[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGt3YheyE4E 285 234]
April 2010
In the News
The World Rethinks Climate Legislation
Tom Switzer, Wall Street Journal, 30 April 2010
When White House Correspondents Go Green, Follow the Money
Richard Morrison, GlobalWarming.org, 30 April 2010
Hockey Stick YouTube Satire Provokes Lawsuit Threat
Ronald Bailey, Reason, 30 April 2010
Drill, Barry, Drill
Andrew Cline, American Spectator, 30 April 2010
Earthquakes, Global Warming, and Bad Journalism
Michael Rielly, Discovery News, 30 April 2010
Obama Green Team Member Cathy Zoi: Climate Profiteer?
Chris Horner, Men’s News Daily, 27 April 2010
Latest Global Warming “Oops” Moment
Mark Landsbaum, Orange Punch, 27 April 2010
20 Years of Media Advocacy, Not Journalism, on Climate
Rich Noyes, Wall Street Journal, 23 April 2010
News You Can Use
Gore Hijinks
In “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore warned that unabated global warming would inundate America’s coast line with sea level rise. Evidently, Gore doesn’t believe his own alarmism, because this week he bought a $9 million, sea-side mansion in Montecito, California. His newest palatial estate comes with 5 bedrooms, 6 fireplaces, and 9 bathrooms.
Inside the Beltway
Myron Ebell
Senate Situation Unclear
Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) promised last week that this time they really were going to unveil at least the draft text of their energy-rationing bill on Monday. Then last Saturday Graham pulled the plug in a letter to Majority Leader Harry “Just Call Me Toast” Reid (D-Nev.). It appears that Graham is starting to feel exposed politically as the left’s favorite Republican. He’s been working with the Democrats on immigration reform and on closing the prison camp for terrorists at Guantanamo as well as energy rationing. So he said that he was picking up his marbles and going home because Reid had announced that immigration reform would be taken up next before K-G-L’s don’t-call-it-cap-and-trade bill.
Kerry then flew back to Washington and began trying to put the Terrific Trio back on track. Reid appeared to reverse course and said that the anti-energy bill would come before immigration because the anti-energy bill was ready. This is odd because the bill seems far from being in finished form and Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) appears to have made more progress in a couple days putting together an immigration bill than K, G, and L have in six months. There have been several conflicting statements this week and many news stories on what happened and what’s happening. I’ve read most of them, and I have only a foggy picture of what happened and no idea what’s going to happen next. Suffice it say that the K-G-L bill’s prospects for achieving sixty votes on the Senate floor are close to nil.
Nonetheless, Senator Graham continues to be the favorite of the mainstream media. I wrote about this in early March. This week Morton Kondracke wrote a fawning article in Roll Call (subscription required, but available here), “Will GOP Follow Graham Model-or Die?” And David Brooks and Gail Collins published an interview on the New York Times web site titled, “Senator Lindsey Graham, Our Hero.”
Around the World
Myron Ebell
Australia
Australia’s Labour Government have decided to delay any further attempt to pass cap-and-trade legislation until 2012-13. This news should shake up the forces of darkness in the European Union, the Obama Administration, and the Congress. Here is an informal comment from Ray Evans of the Lavoiser Group, which is a member of the Cooler Heads Coalition:
“It has, of course, been a happy week. The statement by our glorious leader [Prime Minister Kevin Rudd] that the CPRS [Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme] Bill would be put on hold until 2012 has reverberated through the commentariat. My favourite piece was by Olga Galacho in the Herald-Sun. Olga has been the thermomaniacs’ most fervent spokeswoman, and to read of her sense of betrayal and loss was deeply satisfying.
But no victories are permanent…. As before, it will be the Opposition, led by Tony Abbott, which will decide what happens next…. The most serious problem that we who live south of the old Brisbane line face in the next few years is the prospect of electricity shortages and rationing. The electricity grid which supplies everyone who lives south of that famous line will be running short of base load power within 3 to 5 years. We desperately need a new 5,000 MW coal-fired power station and the only way in which a private investor is going to commit $10 billions to building such a project is for the Commonwealth Govt. to provide a bankable indemnity against any carbon taxes that a future government may decide to impose.
Climategate Update
On April 23, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office sent the University of Virginia a request seeking documents relating to the publicly-funded research of former UVA (and now Penn State) Assistant Professor Michael Mann, the creator of the discredited “hockey stick” global temperature reconstruction. From 1999 to 2005, Mann received nearly half a million dollars from the Virginia taxpayers for climate research. If Cuccinelli determines that Mann manipulated data, then he could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.
Two weeks ago, the Cooler Heads Digest noted a report from NoConsensus.org that awarded an “F” to 21 (of 44) chapters in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Nobel-Prize winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The UNFCCC received the failing grade for citing peer reviewed research less than 60% of the time. Now, No Consensus is organizing a citizen review of the remaining chapters. To learn more and contribute, visit NoConsensus.org.
The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.
In the Politico today, there’s a story about how the Natural Resources Defense Council is advising the White House Correspondents’ Association on how to “go green” with their annual dinner. They seem to be taking this very seriously:
Every two weeks, the greening team — including [NRDC senior scientist Allen] Hershkowitz and representatives from the Hilton — held a conference call to make sure every procurement decision and operation at the event would be as green as possible.
The story goes on to explain that they will be offsetting all of the energy use associated with the dinner – including the private jet to fly host Jay Leno out from L.A. and back. With advice from the Portland-based nonprofit the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, they’ve purchased an undisclosed amount of carbon credits. According to Politico‘s Lisa Lerer, “Credits purchased for the dinner will help fund the Tatanka Wind Farm on the North Dakota-South Dakota border.”
So far, so good. Except that the Tatanka Wind Farm is already up and running – it went online in July of 2008. The project’s $381 million budget was financed by GE Energy Financial Services and Wachovia. And it’s operated by Acciona Energy, a multi-billion dollar Spanish conglomerate with 40,000 employees and operations in 30 countries.
So, my question is, who is getting the White House Correspondents’ Association’s money? The shareholders of Acciona? GE and Wachovia (now Wells Fargo)? It’s one thing for carbon offset money to, for example, fund a nonprofit organization in the developing world to manage a reforestation project, but how does it make any sense to pay money to a Spanish corporation for operating a wind farm that’s already been privately financed and has been producing energy for almost two years? Am I missing something here?
In the Politico today, there’s a story about how the Natural Resources Defense Council is advising the White House Correspondents’ Association on how to “go green” with their annual dinner. They seem to be taking this very seriously:
Every two weeks, the greening team — including [NRDC senior scientist Allen] Hershkowitz and representatives from the Hilton — held a conference call to make sure every procurement decision and operation at the event would be as green as possible.
The story goes on to explain that they will be offsetting all of the energy use associated with the dinner – including the private jet to fly host Jay Leno out from L.A. and back. With advice from the Portland-based nonprofit the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, they’ve purchased an undisclosed amount of carbon credits. According to Politico’s Lisa Lerer, “Credits purchased for the dinner will help fund the Tatanka Wind Farm on the North Dakota-South Dakota border.”
So far, so good. Except that the Tatanka Wind Farm is already up and running – it went online in July of 2008. The project’s $381 million budget was financed by GE Energy Financial Services and Wachovia. And it’s operated by Acciona Energy, a multi-billion dollar Spanish conglomerate with 40,000 employees and operations in 30 countries.
So, my question is, who is getting the White House Correspondents’ Association’s money? The shareholders of Acciona? GE and Wachovia (now Wells Fargo)? It’s one thing for carbon offset money to, for example, fund a nonprofit organization in the developing world to manage a reforestation project, but how does it make any sense to pay money to a Spanish corporation for operating a wind farm that’s already been privately financed and has been producing energy for almost two years? Am I missing something here?
Well, it’s not really so old. I’m referring to a March 10, 2009 letter by atmospheric scientist John Christy to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. I post it on Open Market and GlobalWarming.Org because it is hard to find on the Internet, and Dr. Christy makes a key point that will need to be made again and again in the upcoming Senate battle over the Murkowski resolution of disapproval to veto EPA’s endangerment finding.
The endangerment finding is the statutory prerequisite for the joint greenhouse gas/fuel economy standards rule that EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) finalized on April 1, 2010. Veto the endangerment finding, Murkowski foes warn, and NHTSA will have to ”de-couple” its portion of the joint GHG/fuel economy rule, which could delay by a year implementation of model year 2012 fuel economy standards.
Well, boo-hoo! Keeping the model year 2011 standards in place for an extra year would make no perceptible difference in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, average global temperature, weather patterns, or public health, even if one assumes that climate change is a big problem.
Christy’s letter puts this in perspective. For the sake of argument, Christy adopts the IPCC’s warming projections for its mid-range (A1B) emissions scenario. Even if the United States were to adopt immediately a 43 mpg fuel-economy standard, the net reduction in average global temperature would be 0.01°C in 2100. Such a change would be too small to detect. Even more microscopic would be the impact of the 34.1 mpg standard that NHTSA and EPA want to phase in by model year 2016. Whether that standard is delayed for a year or implemented on schedule is climatologically irrelevant.
In contrast, the economic and safety benefits of a one-year delay could be substantial. The distressed auto industry would not have to spend an estimated $5.9 billion in incremental technology investments (Table 4A.5-6) in model year 2012.
In addition, slower implementation of economy standards would slow the pace at which automakers decrease average vehicle size and weight. Reducing vehicle weight and size is a vintage method of improving fuel economy — but it also negatively affects vehicle safety. NHTSA’s 2002 fuel economy report concluded that regulatory-induced vehicle downsizing contributed to 1,300-2,600 fatalities and 13,000 to 26,000 serious injuries in 1993, a typical year.
EPA and NHTSA struggle to belittle the size-safety tradeoff in their joint rule. However, they do include a “worst-case” scenario in which the new standards cause an additional 493 deaths in model year 2016 (see p. 144). Slowing the pace of fuel economy regulation would save lives.
On April 16th, the Cooler Heads Coalition and the Heritage Foundation hosted a briefing on Climategate by Dr. Patrick J. Michaels, Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies, Cato Institute and Joseph D’Aleo, Executive Director, ICECAP, and Consulting Meteorologist.
The scientific case for catastrophic global warming was already showing signs of weakening when the Climategate scientific fraud scandal broke in November 2009. This release of thousands of computer files and emails between leading global warming scientists showed evidence of data manipulation, flouting of freedom of information laws, and attempts to suppress publication of research that disagreed with the alarmist “consensus.”
Climategate has raised many questions about the reliability of key temperature records as well as the objectivity of the researchers and institutions involved, but it is far from the only global warming-related controversy. It has been followed by revelations that some of the most attention-grabbing claims in the 2007 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report – the supposed gold standard of climate science – were simply made up. Before laws regulating energy use are enacted that could well cost trillions of dollars, it is crucial to understand the extent to which the alleged scientific consensus supporting global warming alarmism has been discredited by these scandals. Join us for a discussion featuring two scientists who have closely studied Climategate.
Click here to view video of the briefing.
Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott, and Jerry Brito bring you Episode 90 of the LibertyWeek podcast. This week we take a look at Robert Bryce’s work on the myths of green energy. Segment starts approximately 10:25 in.
Today, Senators Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman were expected to release their cap and trade bill. However, immigration reform put a damper on that. However, this is a bill that definitely should be on the radar screen.
When (if) the bill is introduced, there will be lots of fanfare about how oil companies and utility companies support the bill (or at least aren’t opposing it).
However, there’s a reason for this support. They are being provided all kinds of goodies as discussed in this recent Mother Jones article.
There will be government-backed loans for nuclear power plants, oil companies won’t be subjected to the same cap and trade requirements as others, there will be $10 billion in subsidies for carbon capture technology research, etc.
It doesn’t take much for businesses to use the lawmaking process to benefit themselves at the expense of the public and the economy.
So, when the bill is unveiled, don’t get fooled by the fanfare regarding how many companies support the bill. If you buy-off industries, then we’d expect those industries to support the bill.
While the environmental extremists and utility and oil companies benefit, the public will get harmed by a massive energy tax that will cut jobs, reduce personal income, and have a disproportionate impact on the poor.
The health care bill was bad enough. However, a cap and trade bill is far worse. Energy is an input into every good or service. That means the government will have its hands on almost every facet of the economy.
This bill should be (in a responsible Congress) dead on arrival–the very idea that we are going to impose a massive energy tax during this recession for no good reason is absurd. However, we don’t have a responsible Congress. As a result, this bill could have some serious legs.
In the News
The Coming Anti-Carbon Clampdown
Chris Horner, Energy Tribune, 23 April 2010
Alcoa Loves Green, But Not the Environment
Tim Carney, Washington Examiner, 23 April 2010
A Reality Check on the Neo-Malthusian World
Indur Goklany, MasterResource.org, 23 April 2010
Climate Scientist Sues Paper for Libel on Climategate Coverage
Dave Adam, Guardian, 22 April 2010
Cap-and-Trade = VAT
Chris Horner, Daily Caller, 22 April 2010
Climate Science in Denial
Richard S. Lindzen, Wall Street Journal, 22 April 2010
Two Energy Giants, a Difference in Approach
Institute for Energy Research, 22 April 2010
Why I Am Enlarging My Carbon Footprint
Robin of Berkley, American Thinker, 22 April 2010
A Happy Earth Day
G. Tracey Mehan, American Spectator, 22 April 2010
The Solar Power Scandal in Spain
Chris Horner, Planet Gore, 21 April 2010
Buying Carbon Offsets May Ease Eco-Guilt, But Not Global Warming
Doug Struck, Christian Science Monitor, 20 April 2010
Fannie Mae Owns Patent on Residential “Cap-and-Trade”
Barbara Hollingsworth, Washington Examiner, 20 April 2010
Failure Would Have Many Benefits
Marlo Lewis, National Journal, 19 April 2010
News You Can Use
Tea Partiers Oppose Cap-and-Trade
More than 365,000 respondents voted online to determine the top three planks of the tea-party movement’s political platform. The second most popular of the 21 issues that were up for a vote: “Reject cap and trade: Stop costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation’s global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures.”
Inside the Beltway
Myron Ebell
Kerry-Graham-Lieberman: Payoffs for Everyone, Taxes for You-Know-Who
It appears that Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) are finally going to release a draft outline of their compromise, middle-of-the-road, some-payoff-for-everyone energy-rationing bill on Monday. Both Kate Sheppard on the Mother Jones web site and Juliet Eilperin on the Washington Post web site report that Senator Kerry shared details of the bill in a Thursday conference call held by the We Can Lead coalition of business leaders who hope to make a buck from energy rationing.
Sheppard and Eilperin both report that the draft bill will pre-empt the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act and also pre-empt States from setting lower emissions targets. Instead of a gas tax or a “linked fee,” the draft will require oil companies to buy ration coupons to cover the emissions of their products. Call it whatever you want, it’s still a tax.
It appears that the cap-and-trade scheme for electric utilities is still in the draft, but according to both blogs, it now includes a price collar setting a floor and a ceiling on the cost of ration coupons. In addition, Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman have adopted the cap-and-dividend idea from the energy-rationing bill introduced by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Me.), S. 2877. Thus some of the additional costs of electricity will be rebated to consumers. I’m not sure how this squares with a story by Darren Samuelsohn in Environment and Energy Daily (and reprinted on the New York Times’s web site here) earlier in the week that the draft would give more free ration coupons to the electric utilities. Perhaps the free coupons will be distributed in the early years of the scheme and consumers will get their rebates in the later years.
Kerry claimed on the conference call that three major oil companies would support the bill in addition to the Edison Electric Institute. The three most likely are Shell, BP, and Conoco Phillips. He also said that they were still working on provisions to allow more offshore oil production.
Among the goodies will be an exemption for agriculture from emissions limits, loan guarantees for twelve new nuclear plants, $10 billion for research and development of carbon capture and storage for coal-fired power plants, “financial incentives” for natural gas and electric vehicles, and a four-year exemption for manufacturing industries. The bill will also include the anti-energy provisions marked up by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year. These include a renewable electricity requirement and new building energy efficiency standards.
As I mentioned last week, the three Senators do not plan to introduce a bill with actual legislative language, but instead will turn their draft over to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Reid will try to put together a package that he can bring to the floor and get sixty votes.
Voinovich Enters the Pre-Emption Fight
Senator George Voinovich (R-Ohio) this week circulated a proposal to remove all authority from the executive branch and the States to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under any existing legal authority. This would include the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Clean Water Act, as well as the Clean Air Act. As Robin Bravender reported in Climate Wire (which was reprinted by the New York Times here), the proposal would also end all public nuisance lawsuits.
Voinovich could offer it as an amendment to the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman energy-rationing bill or to some other bill on the Senate floor. If enacted, it would mean that it would be up to Congress (the people’s representatives) to decide whether and how to deal with global warming.
At the same time, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) continues to try to figure out how to get 51 votes for her resolution of disapproval of the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. One major obstacle remains Senator John Rockefeller’s (D-WV) bill to delay EPA regulations for two years, which is meant to give some of his fellow Democrats an alternative to voting for Murkowski. One solution might be to offer Rockefeller’s bill, S. 3072, as an amendment to some bill on the Senate floor. If it fails, then these Senators will not have an excuse for voting against Murkowski’s resolution. If it passes, then Senators who voted for it will have to explain why they are going to flip and vote no on Murkowski’s resolution.
Across the States
Wisconsin
Major climate legislation was shelved in Wisconsin on Earth Day after both the Assembly and the Senate refused to vote on the measure before the legislative calendar ended. The bill would have mandated that 25% of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2025, and it failed because Wisconsin lawmakers feared the political fallout of adding expensive renewable energy to the state’s electricity portfolio-thereby increasing utility bills.
California
In late 2008, the California Air Resources Board was excoriated by a peer-review panel of economists for publishing a politicized economic analysis that exaggerated the benefits and minimized the costs of AB 32, California’s global warming law. As a result, CARB commissioned a new analysis by a supposedly non-partisan team of economists led by Stanford Professor Larry Goulder. The report was released a month ago, and it largely echoed CARB’s original conclusion that AB 32 will create jobs and is good for the economy. CARB claims that the new report vindicates its old report, but new evidence suggests otherwise. ClimateWire this week reported that Larry Goulder is on the board of directors of a non-profit that is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a political campaign to defeat a ballot initiative that would suspend AB 32. This is a clear conflict of interest, and it demonstrates (again) that CARB manipulates the evidence to support its political agenda.
Around the World
Bonn
The first United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations since the Copenhagen Climate Conference took place in Bonn, Germany, from April 9th to April 11th. Negotiators spent most of the meeting coming to an agreement on how many more meetings to convene before the 16th Conference of the Parties this September in Cancun, Mexico. After many hours of haggling, they agreed to hold two.
Washington, D.C.
In Washington, D.C. this week, representatives from 17 industrialized countries participated in the Major Economies Meeting, U.S.-led negotiations for a climate treaty that. The meeting served primarily to dampen expectations in Cancun this September for a legally binding successor treaty to the failed Kytoto Protocol. U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern told reporters, “We don’t want to let expectations far outstrip what can be done” in Cancun.
Cochabamba
The stalled negotiations in Bonn and Washington, D.C. angered the 15,000 participants to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which is occurring this week in Cochabamba, Bolivia. According to Reuters, Bolivian President Evo Morales kicked off the Conference by noting that, “We are gathered here because the so-called developed countries didn’t meet their obligation of establishing substantial commitments to cutting greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen.” Later, an official from the UN was jeered off the stage.
The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.
Reuters reports that it used freedom of information laws to obtain a copy of text that was stripped from a December 2009 European Union study on biofuels. The hidden portion of the study found that biodiesel fuel made from North American soybeans has an indirect carbon footprint of 339.9 kilograms of CO2 per gigajoule — about four times larger than standard diesel from petroleum.
The suppressed analysis jibes with Fargione et a. (2008) and Searchinger et al. (2009), who found that CO2 emissions from the land use changes associated with biofuel production exceed the emissions avoided by combusting biofuels instead of petroleum-based fuels.
“The EU’s executive European Commission said it had not doctored the report to hide the evidence, but only to allow a deeper analysis before publishing,” Reuters reports. Uh huh. And if the analysts had found that biodiesel has a much smaller footprint than standard diesel, the Commission would have deep-sixed that study too pending a “deeper analysis.” Right!
“Given the divergence of views and the level of complexity of the issue … it was considered better to leave the contentious analysis out of the report,” the Commission said in a statement. Well, when it comes to energy — or health care, or financial industry reform, or almost any public policy issue you can think of — when isn’t there a “divergence of views” and a high “level of complexity”?
EU policymakers don’t want to be troubled by the facts — and they don’t want hoi polloi getting hold of information that calls their agenda into question.
And they wonder why public trust in the ‘climate science community’ is waning!
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
CEI.org