create small annoyances. Sometimes, they lead to catastrophes. For years, the U.S. has heavily subsidized the production of corn-based ethanol. The global impact of that policy is beginning to lean toward the latter category.

The most outrageously repulsive and hypocritical reaction to the Pope’s visit came from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).  Her office's press release included the following admonition from Pelosi: “As we are honored by the visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, the President should heed his warnings about our moral responsibility to act, calling for a ‘strong commitment to reverse those trends that risk making the situation of decay irreversible.’”  The Washington Times ran a front-page photo [find photo] of the militantly pro-abortion Speaker bowing and kissing the Pope's ring when she was presented to him in the White House Rose Garden.   

Perhaps Germans fear Russia more than rising temperatures. A national debate has started on energy security, and there has even been talk of a coal revival in Germany, irrespective of the impact on climate change. In the end, the German people will have to decide what they are willing to sacrifice for a cleaner environment. After all, there's no such thing as a free lunch.