January 2010

Whaddaya know — ever since Climategate and brutal cold (snap!) sawed in half the global warming illusion that the formerly mainstream media had sold as reality, all of a sudden there’s massive upheaval: dogs and cats living together; news networks hosting climate debates; CBS exposing taxpayer-funded boondoggle junkets to Copenhagen; and politicians (other than Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe) boldly denouncing fraudulent research about the “benefits” of “solutions” to global warming. Just check out last Friday’s press release from Michigan State Rep. Tom McMillin:

McMillin made the call following a plan from the global-warming advocacy group the Center for Climate Strategies that likely overstated possible job growth and will cost Michigan taxpayers millions of dollars to follow a political agenda.

“To expend taxpayer money on such a biased group as CCS was just wrong and exemplifies how Governor Granholm has run this state into the ground – by putting political agendas ahead of truth and Michigan job creation,” said McMillin, R-Rochester Hills. “There will not be a net 129,000 jobs created. To follow the recommendations of this study may actually result in net job losses for Michigan.”

McMillin noted the long history of questionable action from the Center for Climate Strategies that can be found here.

“The report is intentionally false in order to promote CCS’s radical agenda, which always conveniently leave out costs to taxpayers and job providers,” McMillin said. “The results of this so-called study is as bogus as the far left group the governor chose to stage this charade – that group, CCS, is closely aligned with scientists who hide data, delete emails and contrive to bully peer review methods in order to promote their radical, non-scientific, highly questionable agenda. In effect, Michigan now has its own version of Climategate. Let’s see if, in Michigan, they’ll come clean or hide.”

McMillin is right, of course — CCS has proven to engage in the same fudge-factoring and half-baked analysis as the Climategate cooks. The failure of Copenhagen and the poor election-year forecast for national cap-and-trade passage may mean the Greens return to the state-level, pressure-up strategy. It would help if more state lawmakers like McMillin engage to expose how this scheming has worked around the country.

This fellow from New Zealand appears to think that Climategate proves that the big money is in climate skepticism. How does that work?

Here’s my attempt to follow his argument: The US Government has spent $79 billion in the past two decades on climate science. But Big Oil and Big Coal want a piece of this. They spend heavily on lobbyists to get it. They would be well served by certain provisions in bills and international treaties. [I agree with this so far…] But “the aims of the climate change lobby groups and the large industries they represent dovetail quite nicely with the arguments put forward by the sceptics.” So [he implies] therefore the skeptics have all the money.

Huh?

Global warming skeptics don’t want carbon capture and storage. They don’t want targets for emissions reduction. They don’t want international treaties and thousand page bills that take money out of the productive class and spend it on vastly expensive ways of doing things we know how to do already. Global warming skeptics do not want “a seat at the table.” They don’t think there should be a table in the first place.

Our science blogger friend has confused skeptic with rent-seeker. We skeptics have a grudging respect for our ‘alarmist’ opponents. In most cases they have a sincere belief that there is a serious problem and want to solve it. (Part of the problem revealed by climategate was that many of them, however, want to solve the problem by any means necessary and are insincere in their methods). Rent-seekers, on the other hand, want to exploit such beliefs for personal/corporate gain*, at the expense of the rest of us. Therefore rent-seekers are a bigger problem than alarmists, because they do indeed bring the big bucks. That’s why rent-seeking businesses want carbon capture and storage, which they will be paid handsomely for. They want international treaties and thousand page bills that contains nice incentives for them, their executives and their shareholders. They want the free market distorted to their benefit. The ends they desire, however, are completely different from those desired by the skeptics. Their aims do not dovetail with the ends of the skeptics in the slightest.

That’s why the big money is with those looking to establish a regime for emissions reduction. Now those thieves have certainly fallen out, and there are still some honorable types who want no handouts to big energy companies at all, but the money is certainly on that side of the aisle.

If genuinely skeptical groups have gotten as much as $790 million total worldwide for global warming efforts since 1989 – 1 percent of that devoted to climate science – I’d be extremely surprised. A tenth of that amount is more likely in the right ballpark. You can’t change that by lumping rent-seeking industries in with skeptics. Rent-seekers really do follow the money.

* Rent-seekers are also only too happy to exploit belief in the free market, arguing for free enterprise up until they can see a benefit from government restricting market entry, and so on.

A federal biofuels program enacted in the name of fighting global warming and reducing dependence on foreign oil is instead killing jobs while perhaps doing more harm than good and costing taxpayers half a billion dollars, reports the Washington Post.

“It sounded like a good idea: Provide…government money to convert wood shavings and plant waste into renewable energy.” But it is now killing jobs by “driving up the price of raw timber, undermining an industry that…used sawdust and wood shavings to make affordable cabinetry.”  Meanwhile, “the Biomass Crop Assistance Program…has mushroomed into a half-a-billion dollar subsidy.” It’s a “Biomass Blunder,” says environmental law professor Jonathan Adler.

At least this program isn’t resulting in malnutrition and death, unlike ethanol mandates and subsidies, which cause starvation and unrest in the Third World.  Ron Bailey writes about the “global food crisis” that has resulted in food riots across the world, including countries like Mexico, Pakistan, Indonesia, Yemen, Haiti, and Egypt.  The crisis, he noted, is caused by “stupid energy policies” in the form of ethanol “mandates” and subsidies, which result in the world’s farmers producing less food and more ethanol.

Food rioting spread throughout Haiti in 2008, endangering the government of its “U.S.-backed president”:  “A desperate appeal from the president Wednesday failed to restore order to Haiti’s shattered capital, and bans of looters sacked stores, warehouses, and government offices.”   The government responded with tear gas and bullets, as this video shows. Food riots also occurred in Ivory Coast and El Salvador.

As the Washington Post earlier noted, “the increasing use of land to produce ethanol” “has led demand for food to outstrip supply.”

In the U.S., “The federal government’s love affair with ethanol subsidies drove up food prices, depleted plains-state aquifers, and subsidized the destruction of water fowl habitat.”

For all this cost, ethanol subsidies do not even reduce net greenhouse gas emissions.  Indeed, ethanol subsidies threaten to cause an enormous amount of environmental damage, deforestation, and soil erosion. For this and other reasons, the New York Times advocates getting rid of ethanol subsidies.

Wheat production is down in the world’s breadbaskets, like the United States, as farmland shifts away from wheat to ethanol production.  In Egypt, a major wheat importer, the fall in worldwide wheat production has triggered bread shortages and unrest as poor people find it difficult to get enough to eat.  The unrest is strengthening support for Islamic extremists opposed to Egypt’s relatively pro-American government.

Many Afghans, facing higher food prices, now have little choice but to grow opium to pay for food: the Soviet invasion and occupation destroyed their irrigation works (and roads), making large-scale food production and transport extremely difficult. And when food prices went up in 2006 and 2007 as a result of ethanol mandates and rising demand for food in India and China, thousands of Afghan children starved to death.

Harmful ethanol subsidies and mandates are likely to expand, thanks to Obama and congressional leaders.  In 2008, Obama repeatedly attacked John McCain for opposing ethanol subsidies, which McCain opposed as a form of corporate welfare for powerful corporations like ADM.

Obama backs expanded ethanol subsidies contained in a huge cap-and-trade carbon tax bill that would do little to protect the environment, while costing the economy trillions. The cap-and-trade bill was pushed through the House before its text even became available. The bill was over 1090 pages long and contained special interest giveaways to a legion of big corporations and their lobbyists. At the last minute, 300 more pages were added to the bill that few in Congress had even read, and had to be manually inserted into the existing 1000 pages after the bill was passed, based on guesses about where those pages would fit in. Thus, the bill did not even really exist at the time it was passed.

In 2008, Obama privately admitted to a San Francisco Chronicle reporter that his cap-and-trade carbon tax would cause people’s electric bills to “skyrocket.” The cap-and-trade bill supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases, administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise. “Officials at the Treasury Department think cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to the Washington Times” by CEI. It could raise household taxes by $1761 per year, equivalent to a 15 percent tax increase. It would also result in “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs.”

The cap-and-trade bill will do little to cut greenhouse gas emissions, since it contains so many special interest giveaways and environmentally-destructive provisions like subsidies for ethanol.  Instead, notes the Examiner, it will result in massive destruction of the Earth’s forests.  Although the bill’s supporters claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them by driving industry overseas to places where there are fewer air pollution curbs, resulting in dirtier air.

Meanwhile, Obama has thwarted more use of nuclear energy, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions, by blocking use of the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste disposal site after billions of dollars in taxpayer money had already been spent developing it.

In other news, a $75 billion Obama mortgage bailout program is actually harming the economy, the housing market, and the construction industry, economists and real estate experts say.  Nobel-Prize winning economist Gary Becker says that Obama’s policies in general are harming the economy.  The $800 billion stimulus package has failed to stem rising unemployment, while reducing the size of the economy over the long run.

“Governor Warns of Deep Fiscal Crisis as He Unveils California Budget Plan (LA Times).”

That’s the comedy, but here’s the tragedy: “California Requests Billions from U.S,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

At Bigjournalism.com, Woody Hochswender puts global warming alarmism in the context of a long tradition of doomsaying — which wasn’t invented by Al Gore and need not necessarily be about climate —  by looking at the dismal career of author Jonathan Schell.

1. Schell argued that given the incredibly dire state of things, a world-destroying nuclear exchange was inevitable. A nuclear exchange was virtually certain to happen, sooner or later, he said, and when it did radioactive clouds would blot out the sun and create a “nuclear winter” resulting in the extinction of human life. Once it started, there was no going back. The concept of inevitability was mortised into the framework of the argument.

2. It was also depicted as a race against time! We had only a teeny-weeny window in which to reverse the horrendous policies and mindset of our ignorant, bellicose leaders (read: Republicans). It was, like, so super urgent, action had to be taken, like, yesterday.

3. But, almost paradoxically, it was already too late! In the bottomless pit of his despair and revulsion at the civilized world for imperiling the planet, Schell contended that we were already too far gone, and it really was too late to stop the nuclear holocaust, although everyone had a moral duty to try.

Sound familiar? What we have here, as Yogi Berra would say, is déjà vu all over again. The eerie parallels between the nuclear-freeze movement and the global-warming movement are clear: the direness of the forecast (which resembles prophecy and has a teleological dimension); the dramatic, race-against-time urgency of the healing project; the element of existential threat as a goad to activism; the notion of human extinction and the “fate” of the earth hanging in the balance, as if suspended by a slender thread; and finally, the admonition that it is probably already too late. The nuclear clock is about to strike midnight; the ice caps are already melting. Fear and trembling all around.

Like other neo-Malthusians, Schell has been spectacularly wrong time and again, but that’s not likely to make him or his correligionists give up on despair. For doomsayers, every year is 2012.

For a more uplifting — and accurate — view of human history, see here.

In the Wall Street Journal, Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker and others explain how President Obama’s policies are delaying and retarding the inevitable economic recovery, keeping unemployment high even though the recession Obama inherited was similar to others in the past that gave way to rapid recoveries:

In terms of U.S. output contractions, the so-called Great Recession was not much more severe than the recessions in 1973-75 and 1981-82. Yet recovery from the latest recession has started out much more slowly. For example, real GDP expanded by 7.7% in 1983 after unemployment peaked at 10.8% in December 1982, whereas GDP grew at an unimpressive annual rate of 2.2% in the third quarter of 2009. Although the fourth quarter is likely to show better numbers–probably much better–there are no signs of an explosive take off from the recession. …

In terms of discouraging a rapid recovery, other government proposals created greater uncertainty and risk for businesses and investors. These include plans to increase greatly marginal tax rates for higher incomes. In addition, discussions at the Copenhagen conference and by the president to impose high taxes on carbon dioxide emissions must surely discourage investments in refineries, power plants, factories and other businesses that are big emitters of greenhouse gases.

Congressional ‘reforms’ of the American health delivery system have gone through dozens of versions. The separate bills passed by the House and Senate worry small businesses, in particular. They fear their labor costs will increase because of mandates to spend much more on health insurance for their employees. The resulting reluctance of small businesses to invest, expand and hire harms households as well, because it slows the creation of new jobs and the growth of labor incomes. …

Even though some of the proposed antibusiness policies might never be implemented, they generate considerable uncertainty for businesses and households. Faced with a highly uncertain policy environment, the prudent course is to set aside or delay costly commitments that are hard to reverse. The result is reluctance by banks to increase lending–despite their huge excess reserves–reluctance by businesses to undertake new capital expenditures or expand work forces, and decisions by households to postpone major purchases.

Several pieces of evidence point to extreme caution by businesses and households. A regular survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) shows that recent capital expenditures and near-term plans for new capital investments remain stuck at 35-year lows. The same survey reveals that only 7% of small businesses see the next few months as a good time to expand. Only 8% of small businesses report job openings, as compared to 14%-24% in 2008, depending on month, and 19%-26% in 2007.

Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which failed to cut unemployment, is now pressuring states to raise taxes, thanks to costly requirements it imposed on states at the behest of powerful public-employee unions.

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package actually would shrink the economy “in the long run.”  Unemployment has skyrocketed past European levels, as big-spending countries have fared worse than thrifty ones.  The Obama Administration claims credit for creating imaginary jobs in non-existent Congressional districts.

As the Examiner notes, “If his stimulus program was approved, Obama promised, unemployment would not go above 8 percent this year. The reality is that it passed 10.3 percent in October. So now the stimulus books are being cooked to mollify an anxious public worried that real-world jobs continue to disappear and angry that Obama has thrown almost $1 trillion down the stimulus rathole.”

The stimulus package actually destroyed thousands of real world jobs by triggering trade wars with Canada and Mexico that killed jobs in America’s export sector (the stimulus package barred a measley 97 Mexican truckers from U.S. roads, a minor NAFTA violation that led to massive Mexican retaliation against U.S. exports of 40 farm products and kitchen goods worth $2.4 billion).  It also is wiping out jobs by inflicting costly mandates on state governments (such as repealing welfare reform, and imposing costly “prevailing wage” regulations and expensive racial set-asides).

The stimulus package has since spawned countless examples of government waste and corruption.  Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.  Obama’s alleged justification for firing the inspector general turned out to be false.

In a column for USA Today, Julianne Malveaux writes that climate change is a civil right issue.  The comments posted on the USA Today site regarding her column make it clear that readers were amused by her column more than persuaded.

This is actually problematic because some of her column covers a very important point regarding global warming policies: They do have a disproportionate effect on the poor.  As I have written, almost every single policy pushed to address global warming by environmental groups hurts the poor.

Roy Innis and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) have done excellent work on the key point that climate change policies are a civil rights issue.

Unfortunately, Ms. Malveaux combines very different issues.  The problematic part of the column is at the start where she argues that climate change (not policies) are the civil rights issue.   She writes about how African-Americans produce less greenhouse gas emissions than other Americans and at the same time African-Americans bear the greatest brunt of climate change based on where they live.

It is easy to see where these arguments can be interpreted as a hint towards compensation for African-Americans.  These arguments completely take away from what she does get right: She goes on to make the accurate point that policies to reduce greenhouse emissions disproportionately hurt the poor.

I hope that Ms. Malveaux will continue to bring up the problems with global warming policies.  However, she needs to drop the weak arguments about how climate change is a civil rights issue and instead stay focused on climate change policies.

In this two–part post on MasterResource.Org, the free-market energy blog, I argue that the EPA’s proposed Tailoring Rule is a temporary, legally questionable, and incomplete antidote to Massachusetts v. EPA’s legacy of “absurd results.”
 
Here is the gist of the column:
 
Congress did not intend to apply the Clean Air Act’s preconstruction permitting (PSD) and Title V operating permits programs to small entities, did not intend for those programs to implode under their own weight, did not intend for PSD to stop development, and did not intend for Title V to undermine Clean Air Act compliance.
 
However, those are the inexorable consequences of the greenhouse gas endangerment finding and motor vehicle emission standards that the Court authorized and indeed pushed EPA to make. To avoid this mess, which would likely produce a fierce political backlash against EPA and the Obama administration, the Agency now proposes via the Tailoring Rule to amend the PSD and Title V programs.
 
This breach of the separation of powers only compounds the constitutional crisis inherent in the Court’s attempt to legislate global warming policy from the bench.

Even if the Tailoring Rule survives judicial scrutiny despite its flouting of clear statutory language, it will provide no defense against Mass. v. EPA’s most absurd result: regulation of carbon dioxide under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) program.

Congress must step up to the plate and either overturn Mass. v. EPA, overturn the endangerment finding, or, at a minimum, prohibit EPA from regulating carbon dioxide from stationary sources.