E&E EnergyWire (subscription required) last week reported that Virginia Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe has endorsed federal legislation that would open offshore Virginia to oil and gas drilling. This is a major shift from his failed 2009 campaign, during which he opposed offshore drilling. On energy policy, McAuliffe also has done a U-turn on coal. In 2009, he pledged to never allow a coal fired power plant; now, he doesn’t mention coal-fired power, but his campaign does support increased coal exports.
McAuliffe’s abrupt shift in energy policy mirrors President Barack Obama’s performance during debates with GOP candidate Mitt Romney in late 2012. During his first term, President Obama’s administration imposed a suite of policies meant to inhibit hydrocarbon energy production in the United States. Yet during the debate, when the American public was paying attention, the President championed his supposed support for more oil and gas drilling, and even claimed to be a booster of the coal industry.
Today in National Review Online, Mark Mills has a terrific column titled “Unleash the Energy Export Revolution.” He begins by calling out the irrationality of our government’s current anti-energy export policy:
On May 17, the Department of Energy (DOE) approved just the second license in America to export natural gas. Nineteen more applicants still wait. Yes, private businesses, willing to spend tens of billions of private capital, are lined up for a schoolyard game of “Mother May I” to get permission to export a product that the U.S. is uniquely good at manufacturing. So good, in fact, that America is now the world’s No. 1 producer, with no end in sight. What a world.
Or, as comedian Yakov Smirnov might say, “What a country!”
Mills makes several salient points. [click to continue…]
Over at National Review, Eliana Johnson has an excellent post about my colleague Chris Horner’s latest FOIA find. Evidently, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson took her Congressional-mandated transparency training using her false identity, “Richard Windsor.”And Mr. Windsor did well, because she was rewarded with three certificates attesting to her being a “scholar of ethical behavior.”
Documents released by the agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that, for three years, the EPA certified Windsor as a “scholar of ethical behavior.”
The agency also documented the nonexistent Windsor’s completion of training courses in the management of e-mail records, cyber-security awareness, and what appears to be a counter-terror initiative that urges federal employees to report suspicious activity.
The EPA made the certifications public in response to a FOIA request from Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who was tipped off to Jackson’s use of the Windsor account by agency employees while he was researching his 2012 book, The Liberal War on Transparency. Horner says that the EPA probably issued agency-wide training requirements for anybody who wished to maintain an active e-mail address, “never contemplating a false identity or fake employee would be created.”
So…EPA’s bloated bureaucracy thought that Lisa Jackson’s alias, the existence of which is a violation of transparency ethics, was a real person, and the agency awarded him/her a citation for ethics. Ladies and gentleman, your taxes at work!
This strange juxtaposition (i.e., Lisa Jackson ostensibly demonstrating her ethical behavior in the act of committing a gross ethical violation) immediately brought to mind the end of Billy Madison, when Billy’s nemesis, Eric, had a meltdown over “business ethics.” [click to continue…]
Yesterday, Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.) hosted a climate change conference in a technology park in Fairmont, W.Va.
A mixed panel of warmistas and skeptics featured Marc Marano of Climate Depot, Scott Denning of Colorado State University, Jim Hurrell of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Joe Casola of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, Annie Petsonk of Environmental Defense Fund, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, and John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who participated by satellite link.
I emailed Dr. Christy and asked for permission to post his presentation on GlobalWarming.Org; he promptly sent me the files.
Dr. Christy’s Power Point presentation is available here. The accompanying text is available here. The main takeaway points:
- Popular scare stories that weather extremes — hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods — are getting worse are not based on fact.
- In the U.S., high temperature records are not becoming more numerous.
- Climate models significantly overestimated warming during the past 15 years.
- Even if climate models were correct, a 50% reduction in U.S. CO2 emissions by 2050 would avert only 0.07°C of warming by 2100.
- If a policy is not economically sustainable, it’s not politically sustainable.
- The climate change impact of enhancing CO2 concentrations has so far been small compared to the public health and biospheric benefits provided by affordable, carbon-based energy.
By Anthony Ward, CEI Research Associate
Solar industry executives are worried about the reliability of their own products. In an article this week, the New York Times reports industry executives are becoming increasingly concerned about the rising number of solar panel failures. The average expected operational lifetime of a solar panel is 25 years, but some are failing in only two years. Increasingly, it seems that solar panels are becoming defunct earlier than anticipated.
According to the article:
The solar panels covering a vast warehouse roof in the sun-soaked Inland Empire region east of Los Angeles were only two years into their expected 25-year life span when they began to fail. Coatings that protect the panels disintegrated while other defects caused two fires that took the system offline for two years, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenues.
It was not an isolated incident. Worldwide, testing labs, developers, financiers and insurers are reporting similar problems and say the $77 billion solar industry is facing a quality crisis just as solar panels are on the verge of widespread adoption.
No one is sure how pervasive the problem is. There are no industry wide figures about defective solar panels. And when defects are discovered, confidentiality agreements often keep the manufacturer’s identity secret, making accountability in the industry all the more difficult.
But at stake are billions of dollars that have financed solar installations, from desert power plants to suburban rooftops, on the premise that solar panels will more than pay for themselves over a quarter century.
Subsidies and the associated pressures to reduce costs, boost sales, and reduce government debt are the principal cause of the decline in quality:
After incurring billions of dollars in debt to accelerate production that has sent solar panel prices plunging since 2009, Chinese solar companies are under extreme pressure to cut costs. [click to continue…]
Three factors limit the market penetration of electric vehicles. One is purchase price. For example, the average price paid for a gasoline-powered 2013 Ford Focus ranges from $16,500 to $24,176. In contrast, the average price paid for a 2013 Ford Focus Electric is $39,020.
Another drawback is range. Except for the Tesla Model S, with an EPA-estimated range of 265 miles, most battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) have EPA-estimated ranges of 62 to 99.8 miles — although motorists may go farther under actual driving conditions, Edmunds.Com reports. These range limitations diminish the utility and, thus, value of BEVs for many consumers, and may induce “range anxiety” — fear of being stranded between where you are and where you have to go. The Tesla Model S has an impressive range but, with a manufacturer’s recommended sale price of $69,900, most households cannot afford to buy one even with generous federal and state tax rebates.
A third and related barrier to consumer acceptance is recharging time. Of a dozen BEVs tested by Edmunds.Com, some recharged in ‘as little as’ 4 hours (2013 Fiat 500e, Ford Focus Electric, Honda Fit EV). But for some, the recharging time was as long as 5 hours (Tesla Model S), 6 hours (Volkswagon E-Golf), and 7 hours (Chevrolet Spark EV, Mitsubishi i MiEv). Buying a BEV means paying for the inconvenience of not being able to gas up and go in 5 minutes at the nearest service station the way ordinary folks do.
To overcome these battery-related inconveniences, an Israeli company called “Better Place” developed networks of battery-charging and -swapping stations in Israel and Denmark. Better Place hoped the stations would spark consumer interest in electric vehicles and spread globally. But on Sunday the firm announced “that it is shutting down, less than six years after unveiling an ambitious plan that promised to revolutionize the auto industry by reducing the world’s dependency on oil,” reports the Detroit Free Press. [click to continue…]
National Journal published an article in their 18th May issue titled, “The GOP Energy Tent Is Slowly Getting Bigger.” Reporter Coral Davenport, who is a reliable promoter of environmentalist views, writes a puff piece on House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) efforts to add a green tinge to the House Republicans’ wardrobe.
In the last Congress, McCarthy, who is number three in the Republican leadership, started the House Energy Action Team (HEAT) in order to develop messaging points for the 2012 election. Now, he is trying to broaden HEAT’s messaging to include support for subsidies for renewable energy and energy efficiency measures. That is no surprise: McCarthy is not a movement conservative, but he does have the country’s largest concentration of wind farms in his Bakersfield-area district. McCarthy has received many major campaign contributions from the wind industry.
Davenport’s story includes a long quote praising McCarthy’s green turn: “‘I think it’s smart,’ Republican strategist John Feehery said of McCarthy’s new tactics. Republicans’ aggressive campaigning against Obama’s clean-energy agenda was ‘an overreaction,’ Feehery said. ‘It made us seem like enemies of the environment. The idea that government has absolutely no role, that the climate is absolutely not changing—it’s not smart,’ he said. ‘It’s also not smart if you’re talking about all the farmers in red states that make money off windmills. A lot of the base is there.’ Davenport does not mention that Feehery is a top lobbyist at Quinn Gillespie, who represents clients in the renewable energy industry and started a front group to lobby for the wind production tax credit and other subsidies called the Red State Renewables Alliance.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said last week that confirmation votes on several of President Obama’s nominees for top positions, including Gina McCarthy for EPA Administrator, would be delayed until July. Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told reporters that he wasn’t sure that McCarthy and Labor Secretary nominee Thomas Perez had the sixty votes necessary to invoke cloture and proceed to a final vote.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Senator Durbin also speculated that, “Unless we start seeing a more co-operative atmosphere around here … there’s going to continue to be speculation about changing the rules.” This refers to the so-called “nuclear option”—changing Senate rules so that confirmation votes cannot be blocked by a 41-vote minority.
Heritage Action for America has joined eleven other non-profit groups officially opposed to McCarthy’s confirmation.
Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) were quick to use the giant tornado that obliterated Moore, Oklahoma to chastise Republican members of Congress for failing to get on board the global warming bandwagon. Senator James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) noted that he has seen a lot of tornadoes during his lifetime in Oklahoma and called the attempt to make tawdry political points out of the Moore tragedy “outrageous” and “immoral.”
For the record, the Digest noted two weeks ago that tornado activity in the past twelve months had been the lowest in 60 years. If the tornado that hit Moore can be attributed to global warming, then so too must the low level of activity across the U. S. in the past year. Anthony Watts compiles the facts here, while James Delingpole tees off on Boxer in his Telegraph blog.
A. Cheap electricity.
The American Legislative Exchange Council this week released the latest version of its “Rich States, Poor States” report, which compares the economic performance of the fifty States. It finds that eight of the top ten States for economic growth are controlled by Republican elected officials, while eight of the ten bottom States are controlled by Democrats. Not co-incidentally, electricity costs are lower in the States with the strongest growth. Nine of the top ten States have lower electric rates that the average of the bottom ten.
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