December 2011

In this excerpt from Energy and Climate Wars: How naïve politicians, green ideologues and media elites are undermining the truth about energy and climate, Peter Glover and Michael Economides explain why energy consumption is the ultimate good and why governments shouldn’t prevent increased energy use. As they write, “energy demand is the cause of US wealth.”

Energy and Climate Wars was released in 2011

Without modern energy Western civilization would grind to a halt, literally. Your refrigerator would no longer keep cheap food chilled for weeks and months; you would need fresh food daily, with all the extra costs and the journeys that entails. Private cars would be obsolete. You would have to read by candlelight. Your home would have to be heated by burning wood or, if you had a local source of hydrocarbon fuels—what we call primary—burning oil, gas, or coal. In short, you would be subject to the technology of the mid-nineteenth century.

At this point, an extreme idealist may naively insist that life was better in former generations than today. A less extreme idealist may claim that hydrocarbon fuels are no longer necessary and that we could switch, with the right social and political will, to alternative energy sources. The argument runs that, if only we could divest ourselves of our “addiction” to oil, gas, and coal (“fossil” fuels) we could, at a stroke, clean up our environment by making a wholehearted commitment to renewable, clean and “free” energy, wind, wave, hydro, solar, and geothermal power to solve our future energy needs. Only one problem with that: there’s more chance of Donald Duck becoming president of the United States.

Just try to make that particular energy switchover and stand back and watch the lights go out all over the world. True, some radicals want it that way. They think it would be “quaint” to return to dark ages lifestyle, the same “quaint,” often poverty-stricken, lifestyles to which they would doom other societies who today are desperate to industrialize, as the West has. This is an easy pastime, of course, when you are an armchair eco-liberal enjoying the fruits of a post-industrial society.

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Climate scare-mongers love to hide behind the alleged scientific “consensus” that man-made carbon emissions are an imminent threat to the planet.  But to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, the number of scientists who believe a theory is irrelevant to its truth.  In fact, scientific consensuses have a long history of coming to ignoble ends, as I discuss in my column for the Washington Examiner today:

Once it was the unshakable belief of experts that the Sun revolved around the Earth.

This Ptolemaic model of the solar system, so-called after the 2nd century A.D. Roman astronomer who cemented the hypothesis in the Western mind, was for centuries considered so obvious and uncontroversial that to even suggest otherwise was to be accused of insanity, stupidity or heresy.

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Following the failure in Copenhagen and Cancun, no one expected much from the UN’s seventeenth year of climate talks that took place during the past two weeks in South Africa. However, the sluggish conference got a jolt of excitement when China teased that they might agree, after sixteen years of disagreement, to sign a legally binding deal for reducing emissions.

China’s softening position escalated enthusiasm at the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP17) with news coming out stating that negotiators “were steps closer to an agreement on combating climate change” and “Agreement on emissions reduction appears near.”

COP17, according to The Economist, was “more about saving the circus” than “saving the planet.” Regarding the event, the Wall Street Journal declared that it “appeared destined to end as a well-advertised convention of environmental officials and activists swapping strategies on creating new national parks and shuttering old coal-fired plants.” But that was before China’s changing rhetoric—and rhetoric it was.

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“To maintain our Nation’s competitive edge,” President Obama said this summer, “we must ensure that the United States has fast, reliable ways to move people, goods, energy, and information. In a global economy, where businesses are making investment choices between countries, we will compete for the world’s investments based in part on the quality of our infrastructure.” The president is absolutely right, and yet his environmental zeal stands in the way of American infrastructure growth.

At a news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday, Obama told reporters that he would reject any Congressional deal that tied a payroll tax cut—something he has pushed for over the past couple months—to an approval for Canada’s Keystone XL, a 1700 mile pipeline that would deliver up to 830,000 barrels of oil a day from the Alberta tar sands to America’s refining hub along the Gulf of Mexico.

“Any effort to try to tie Keystone to the payroll tax cut, I will reject. Everybody should be on notice. The reason is,” he explained, “because the payroll tax cut is something House Republicans and Senate Republicans should want to do regardless of any other issues.” In other words, it’s his way or no way.

The logic behind the payroll tax cuts, as explained by Obama, is that “it will spur spending.  It will spur hiring.” Yet the pipeline will create $7 billion in investment and will create upwards of 13,000 private sector jobs without spending a single public dollar. In tough budgetary times, Congress and the president should be open ways to create jobs without more debt-financed stimulus.

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“Wall Street and corporations have corrupted the political process,” says one Occupy Wall Street sign. It’s a common refrain from progressives, but their criticism is one-directional. The accusation is only leveled when Giant Corporations oppose government intervention. When big business supports the intervention, because it stands to reap windfall profits, industry reports are suddenly valid sources for information about the legislation. During the debate about the incandescent light bulb ban, this attitude was rampant, and still is. Consider this excerpt from a recent piece by Washington Times’ Blogger Catherine Poe. She writes:

[W]hile sitting on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, [Rand] Paul railed against government plans to transition from the incandescent light bulb to more energy saving light bulbs, citing Rand’s 1937 novel Anthem. The similarity, according to Paul, is that “individual choice is banned and the collective basically runs society.”Just for the record: The companies making light bulbs were all for this change. [Emphasis added]

Her closing comment is remarkable because it demonstrates complete deference to corporate interests on this issue. It’s not just Poe. The Washington Post editorialized in favor of the light bulb ban in July, citing a study by light bulb manufacturer Phillips that said the ban “would save a household $160 in energy costs over its life.” According to the Post, “The law has had an impressive effect: Light bulb manufacturers have invested heavily in developing new bulbs that use much less electricity, turn on immediately, work with dimmers and produce soft white light.” It’s like reading the back of a GE box.

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In Monday’s excerpt, Julian Simon argued that pollution has been in steady decline and living standards have improved over time if you include the ancient pollutants like bacteria and viruses spread by polluted water. In Tuesday’s post, Wilfred Beckerman echoed the point. He argued that economic development improves standards of living, even today. Today’s post from Daniel Yergin’s new book The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World demonstrates how the post-Soviet Russian state rediscovered energy privatization and market forces improved the lives of average Russians.

Natural resources–particularly oil and natural gas–were as critical to the new Russian state as they had been to the former Soviet Union. By the middle 1990s, oil export revenues accounted for as much as two thirds of the Russian government’s hard currency earnings…. Yet the oil sector was swept up in the same anarchy as the rest of the economy. Workers, who were not being paid, went on strike, shutting down the oil fields. Production and supply across the country were disrupted. Oil was being commandeered or stolen and sold for hard currency in the West.

No one even knew who really owned the oil. Individual production organizations in various parts of West Siberia and elsewhere were busily trying to go into business for themselves. The industry was suddenly being run by “nearly 2000 uncoordinated associations, enterprises, and organizations belonging to the former Soviet industry ministry.” Amid such disruption and starved for investment, Russian oil output started to slip, and then collapse. In little more than half a decade, Russian production plummeted by almost 50 percent–an astonishing loss of more than 5 million barrels a day.

One person with clearly thought-through ideas about what to do was Vagit Alekperov… deputy oil minister. On trips to the West, Alekperov visited a number of petroleum companies. He saw a dramatically different way of operating an oil business. “It was a revelation,” he said. “Here was a type of organization that was flexible and capable, a company that was tackling all the issues at the same time–exploration, production, and engineering–and everybody pursuing the common goal, and not each branch operating separately.”

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