January 2009

A Tide Turning?

by Iain Murray on January 20, 2009

in Science

Very interesting new poll from Rasmussen that suggests a significant reversal in public opinion over the causes of global warming.

Forty-four percent (44%) of U.S. voters now say long-term planetary trends are the cause of global warming, compared to 41% who blame it on human activity.

Seven percent (7%) attribute global warming to some other reason, and nine percent (9%) are unsure in a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democrats blame global warming on human activity, compared to 21% percent of Republicans. Two-thirds of GOP voters (67%) see long-term planetary trends as the cause versus 23% of Democrats. Voters not affiliated with either party by eight points put the blame on planetary trends.

In July 2006, 46% of voters said global warming is caused primarily by human activities, while 35% said it is due to long-term planetary trends.

In April of last year, 47% of Americans blamed human activity versus 34% who viewed long-term planetary trends as the culprit. But the numbers have been moving in the direction of planetary trends since then.

I must put in the obligatory disclaimer here: I believe that the weight of the scientific evidence points towards human activity having an effect on climate. However, I also believe that this effect is minor and that it is likely to remain minor. Which means that I believe these 44% are wrong. But what is and isn’t true actually isn’t the case here.

The truth is that political action in a democracy depends on what people believe, not on what actually is fact. This significant reversal trend suggests that it will be much harder to justify significant costs – particularly at household level – to combat global warming.

The new Administration and Congress would therefore be wise to step away from expensive anti-energy measures and concentrate instead on improving the resiliency and adaptive capacity of those who are most vulnerable should global warming turn out to be a problem. Otherwise, they run the risk of the electorate reacting like Batman.

HIGH NOON–Inauguration Global Warming Temperature Watch

by Sam Kazman on January 20, 2009

in Science

When President Bush leaves office today, will the capital be warmer or colder than when he was sworn in eight years ago?

It’s not scientifically meaningful, but it is interesting.

Bush has been heavily criticized for doing precious little to curb our emissions of carbon dioxide. During his eight years in office, atmospheric CO2 levels climbed by over four percent.

So what did Bush’s dilly-dallying produce in terms of deadly global warming? The temperature at noon in Washington DC will give us one factoid. It’s a scientifically meaningless factoid, since the local temperature on any one day, let alone any one hour, tells us nothing about long-term temperature trends, but it’s heavy in symbolism.

When Bush was first sworn in, in 2001, the temperature at noon in DC was 36 degrees F. What will it be today, when he leaves office? Will the capital be warmer or colder than when he took office eight years ago?

Don’t be surprised if it’s colder. Today’s forecast is for relatively low temperatures. More importantly, despite steady increases in atmospheric CO2, and despite everything you’ve heard about climate catastrophe, there’s been no warming for about the last decade, and the planet has actually cooled over the last three years. (This is from the British Hadley Centre’s data on land and sea surface temperatures. The Centre’s global surface temperature graph shows this in somewhat compressed form, but you can easily graph its data yourself to get a better idea.)

That should lead us to ask where’s the warming?

But first, let’s see what the temperature is at noon, when President Obama is sworn in.

And I repeat–this is scientifically meaningless, but I think it’s interesting.

(As for Bush’s failure to curb CO2 emissions, I doubt that even stringent curbs would have had any effect on atmospheric CO2 levels.  More importantly, that failure was, I believe, a good thing in terms of affordable energy and human wefare.  And the CO2 curbs that Bush did support and which will soon go into effect, such as higher fuel efficiency standards for cars, will prove extremely harmful to both consumers and the auto industry.  But that’s off topic, sort of.)

Putin: Chevron’s Man of the Year?

by William Yeatman on January 16, 2009

I don’t know what the situation is in other areas, but Chevron’s use-less-energy ads, launched last fall, are still thick and heavy in the DC area.  Its campaign, dubbed “Will You Join Us?”, shows people promising to use their cars less and “unplug things more.”

The print ads are plastered over subway car interiors and bus stops, while the TV spots proliferate during the Sunday morning talk shows.  For reasons I’ve described elsewhere, I don’t like them.  Oil gets demonized by lots of groups these days, but the notion of an oil company dissing its chief product seems perverse, and doesn’t bode well for the future of mobility.

So what does Chevron think of Vladimir Putin’s recent cut-off of Russian gas to the Ukraine and beyond? It seems to me that Chevron should applaud him.  Putin may have monetary and military reasons for his action, but he’s also reducing energy use and encouraging conservation.

I think Chevron should give Putin a major role in its ad campaign.  This is CEI’s suggestion.

William Yeatman Responds to the Davos Forum

by Carl Wolk on January 16, 2009

in Blog, videos

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nzvYLrkRwY 285 234]

Debate Over: It’s Freezing

by William Yeatman on January 16, 2009

in Blog

The carbon footprint of Barack Obama's inauguration could exceed 575 million pounds of CO2. According to the Institute for Liberty, it would take the average U.S. household nearly 60,000 years of naughty ecological behavior to produce a carbon footprint equal to the largest self-congratulatory event in the history of humankind.

Global Warming Panic Attack over at HuffPo

by William Yeatman on January 16, 2009

in Blog

Please pay no attention to the evidence right outside your windows! Despite the fact that we are experiencing the coldest weather in decades, Kevin Grandia blogging at the Huffington Post wants you to ignore this and start worrying about the growing trend of global warming skepticism. According to Grandia, questioning the holy theology of the Church of Global Warming is a seriously disturbing heresy. He even catalogued the increased levels of global warming skepticism by analyzing Google search stats in excruciating detail:

Pickens Windmills Tilt against Market Realities

by William Yeatman on January 16, 2009

in Blog

He boasts his own self-declared army and the support of 13 governors, 53 congressmen and 180 mayors, along with the Sierra Club and the American Lung Association. He has plugged his cause on countless news shows and spent $60 million of his own money on a massive ad spree.

Spare Detroit Car Czar’s Green Thumb

by William Yeatman on January 16, 2009

in Blog

Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, the Republican who wore the black hat during the congressional debate on bailing out Detroit's automakers, visited the North American International Auto Show Tuesday to see firsthand what automobiles mean to Detroit. It would have been more useful had Congress sent U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

Cooler Heads Digest

by William Yeatman on January 16, 2009

In the News

Debate Over: It’s Freezing
David Harsanyi, Townhall, 16 January 2009

Paulson on Energy Rationing
Myron Ebell, Globalwarming.org, 15 January 2009

Global Government
Chris Horner, Washington Times, 14 January 2009

The Problem with Green Jobs
John Whitehead, Salon, 14 January 2009

Pickens’s Windmills Tilt against Market Realities
Neil King, Jr., Wall Street Journal, 13 January 2009

Spare Detroit Car Czar’s Green Thumb
Sam Kazman, Detroit News, 13 January 2009

Bail Out Big Three by Cutting Red Tape
Iain Murray, Detroit News, 13 January 2009

Laffer Gas
William Yeatman & Jeremy Lott, Culture 11, 13 January 2009

Green Wacko Tobacco
Chris Horner, Human Events, 13 January 2009

News You Can Use

Inaugural Emissions

Paul Chesser

The Institute for Liberty and The Chilling Effect have calculated some “conservative” estimates of how much carbon will be emitted at next week’s swearin’ (in) of the green new president. They came up with a total of 575 million pounds of CO2 as the likely figure.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the new Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said at the committee’s first hearing on Thursday that he planned to mark up cap-and-trade legislation before Memorial Day.  The committee has 36 Democrats and 23 Republicans.  It looks to me that the Republicans on the committee will vote against any cap-and-trade bill close to unanimously.  That means that Waxman will have to win over at least several of the committee’s Democrats from coal States in order to pass his bill out of committee.  That makes it likely that any bill will be a lot messier than the environmental pressure groups would like to see.

Waxman held a hearing to spotlight big business support for cap-and-trade.  Fifteen members of the U. S. Climate Action Partnership testified about their new agreement on the outlines of a cap-and-trade system to ration energy.  Witnesses included Jeff Immelt of General Electric and Jim Rogers of Duke Energy, plus the heads of Conoco Phillips, Exelon, Rio Tinto, PNM Resources, P G and E, Siemens, and NRG Energy.  Five heads of environmental front groups for big business that belong to USCAP also testified—NRDC, EDF, Nature Conservancy, WRI, and Pew Center.

Not everyone was pleased.  At a briefing on USCAP’s new plan for Senators and Representatives before the hearing, Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) apparently unloaded on the CEOs.  His office then sent out a press release that made Corker’s broadside public.  Corker in the press release  calls USCAP’s plan self-serving and says: “I’m totally bewildered that in this anti-earmark atmosphere, USCAP would promote what is basically just another request from special interest groups to take money out of taxpayer pockets.”

The House Appropriations Committee released the text of an economic stimulus bill that would cut taxes by $275 billion and spend $550 billion.  I haven’t seen the tax cuts yet, but they are undoubtedly designed to benefit special interests.  Extending tax subsidies for renewable energy is probably included.

The new spending is described in the committee report as “$550 billion in thoughtful and carefully targeted priority investments with unprecedented accountability measures built in.”  Parts of the package are pork barrel projects designed to create “green jobs.”  For example, there is at least $18 billion for renewable technologies and energy efficiency.  There is an $8 billion loan guarantee to finance renewable energy and transmission projects.  The bill would spend $6 billion on weatherizing houses of low-income people and another $7 billion on making federal buildings more energy efficient.  The Institute for Energy Research this week happened to publish a paper that blows a lot of big holes in the green jobs myth.

Senate committees held hearings this week on President-elect Barack Obama’s nominees for environment and energy posts.  His choices for Secretary of Energy, Secretary of Interior, EPA Administrator, and CEQ Chairman sailed through the hearings.  Senators voiced little criticism and asked few tough questions.  The nominees were careful not to make controversial remarks.  For example, Dr. Steven Chu, Obama’s pick for Energy, played down his anti-coal remarks and sounded more like the administrator he is about to become than the advocate that he has been.

Around the World

The Russian Gas Crisis Week Two

Russia’s cutoff of gas to Ukraine and eighteen other European countries is now in its tenth day. Several deals to end the crisis have fallen apart.  Negotiations between Russia, Ukraine, and the European Union may resume this weekend.

German gas stockpiles are down to levels usually seen at the end of the heating season. Slovenia said its gas reserves will last for another 30 days. French gas supplier GDF Suez has been sending emergency supplies to Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bosnia and Serbia. Serbia’s three largest cities are now facing blackouts because the lack of gas has forced consumers to switch to electricity to heat their homes, overloading their power grid. Residents and businesses in the Serbian, Bosnian and Hungarian capitals have resorted to burning oil, wood and coal. And angry Bulgarians demonstrated outside the parliament in Sofia.

The dispute between Russia and Ukraine currently centers around who will pay for “technical gas”—gas worth several million dollars per day that is needed to power compressors to push gas westward through the inefficient pipeline system that was built in the Soviet era. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met today with European energy company chiefs to push his idea of a consortium to help pay for this technical gas. The companies within the consortium would jointly buy the gas from Gazprom at a price of around $450 per 1,000 cubic meters, according to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

The European Commission threatened today to take unspecified sanctions against Russia and Ukraine unless gas flows to the EU resume after the weekend. The crisis appears to be changing the thinking of some European leaders on the EU’s energy priorities. Securing energy supplies suddenly seems more critical than reducing greenhouse emissions by closing down coal-fired power plants in order to address global warming.  Announced plans to close down nuclear plants may also soon be reconsidered.

How gullible are we?

by Julie Walsh on January 15, 2009

Scrolling through the $825 billion dollar monstrosity, my first question is–how many unemployed construction workers do they think there are? Don’t they realize that they will be competing with the private sector beyond those currently unemployed?

We signed our name to a blank check. (CEI opposed it.) Now they want us to sign again and again—bailout, stimulus, whatever they’re calling it today.  But as Martin Hutchinson said, “Stimulus plans also raise the chance of a Great Depression because of the deficits they cause.”

The Wall Street Journal reported today that Americans are in favor of Obama’s stimulus with 89% in favor of deficit spending to create more renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Here’s some hard questions that should be asked about those “green” projects, though:

1. How long will it take the projects to break ground?

2. How many permanent jobs will be created and at what cost?

3. Of those permanent jobs, are they sustainable without government subsidies? EIA has reported that solar energy is subsidized to the tune of $24.34 per megawatt hour, wind $23.37 and “clean coal” $29.81. By contrast, normal coal receives 44 cents, natural gas a mere quarter, hydroelectric about 67 cents and nuclear power $1.59.

4. What is the current unemployment rate of the industry to be “stimulated?”

5. You won’t catch me signing up to build a wind turbine or highway, so who will you be employing?

6. Is that national electrical grid going to bring inexpensive coal-fired power to needed US industries? E and E reports that Frederick Butler, president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, acknowledged that “strategically sited” transmission lines could bypass power plants in coal states, while running through countryside laced with wind farms to promote clean energy.

Finally, as environmental economist John Whitehead cautioned yesterday in Salon:

“The Wall Street Journal’s economic forecast survey concludes that a big fiscal stimulus will lead to positive economic growth by the third quarter of 2009. But without the fiscal stimulus positive economic growth will be restored by the beginning of 2010. Speeding up the recovery is important in the short run, but there are also long-run risks associated with excessive government spending. At some large debt to gross domestic product ratio, lenders may no longer buy our government bonds and interest rates could spike.”

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