November 2010

Are Depressions Green? (An Update)

by Marlo Lewis on November 23, 2010

in Blog

In March 2009, I posted a blog over at MasterResource.Org entitled, “Are Depressions Green?” What prompted that piece was speech by Cambridge University economist Terry Barker at the Copenhagen climate conference.

Barker told delegates that the Great Depression of the 1930s reduced global CO2 emissions by 35%. He opined that if the current economic downturn persists for several years, it might cut global emissions in half.

Citing the International Energy Agency’s CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion Highlights (2005 Edition), I offered additional proof of the emission-cutting power of economic collapse. From 1990 to 2003, CO2 emission declined 38% in Bulgaria, 35.3% in Estonia, 52.3% in Latvia, 43.5% in Lithuania, 43.3% in Rumania, 24.5% in Russia, 30.2% in the Slovak Republic, and 50.1% in Ukraine.

I commented:

So clearly, governments do have the power to achieve deep emission cuts in in a single decade or even in a few years. However, there’s not a shred of historical evidence that they can do this without first engineering severe economic contractions.

A new study by University of Exerter scientist Pierre Friedlingstein and colleagues finds that from 2008 to 2009, global emissions declined by 1.3%, the first time since the late 1990s. There were significant regional differences, depending on whether a country’s economy was shrinking or growing. As summarized by USA Today:

The largest decreases occurred in Europe, Japan and North America: 6.9% in the United States, 8.6% in the U.K., 7% in Germany, 11.8% in Japan and 8.4% in Russia.

In contrast, emissions jumped in emerging economies, including 8% in China and 6.2% in India. China remains the top emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, followed by the USA, India, Russia and Japan.

A question for the greenhouse lobby: If depressions induce deep emission cuts, then wouldn’t mandating deep cuts prolong or intensify our current economic woes?

Seems like a no-brainer, but they’ll tell you that putting a price on carbon will stimulate the creation of “green jobs” (like window caulkers?) and “industries of the future” (like windmills?). Our friends at the Institute for Energy Research summarize and link to several studies debunking the green jobs myth. 

Here’s how I ended “Are Depressions Green?”:

So-called green industries and jobs were bit players even when the economy was booming. That’s because even when credit markets were flush and fossil energy prices were high, green industries were relatively unproductive. For example, as my colleague Iain Murray estimates, one coal-industry job supports seven times as much electricity as one wind-industry job.

It strains credulity to claim that diverting capital and labor from, e.g., the coal industry to the wind industry will create a macroeconomic benefit, or that economic recovery can be built on jobs and industries that depended heavily on subsidies, tax preferences, and mandates even in prosperous times.

WaPo Exposes Reality of Unemployed “Green Jobs”

by Christine Hall on November 23, 2010

in Blog

In a front page story today, the Washington Post – of all places! – revealed that unemployment for so-called “green jobs” is pretty darn high.  (See Retrained for green jobs, but still waiting on work by Michael A. Fletcher).  You mean, all the Obama and enviro promises about green jobs being the next, great economic boom were…wrong?  People aren’t voluntarily choosing to pay more for “clean energy”?

Who could have guessed that the Great Green Dream has been “undercut by the simple economic fact that fossil fuels remain cheaper than renewables”?

So, the Obama administration shoveled out $90 billion out of the $814 billion economic stimulus bill for clean energy stuff, like weatherizing public buildings, constructing “advanced” (?) battery plants in the Midwest, financing solar electric plants in the Mojave desert, and training green energy workers.

But the huge federal investment has run headlong into the stubborn reality that the market for renewable energy products – and workers – remains in its infancy.

Well, that can’t be good, all those 90 billion smackeroos just blown on nothing.  So, surely the next step is to pull the plug on this economy-busting boondoggle force people to buy green energy stuff.

Both Obama administration officials and green energy executives say that the business needs not just government incentives, but also rules and regulations that force people and business to turn to renewable energy.

Without government mandates dictating how much renewable energy utilities must use to generate electricity, or placing a price on the polluting carbon emitted by fossil fuels, they say, green energy cannot begin to reach its job creation potential.

I mean, just look at the potential here.  The poor guy profiled in the WaPo story was trained in: solar installation,sustainable landscape design, recycling and green demolition (which has something to do with dismantling buildings, rather than demolishing them).  What if we could just force everyone to dip into their pockets to buy expensive solar stuff, contemplate how sustainable their landscape design could be, and pull apart buildings brick by brick!

With some 7.5 million jobs lost from the US economy since December 2007, it’s astounding to realize there’s a movement afoot to force people to spend money on the green equivalent of ditch-digging make-work.

Coal Exports to China Surge (Carbon Leakage with a Vengeance — No Escape from Law of Unintended Consequences)

by Marlo Lewis on November 22, 2010

in Blog

In “Nations that Debate Coal Use Export It to Feed China’s Need,” New York Times reporter Elizabeth Rosenthal exposes a huge unintended consequence of Kyotoism’s assault on coal-fired power plants: U.S. and Australian coal companies are shipping their product to Asian countries, especially China, which in 2008 outstripped the United States as the world’s top emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2).  

Rosenthal explains why this situation drives climate activists up the wall:

Traditionally, coal is burned near where it is mined — particularly so-called thermal or steaming coal, used for heat and electricity. But in the last few years, long-distance international coal exports have been surging because of China’s galloping economy, which now burns half of the six billion tons of coal used globally each year.

As a result, not only are the pollutants that developed countries have tried to reduce finding their way into the atmosphere anyway, but ships chugging halfway around the globe are spewing still more.

This is “carbon leakage” with a vengeance. “Leakage” refers to emissions that migrate overseas as domestic firms offshore production and jobs to countries with less restrictive controls on carbon-based energy. Up to now, nearly all the discussion has focused on “energy-intensive, trade-intensive” industries such as producers of iron, steel, aluminum, copper, cement, glass, ceramics, and paper. Such energy-intensive manufacturers can pick up and leave if domestic climate policy puts them at a competitive disadvantage, and climate campaigners don’t want to be blamed for destroying American jobs.

Policymakers have not considered coal industry jobs in this context, however, because coal mines are pretty much stuck where they are. Besides, Al Gore and the Repower America campaign say we should replace all U.S. electric generation with “zero-carbon” energy by 2018. Who needs coal!

In a House Ways and Means hearing last year on the Trade Aspects of Climate Legislation, not one witness mentioned that carbon policies, especially a de-facto ban on new coal-fired power plants, would ramp up coal exports to China, fueling industries that typically emit much more CO2 per unit of output than do their U.S. counterparts.

David Hamilton of the Sierra Club, for example, saw carbon leakage to China as a big problem, but did not say a word about his organization’s “Stopping the Coal Rush” campaign much less whether it might stimulate a surge in coal exports to the (ahem) People’s Republic. Sierra Club now regards this as a big problem, as Rosenthal reports: 

“This is a worst-case scenario,” said David Graham-Caso, spokesman for the Sierra Club, which estimates that its “Beyond Coal” campaign has helped to block 139 proposed coal plants in the United States over the last few years. “We don’t want this coal burned here, but we don’t want it burned at all. This is undermining everything we’ve accomplished.” [Emphasis added.]

This photo from the NYT article shows Australian coal waiting to be shipped to China:

fossil-articlelarge

Rosenthal quotes Vic Svec, senior VP of Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company, as saying, “Coal is the fastest-growing fuel in the world and will continue to be largely driven by the enormous appetite for energy in Asia.”

Here are some key facts she reports (in her words):

  • This summer an Australian company signed a $60 billion contract with a state enterprise, China Power International Development, to supply coal to Chinese power stations beginning in 2013 from a vast complex of mines, called China First, to be built in the Australian outback. It was Australia’s largest export contract ever, the company said.
  • For Australia, coal exports to China grew to $5.6 billion from $508 million between 2008 and 2009, government statistics show. While it still sends more coal to its longtime customers Japan and Korea, that balance could shift as Australian coal giants sink billions into new projects like China First.
  • Last year, the United States exported only 2,714 tons of coal to China, according to the United States Energy Information Administration. Yet that figure soared to 2.9 million tons in the first six months of this year alone — huge growth, though still a minuscule fraction of China’s coal imports.
  • The growth and shifts in coal exports to China are impressive, flowering even during the recession. Seaborne trade in thermal coal rose to about 690 million tons this year, up from 385 million in 2001.
  • The price rose to $60 from $40 a ton five years ago to a high of $200 in 2008. Coal delivered to southern China currently sells for $114 per ton.
  • China, which was a perennial coal exporter until 2009, the first year that it imported more than it sent out, is expected to import up to 150 million tons this year.
  • Another emerging customer is India, whose coal imports rose from 36 million tons in 2008 to 60 million tons in 2009, the last full year for which data is available.

IPCC Official: Climate Policy Is about Wealth Redistribution, Not Environment

by William Yeatman on November 22, 2010

in Blog

German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer gave an eye-opening interview to Neue Zürcher Zeitung (translated here), in which he said that “one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy….This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.” Mr. Edenhofer was appointed as joint chair of Working Group 3 at the Twenty-Ninth Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Texas Battles Back

by William Yeatman on November 22, 2010

in Blog

The Washington Examiner last week ran an excellent three part series by Kathleen Hartnett White and Mario Loyola, of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, on a burgeoning conflict between the EPA and the State of Texas.

Part 1: EPA Is Offended by Texas’s Successful Permitting Rules
Part 2: Putting a Lid on Texas’s Economic Growth
Part 3: Doing the Environmentalists’ Dirty Work

Lame Duck Session a Big Success So Far

by Myron Ebell on November 22, 2010

in Blog

Lame Duck Session a Big Success So Far

The first week of Congress’s lame duck session has been a big success.  They haven’t done anything.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) pulled a scheduled vote to invoke cloture and proceed to S. 3815, the “Promoting Natural Gas and Electric Vehicles Act of 2010,” because he did not have the 60 votes required.

S. 3815 is known around town as the Boone Pickens Payoff Bill.  Pickens told Bloomberg News this week that he thought there was a better than 50-50 chance that the bill would be enacted, so we can’t celebrate yet.

The bill would provide $4.5 billion in subsidies for natural gas vehicles and $3.5 billion in subsidies for electric vehicles plus $2 billion in loans to manufacturers of natural gas vehicles.  The subsidies to purchasers would range from $8,000 to $64,000.  The larger payments would be for purchasers of heavy trucks that run on natural gas.

But the Lame Ducks Will Be Back after Thanksgiving

Congress will be in recess next week for Thanksgiving and will return on November 29th.  There are enough big must-do items that it still seems unlikely to me that the Senate will be able to take up Pickens’s bill or the Renewable Electricity Standard (or RES) bill, S. 3813.  The RES bill is sponsored by Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), the Chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and retiring Senator Sam Brownback (R-Ks.), who has just been elected Governor of Kansas.  It now has 31 co-sponsors, including three other Republicans.

The RES bill would raise electric rates in those States that haven’t yet followed the failed California model of raising rates to impoverish consumers and drive out energy-intensive industries.  My guess is that it will be blocked in the Senate by Republican and Democratic Senators from those States in the Mideast and Southeast that still depend on low-cost coal and therefore still have manufacturing.  On the other hand, there is an incentive for Senators from States that have already enacted their own renewable requirements to support a national standard in order to lower the competitiveness of the States that have not adopted renewable requirements.

Cooler Heads Digest 19 November 2010

by William Yeatman on November 19, 2010

in Blog, Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

The Ecological Monster Who Said…Peep
Ben Lieberman, Washington Times, 19 November 2010

America’s First Carbon Market Closes Shop
Christopher Horner & William Yeatman, Sacramento Bee, 19 November 2010

G20 Adviser Says U.S. Will Face Trade Boycott over Climate
Ben Webster, The Times, 19 November 2010

Global Warming: How To Approach the Science
Richard Lindzen, Testimony before the Committee on Science and Technology, 17 November 2010

Global Warming: How To Approach the Science
Patrick Michaels, Testimony before the Committee on Science and Technology, 17 November 2010

Cap-and-Trade Is Dead, But Kyotoism Is Alive and Well at the EPA
Marlo Lewis, Washington Examiner, 15 November 2010

Colorado Plan Tied to Phantom Carbon Tax
William Yeatman & Amy Oliver Cooke, Pueblo Chieftain, 14 November 2010

The Climate Change Scare Is Dying
Christopher Booker, Telegraph, 14 November 2010

Big Green Leader Wants GOP To Forget Popular Will…Or Else
Mark Tapscott, Washington Examiner, 9 November 2010

News You Can Use

Climategate’s First Anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of the Climategate scandal. Here’s a round-up of analyses and commentary:

One Year Ago Today, Anthony Watts, WattsUpWithThat
Climategate: One Year and 60 House Seats Later, Marc Sheppard, American Thinker
How the Climategate Weasels Wiggle Away, James Delingpole, Telegraph
What Does Climategate Say about Science?, Terence Kealey, The Global Warming Policy Foundation

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Lame Duck Session a Big Success So Far

The first week of Congress’s lame duck session has been a big success.  They haven’t done anything.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) pulled a scheduled vote to invoke cloture and proceed to S. 3815, the “Promoting Natural Gas and Electric Vehicles Act of 2010,” because he did not have the 60 votes required.

S. 3815 is known around town as the Boone Pickens Payoff Bill.  Pickens told Bloomberg News this week that he thought there was a better than 50-50 chance that the bill would be enacted, so we can’t celebrate yet.

The bill would provide $4.5 billion in subsidies for natural gas vehicles and $3.5 billion in subsidies for electric vehicles plus $2 billion in loans to manufacturers of natural gas vehicles.  The subsidies to purchasers would range from $8,000 to $64,000.  The larger payments would be for purchasers of heavy trucks that run on natural gas.

But the Lame Ducks Will Be Back after Thanksgiving

Congress will be in recess next week for Thanksgiving and will return on November 29th.  There are enough big must-do items that it still seems unlikely to me that the Senate will be able to take up Pickens’s bill or the Renewable Electricity Standard (or RES) bill, S. 3813.  The RES bill is sponsored by Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), the Chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and retiring Senator Sam Brownback (R-Ks.), who has just been elected Governor of Kansas.  It now has 31 co-sponsors, including three other Republicans.

The RES bill would raise electric rates in those States that haven’t yet followed the failed California model of raising rates to impoverish consumers and drive out energy-intensive industries.  My guess is that it will be blocked in the Senate by Republican and Democratic Senators from those States in the Mideast and Southeast that still depend on low-cost coal and therefore still have manufacturing.  On the other hand, there is an incentive for Senators from States that have already enacted their own renewable requirements to support a national standard in order to lower the competitiveness of the States that have not adopted renewable requirements.

Who Will Be Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee?

There are now four active candidates running to be the next Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee: former Chairman and current Ranking Republican Joe Barton (R-Tex.), Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), and Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.).  The House Republican Steering Committee will vote-probably in early December-and then their recommendation will be voted on by the entire Republican Conference.

It’s hard to predict these insider contests because personal relationships play a big role.  Here are a few comments.  Barton has served two years as Chairman and the last four as Ranking Republican.  House Republican rules are ambiguous, but it seems that Barton requires a waiver of the six-year rule in order to be eligible.  Another obstacle is the new Speaker, current Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio).  Barton made the mistake of running against Boehner for Minority Leader after the House Republicans lost their majority in the 2006 elections.

Upton is one of the more liberal Republican House Members, but is nonetheless the front runner for the job.   His voting record has been compiled here.  A number of his environmental and energy votes are at odds with the vast majority of his Republican colleagues.  For example, he was the main sponsor of the ban on incandescent light bulbs, voted for the 2007 anti-energy bill, voted against offshore drilling, voted against a major reform of the Endangered Species Act, and voted for the California Desert bill, which locked up millions of acres.  But Upton is running a hard and highly visible public campaign and is promising to be a good conservative.

Stearns has a very conservative voting record.  He is also saying some of the right things, as for example in this column by Kim Strassel in the Wall Street Journal.  On the other hand, the rap on Stearns is that he has not done much heavy lifting on the committee.

My guess is that Shimkus is the most likely to have a shot at defeating Upton.  Shimkus, like Barton and Stearns, opposes global warming alarmism and supports more domestic production of coal, oil, and natural gas.  He has said publicly that he is a candidate, but is running a behind-the-scenes campaign.

Another possible candidate for Energy and Commerce Chairman is Rep. Greg Walden (R-Oreg.).  He took a leave of absence from the committee, so that a party-switcher could keep his seat on the committee as a Republican.  Walden is currently serving as Chairman of the Republican transition team that is preparing for transfer of majority control of the House in January to the Republicans.  That suggests that the House Republican leadership holds him in high regard.

On the Democratic side, outgoing Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) faces no opposition to become Ranking Democrat on the committee in the 112th Congress.  Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the other chief sponsor of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, has apparently cleared the field and will be elected Ranking Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee.

The Natural Resources Committee’s ranking Republican, Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), who is unopposed to be Chairman when the Republicans take control of the House in January, proposed this week to take the Energy and Commerce Committee’s jurisdiction over energy issues and combine it with his committee into a new Energy and Natural Resources Committee.  I have publicly supported Hastings’s proposal in my role as director of Freedom Action. It’s a long shot that the House Republican leadership or Conference will go along, but at the least Hastings is sending a shot across the bows of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which regularly encroaches on the jurisdiction of his committee.

Across the States

Texas Fights Back

The Washington Examiner this week ran an excellent three part series by Kathleen Hartnett White and Mario Loyola, of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, on a burgeoning conflict between the EPA and the State of Texas.

Part 1: EPA Is Offended by Texas’s Successful Permitting Rules
Part 2: Putting a Lid on Texas’s Economic Growth
Part 3: Doing the Environmentalists’ Dirty Work

Around the World

IPCC Official: Climate Policy Is about Wealth Redistribution, Not Environment

German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer gave an eye-opening interview to Neue Zürcher Zeitung (translated here), in which he said that “one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy….This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.” Mr. Edenhofer was appointed as joint chair of Working Group 3 at the Twenty-Ninth Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

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

How to Improve Sen. Rockefeller’s EPA Proposal

by Marlo Lewis on November 16, 2010

in Blog

This morning, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) were scheduled to discuss a lame duck floor vote on Rockefeller’s proposed two-year suspension of EPA’s plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, factories, and other “stationary sources,” Politico reports.

Reid’s promise in June to hold a vote on the Rockefeller bill after the August recess was likely the critical maneuver defeating Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s resolution (S.J.Res.26) to overturn EPA’s Endangerment Rule. The Endangerment Rule is the trigger, prerequisite, and precedent for a cascade of both mobile and stationary source greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act.

On June 10, the Senate rejected the Murkowski resolution by a vote of 47-53. All 41 Senate Republicans and six Democrats voted for S.J.Res.26. Had four additional Democrats voted for the resolution, it would have passed.

Reid’s promise to hold a vote on the Rockefeller bill gave fence-straddling Democrats cover to vote against S.J.Res.26. They could profess to oppose EPA’s looming energy tax on power plants and factories while in fact doing nothing to stop it.

Some observers speculated at the time that the Honorable Mr. Reid’s promise was a bait-and-switch — that he’d never get around to scheduling a vote on Rockefeller’s bill. Maybe, maybe not. Time will surely tell.

Now that cap-and-trade is dead, the urgent question facing lawmakers is not what U.S. climate policy should be but who should make it. Should climate policy be made by the people’s elected representatives, or by politically-unaccountable bureaucrats, trial lawyers, and activist judges appointed for life? The U.S. Constitution, which vests “all legislative powers” in Congress, permits only one answer.

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA and the agency’s expertise in bureaucratic self-dealing, EPA has positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set climate policy for the nation, and even amend the Clean Air Act — powers never delegated to it by Congress.

Overturning EPA’s Endangerment Rule would nip all this mischief in the bud. There may be enough votes in the new (112th) Congress to pass a resolution of disapproval. 

In the meantime, opponents of EPA’s greenhouse power grab should consider a beefed-up version of Rockefeller’s two-year suspension. How about this: Suspend greenhouse gas regulation of stationary sources until such time as Congress votes to remove the suspension?

Rockefeller’s bill as written doesn’t take a clear stand on the bedrock constitutional principle that EPA’s power grab endangers. It would merely delay, not stop, EPA from Kyotoizing the U.S. economy notwithstanding the lack of any plausible legislative mandate to do so.

The beefier version suggested above would allow a clear up or down vote on the proposition that EPA’s job is to administer public policy, not enact it. Any Senator opposing such a bill would admit by that very fact that he wants EPA, not Congress, to “legislate” climate policy.

Voters Want to Save Planet from Attempts To Save Planet

by Ben Lieberman on November 15, 2010

in Blog

It is worth noting that the two biggest environmental scares of recent memory-global warming and the BP oil spill-both failed to sway voters on November 2.  Quite the contrary, it was the ill-advised attempts to address them that sparked voter anger.  The Waxman-Markey bill worried the electorate more than global warming itself (and quite rightly so), and contributed to the loss of more than two dozen of its supporters in the House of Representatives.

Similarly, the BP oil spill had virtually no adverse impact on pro-drilling politicians. If anything, it was Obama’s overreaction to the spill in the form of the drilling moratorium that proved highly unpopular in Louisiana and other impacted States. The moratorium didn’t cost any Congressional seats there only because both Democrats and Republicans strongly denounced it.

Climate Czar Carol Browner Must Go

by Myron Ebell on November 15, 2010

in Blog

Dan Berman reported in Politico on Wednesday that: “The White House rewrote crucial sections of an Interior Department report to suggest an independent group of scientists and engineers supported a six-month ban on offshore oil drilling, the Interior inspector general says in a new report.  In the wee hours of the morning of May 27, a staff member to White House energy adviser Carol Browner sent two edited versions of the department report’s executive summary back to Interior. The language had been changed to insinuate the seven-member panel of outside experts – who reviewed a draft of various safety recommendations – endorsed the moratorium, according to the IG report.”  This is the most outrageous example yet of the Obama Administration’s improper manipulation of science to support its agenda.  I responded in a CEI press release by calling for the firing of President Obama’s Climate Czar, Carol Browner. Senator James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, and two of his colleagues on the committee, John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and David Vitter (R-La.), have requested that the committee hold a hearing on the Inspector General’s report.

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