December 2008

The Cooler Heads Digest has already reported how the United Kingdom’s huge gamble on wind power will raise electricity prices and undermine reliability (here and here). Unfortunately for energy consumers in that country, it looks like it’s going to take a lot more windmills than the government thought. Experts had calculated that 50,000 wind turbines would be needed to generate 15% of Britain's electricity, to help the government to meet the EU target for a 20% reduction of CO2 emissions by 2020.  But the Sunday Telegraph reports that it will take 100,000 turbines to meet the country’s climate goals, because wind power lobbyists in the UK grossly overestimated the benefits of wind power. The British Wind Energy Association had previously estimated that electricity from wind turbines ‘displaces’ 860 grams of carbon dioxide emissions for every kilowatt hour of electricity generated.  Now it has revised that figure to 430 grams following discussions with the Advertising Standards Authority. 

Californians in Control

by William Yeatman on December 31, 2008

The Obama transition team continues to talk to House and Senate Democratic leaders about trying to move a big ($850 billion?) economic stimulus package soon after the new Congress is sworn in. Every special interest in the country is trying to stake a claim to a share of the cash, including promoters of “green jobs” and those that claim that transforming the energy economy to rely on much more costly forms of renewable energy would somehow stimulate the economy. As the Washington Post noted this week, our energy and environmental policy is now in the hands of powerful legislators from California, where they actually believe that raising consumer and producer costs and pricing people out of jobs is sound public policy.  (And where the State, perhaps co-incidentally, now confronts a $40 billion budget deficit.)  We shall see what happens next week.

Entire global energy and climate policies are based on the Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their conclusions are based on climate models that don't and cannot work. This article explains how the situation developed and why the models are failures.

Green Goals Have Limits

by William Yeatman on December 30, 2008


Computer giant Dell Inc. said this summer that it has become "carbon neutral," the latest step in its quest to be "the greenest technology company on the planet."

A Nightmare Energy Policy

by William Yeatman on December 30, 2008

in Blog


Well, it must be recognized that the main reason for the decline in energy prices is that the United States and many other nations are in recession. A decline in economic activity means a decline in the demand for oil, and prices fall.

In the News

An Energy Policy That Is the Stuff of Nightmares
Raymond Keating, Long Island Business News, 30 December 2008

Green Goals Have Limits
Jeffrey Ball, Wall Street Journal, 30 December 2008

Green Bible Attracts Controversy
Ginger D. Richardson, Arizona Republic, 29 December 2008

Global Warming Predictions and Computer Climate Models

Dr. Timothy Ball, RightSideNews, 28 December 2008

Clean Waste

William Yeatman & Jeremy Lott, Culture11, 22 December 2008

It’s Cold Outside, But Alarmists Are Still Hard at Work

Chris Horner, Human Events, 22 December 2008

News You Can Use

Great New Blogs

Two new valuable climate blogs appeared this week. Dr. Roy W. Spencer, author of the best selling book, Climate Confusion, and Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, has started blogging at www.drroyspencer.com. Dr. Robert Bradley, author of Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy, and others now blog at http://masterresource.org/.

Inside the Beltway

Californians in Control

Myron Ebell

The Obama transition team continues to talk to House and Senate Democratic leaders about trying to move a big ($850 billion?) economic stimulus package soon after the new Congress is sworn in. Every special interest in the country is trying to stake a claim to a share of the cash, including promoters of “green jobs” and those that claim that transforming the energy economy to rely on much more costly forms of renewable energy would somehow stimulate the economy. As the Washington Post noted this week, our energy and environmental policy is now in the hands of powerful legislators from California, where they actually believe that raising consumer and producer costs and pricing people out of jobs is sound public policy.  (And where the State, perhaps co-incidentally, now confronts a $40 billion budget deficit.)  We shall see what happens next week.

Obama’s Disastrous Energy Pick, Part 2

I commented in the last issue (19th December) on President-elect Barack Obama’s choices of John P. Holdren for White House science adviser and Jane Lubchenco for administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I would like to say a bit more about the bizarre choice of Dr. Holdren.

Holdren holds the Teresa and John Heinz professorship at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for his leading involvement with the Pugwash nuclear disarmament conferences, earned a Ph. D. in physics from Stanford University, won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship, has served as president and chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has published hundreds of articles and books. He has spent most of his career on areas and issues outside of physics, especially on energy and ecology policy.

Wow! That sounds great, doesn’t it? A man of high accomplishment, wide interests, and long involvement in public policy. Unfortunately, Holdren is also a lifelong doomster and close associate of Paul Ehrlich, who has promoted one nutty cause after another.  Ehrlich called Holdren “one of the best scientists in the world,” and his recommendation alone should disqualify Holdren for any position of public trust.

There is something in Western civilization that regularly produces people proclaiming that the end of the world is nigh and that they are the leaders with the knowledge to prevent it. The threat is that people will actually believe these charlatans and sign up to remake the world according to their ideas. Holdren has moved from one looming disaster to another. What remains constant is that the disaster requires radical political action, which always includes massive increases in government.

His latest cause is what he calls global “climate disruption.” He regularly makes outlandish claims about the disastrous disruptions that are already occurring and the even more disastrous disruptions that are about to occur. And from these wild claims, which are not supported in the scientific literature, he jumps immediately to policy prescriptions. In short, the threat posed by global warming to civilization requires that we tear down civilization and rebuild it in a way more pleasing to the tastes of people like Holdren.

In my view, the Senate should not confirm John P. Holdren to be the White House science adviser and chairman of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Around the World

UK

The Cooler Heads Digest has already reported how the United Kingdom’s huge gamble on wind power will raise electricity prices and undermine reliability (here and here). Unfortunately for energy consumers in that country, it looks like it’s going to take a lot more windmills than the government thought. Experts had calculated that 50,000 wind turbines would be needed to generate 15% of Britain’s electricity, to help the government to meet the EU target for a 20% reduction of CO2 emissions by 2020.  But the Sunday Telegraph reports that it will take 100,000 turbines to meet the country’s climate goals, because wind power lobbyists in the UK grossly overestimated the benefits of wind power. The British Wind Energy Association had previously estimated that electricity from wind turbines ‘displaces’ 860 grams of carbon dioxide emissions for every kilowatt hour of electricity generated.  Now it has revised that figure to 430 grams following discussions with the Advertising Standards Authority.

Whopper of the Year

Julie Walsh

Last year’s doozy is almost as good as this year’s but not quite. In June Senator Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, told reporters during the Senate debate on the Lieberman-Warner America’s Climate Security Act:

“This bill, in fact, will lead us to a strong economy, with the creation of millions of new jobs.”

Partner in crime Senator Harry Reid elaborated:

“The Boxer-Warner-Lieberman bill is also about creating a new and powerful economic engine. It is about creating hundreds of thousands, even millions of high-paying, permanent and sustainable jobs in America… Hundreds of thousands of new jobs in renewable energy have already been created by foresighted investors who see the need for clean energy that doesn’t contribute to global warming. Millions more jobs can be created with the enactment of a strong cap-and-trade system.”

The Office of Management and Budget countered, saying the bill would impose economic costs of $10 trillion through 2050 primarily by boosting energy prices and would slash annual household disposable income by nearly $1,400 per household in 2030 and as much as $4,400 in 2050. “This would make S. 3036 by far the single most expensive regulatory bill in our nation’s history,” OMB said.

The Heritage Foundation calculated job losses under the Act would exceed 500,000 before 2030, even using the most favorable assumptions. And the National Association of Manufacturers predicted that more than 4 million jobs could be lost by 2030.

Talking about the “millions” of jobs that would be created and forgetting to mention the many more millions that would be destroyed truly takes the cake.

Dr. Roy Spencer has a new climate blog, http://www.DrRoySpencer.com. In an age of alarmism, Dr. Spencer's new blog is an invaluable resource for cooler heads.

Dr. Roy W. Spencer, author of the best selling book Climate Confusion, is a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.   He received his Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1981 and formerly was Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA.  Dr. Spencer also serves as the U. S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite.  He is co-developer (with Dr. John Christy) of the original satellite method for precise monitoring of global temperatures from Earth-orbiting satellites.  He is the author of numerous research articles in scientific journals, has testified before Congress several times on global warming, and given briefings for the Cooler Heads Coalition.

 

We have already explained why New Jersey’s new climate plan, written by Lisa Jackson, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, is a boondoggle shrouded in smoke and mirrors. Evidently, environmentalists agree.

Jeff Tittel, the director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, concedes that the Garden State’s global warming plan “has some good ideas,” but he says that more is needed (“State’s plan to curb global warming tepid,” Asbury Park Press, 12 December 2008).

To give New Jersey’s climate plan some teeth, Mr. Tittel suggests a “mandatory trip reduction program.” Simply put, he wants to give government the power to force you and me to drive together.

After proposing that the state tell us with whom we must drive, Mr. Tittel says that government should also tell us where we are permitted to live. Specifically, he frets that the legislature would never pass a law that would limit new development until 99% of existing buildings are occupied. He further suggests that the state should prohibit the construction of water and sewer lines to rural developments.

Mr. Tittel says that “climate change is the most serious threat facing our planet,” but that’s debatable. After all, disease and hunger kill scores of millions of human beings every year; climate change has led to an invasion of Japanese beetles.

It is, however, unquestioned that government is an awfully imprecise cudgel whenever it tries to influence social patterns like energy consumption. History suggests that Mr. Tittel’s statist energy policies would be as annoying as they would be ineffective.

In Poland recently, representatives of the European Union were discussing ways to look like soldiers in the war against global warming while once more dodging the draft, and outside there were the usual sorts of doomsday-prognosticating protesters. Some were dressed as penguins, devils and polar bears, it's reported.

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection released its plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The proposals were crafted by former DEP head Lisa Jackson, who was tapped this week by President-elect Barack Obama to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. The plan has three components. The first is Governor Corzine’s Energy Master Plan (read here why it’s a boondoggle). The second part of the plan is to regulate tailpipe emissions from cars, but a federal court have yet to decide whether states have the authority to regulate fuel efficiency, and even if they did, the $100 billion regulatory burden would ruin the American auto industry. The final component is New Jersey’s participation in a regional energy rationing program that is designed to increase the price of energy.