Last week at the state capitol in Little Rock, Arkansas, lawmakers on the Joint Committee on Energy heard expert testimony from scientists and policy experts, including CEI’s Chris Horner, who challenged conventional views on global warming and the real world experience of global warming policies.
Dr. Richard Ford, an environmental economist and member of the Governor’s Commission on Global Warming, had originally requested the hearing. He and several other members of the GCGW opposed some of the recommendations in the Commission’s recently-released policy report. The report recommended that Arkansas lawmakers support a carbon tax, a regional “cap-and-trade” scheme, and renewable energy portfolio mandates for Arkansas utilities.
In his opening remarks, Ford told lawmakers the Commission hadn’t followed the intent of its statutory charter, which required it to “study the scientific data, literature and research on global warming to determine whether global warming is an immediate threat to the citizens in the state of Arkansas.” He also explained that none of the policy recommendations included a cost-benefit analysis.
Climatologist Paul Knappenberger and Robert Ferguson, both from the Science and Public Policy Institute, laid out the evidence to show that climate in Arkansas hadn’t changed for over 100 years. Knappenberger specifically challenge GCGW’s policy recommendations claiming that if enacted into law, they would not appreciably reduce greenhouse gases or do anything to stabilize global climate change.
Dr. Roy Spencer, climate scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, presented lawmakers with his technical findings from his work on the NASA’s Aqua satellite, which point to natural—as opposed to man-made— causes of global warming.
In the hearing’s final presentation, Chris Horner reviewed Europe’s experience with cap-and trade. He cautioned lawmakers that its net effect has been to drive jobs off the continent while having little, if any, impact on lowering carbon emissions. In fact, he showed how covered EU emissions actually rose even while economy-wide emissions dipped.
The only audible response from lawmakers during the presentations came when Horner read from e-mails from his former boss, Enron’s CEO, Kenneth Lay, a tireless advocate of a U.S. cap-and-trade system. Lay, Horner explained, had hoped that now-defunct energy giant could profit from a cap-and-trade scheme once it was up and operational.
After the hearing, one lawmaker commented that he was glad the other side of the science on global warming was given a fair hearing. What isn’t known at this point is how much, if any, of the GCGW’s recommendations will show up in legislation.
January 2009
President Barack Obama in his brief inaugural address on Tuesday mentioned energy and global warming several times, but gave no specifics. He vowed to “restore science to its rightful place,” yet has nominated Dr. John P. Holdren to the post of White House Science Adviser. He later faintly echoed Holdren’s Malthusianism when he said, “…[N]or can we consume the world’s resources without regard to the effect.” The effect of consuming the world’s resources has been unprecedented prosperity and well-being and an expanding abundance of those resources.
The President said that,”…[E]ach day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet,” thereby tying global warming policy to national energy security. But our most abundant domestic energy source is coal. Instead of using coal, “We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” Insofar as those energy sources require taxpayer subsidies and cost more to consumers than conventional energy, it is hard to see how this is going to contribute to the economic revival Mr. Obama promised in his speech.
Finally, the president said, “With old friends and foes, we’ll work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat and roll back the specter of a warming planet.” That last phrase is code for negotiating a new U. N. agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol after 2012. The problem with a new agreement is the same as the problem with the Kyoto Protocol. The countries that ratified Kyoto aren’t meeting their commitments to reduce emissions. If they did, it would wreck their economies. If the United States Senate ratified such an agreement, it could be enforced in federal court by a lawsuit from a private person, such as an environmental pressure group. That would force the U. S. to reduce its emissions at ruinous cost, while other countries continued to express the best of intentions to reduce emissions.
Greenwire has a long lead story (subscription required) in today's edition by Daniel Cusick about the plans of the Navajo Nation to build three huge new coal-fired power plants totaling 5,300 megawatts in order to exploit their enormous coal resources. These new plants could supply enough electricity for approximately four million homes in the rapidly growing cities of the Southwest.
In an interview accompanying the story, Navajo President Joe Shirley, Jr., responded to a question about whether he was concerned about all the greenhouse gas emissions that these plants would produce by saying:
“That's a resource that was put there by the Creator for us to use. … To have the Creator bring that about, and then to say, 'Hey, we don't want that,' I don't think that's right. We need to develop it.”
While many of the nation's major utilities advocate energy-rationing policies, such as cap-and-trade, that would price coal out of the market and thereby lead to rapid increases in electricity prices for consumers and manufacturers and probably to chronic regional blackouts, it's great to see the Navajos stepping forward to help supply the energy that America needs.
Andrew Revkin of the New York Times has just posted a piece on Dot Earth that discusses a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that finds that global warming has dropped to the bottom of people’s concerns. Asked to rate their top priorities from a list of twenty issues, only 31% listed global warming as one of their top priorities. That’s down five percent from last year. The biggest drop was for protecting the environment, which dropped fifteen points to 41%. For comparison, the top concerns were the economy at 85%, jobs at 82, and terrorism at 76%.
That’s the background for trying to enact energy-rationing programs that can only work if they raise energy prices considerably. Perhaps Al Gore needs to raise more than the $300 million goal of his We can Solve It advertising campaign, which is designed to convince people that they agree with him that global warming is our most serious problem and demands immediate and radical action (such as replacing all the coal-fired power plants that supply half of America’s electricity within ten years). Although Mr. Gore has insisted that the American people already agree with him on global warming, this poll demonstrates that his mass media advertising campaign is going to be an uphill climb.
The case for global warming alarmism depends on models that attempt to simulate a dynamic climate with mathematical formulas plugged into super-computers. According to the best of these models, increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases could cause a 2 degree warming by 2100. In a present beset by breast cancer, poverty, and mental illness, I really don’t care about warmer winters in a richer world 100 years from now, but that’s beside the point.
More to the point, I think climate models are bunk. Specifically, I doubt a mathmatician's ability to mimic the myriad interactions between the abiotic and biotic that drive the earth’s climate system, using numbers and equations. Then again, I am not a scientist, so it doesn’t really matter what I think about models that I don’t understand.
Roger Pielke Jr, however, is a scientist. And over at his blog, Prometheus, he is making some global climate modelers look silly. In yesterday’s post, Pielke commented on a new study in the journal Nature, which suggests that Antarctica is in fact warming, whereas before the icy continent was thought to be cooling.
In the post, which is available here, Pielke juxtaposes an earlier claim on a prominent alarmist science blog that Antarctic cooling was consistent with global warming with the claim that Antarctic warming is consistent with global warming made by the authors of the Nature paper.
Asks Pielke:
“So a warming Antarctica and a cooling Antarctica are both "consistent with" model projections of global warming. Our foray into the tortured logic of "consistent with" in climate science raises the periennel question, what observations of the climate system would be inconsistent with the model predictions?”
Andrew Revkin of the New York Times has just posted a piece on Dot Earth that discusses a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that finds that global warming has dropped to the bottom of people's concerns. Asked to rate their top priorities from a list of twenty issues, only 31% listed global warming as one of their top priorities. That's down five percent from last year. The biggest drop was for protecting the environment, which dropped fifteen points to 41%. For comparison, the top concerns were the economy at 85%, jobs at 82, and terrorism at 76%.
That's the background for trying to enact energy-rationing programs that can only work if they raise energy prices considerably. Perhaps Al Gore needs to raise more than the $300 million goal of his We can Solve It advertising campaign, which is designed to convince people that they agree with him that global warming is our most serious problem and demands immediate and radical action (such as replacing all the coal-fired power plants that supply half of America's electricity within ten years). Although Mr. Gore has insisted that the American people already agree with him on global warming, this poll demonstrates that his mass media advertising campaign is going to be an uphill climb.
The intimidation tactics and belittling words of those in global warming alarmism are only a means to cloak the weaknesses of their arguments, especially now that the scientific and economic evidence has found a broader, more receptive audience — check the latest poll results if you don't believe me.
If Hollywood Henry Waxman has his way, we might have to cancel the Indianapolis 500 this year. At least, he claims to be racing to adopt a “cap and trade” anti-global warming bill through his committee by the time the engines rev on Memorial Day.
"Coal plants are factories of death," declared NASA climate modeler James Hansen in a letter to President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. Last year, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), now chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, introduced the "Moratorium on Uncontrolled Power Plants Act of 2008." That bill would have placed a moratorium on issuing permits for new coal-fired power plants that don't have the ability to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions. Since that technology is still being tested, it means that no new coal-fired power plants would have been permitted. In early 2008, Obama told the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle, "If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted."
I’ve spent a while crunching the numbers relating to energy and environment spending in the stimulus bill. The bill will spend about $80 billion on energy and environment, which can be broadly broken down into the following categorizations:
Electricity infrastructure/efficiency – $35.6 billion
Renewable projects – $11.95bn (mostly $8bn in loan guarantees and $2.4bn for clean coal)
Climate science/general energy academic research – $9.3bn!!! (including $1.9 for nuclear research)
EPA programs (Superfund cleanup etc) – $12.2bn
Other environmental (National Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management etc) – $10.899bn
So that means around $57 billion of the total is aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Thanks to Jonathan Tolman, we can work out how many jobs this will create. As he says, not every program gives a figure for created jobs, but about 5/8ths of them do. That $50 billion is supposed to create just under 1 million jobs, but many of these are in the traditional environmental areas of clean-up.
Of the $57 billion aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, just over half the expenditures have job numbers associated with them. Those total $32.3 billion, for a total of 353,000 jobs, at $91,000 per job. These are overwhelmingly related to the (much-needed) creation of a smart electricity grid, and improving the efficiency and weatherization of the housing stock, which will be a good thing even if global warming turns out not to be a problem*.
The actual “green energy/jobs” program, in the sense most people think about it of revolutionizing our energy provision, amounts to $6.4 billion and 70,000 jobs. There may well be more (there are no job figures attached to the renewable energy loan guarantees, for instance), but that remains so speculative that it was not even suggested in the Bill.
* This should not be taken as an endorsement of government expenditure on the programs.
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