2014

Americans United for Change, a liberal group that seeks to “create a groundswell for a return to the traditional progressive values that have defined America,” plastered the airwaves during this Sunday morning’s political talk shows with a jingoistic ad that tries to tar opposition to ethanol by linking it to Saudi Arabia (below).

For the life of me, I can’t imagine why any self-proclaimed “progressive” group would back ethanol, a motor fuel manufactured from corn that increases the price of food and gasoline. By rendering food & fuel costlier, America’s ethanol policy hurts the poor the most, due to the fact that these basic necessities constitute a larger part of poor peoples’ income. Bluntly put, support for ethanol is regressive.

But that’s an aside to my main point: The advertisement is disgusting, if you’re the sort, like me, that doesn’t begrudge human beings for not being American. It’s clearly a play on anti-Arab sensibilities. Opposition to ethanol is a terrible thing, the ad tells us, because it is associated with evil Saudi Arabia, a.k.a., “the Kingdom.” Period. In the ad’s universe, if it’s Saudi, it’s bad.

This is, alas, the second lefty, xenophobic energy TV spot that recently has aired. In January, billionaire hedge fund environmentalist Tom Steyer produced an equally appalling public (dis)service announcement in opposition to Keystone XL. In Steyer’s over-the-top ad, the bogeyman was China.  Keystone is a “sucker’s deal” for America, the narrator avers, because the pipeline’s real beneficiary is allegedly China (below).

Washington Post gave the ad 4 Pinocchios, the paper’s highest possible condemnation of untruthfulness. In addition to being full of lies, the ad is tasteless. Indeed, it took an identical tack as the Americans for United Change spot, except the Saudis were replaced by the Chinese. That is, in the Steyer ad’s universe, if it’s Chinese it’s bad. Classy stuff!

To be sure, I understand why Americans United for Change and Tom Steyer would resort to such dirty politics. Their policy prescriptions–more ethanol, less Canadian oil–are awful for the public at large, for reasons that are detailed here, here, and here by my colleague Marlo Lewis. Because they can’t back their respective positions with a rational argument, Steyer et al. descend to the gutter, and appeal to the basest instincts.

The National Science Foundation reportedly spent $700,000 to produce an off-Broadway dramatization of global warming alarmism. It’s titled, “The Great Immensity,” and it sounds dreadful.

Per the New York Times review:

Written and directed by Steve Cosson, “The Great Immensity” stuffs thick binders of information about man’s trampling of nature into a pulpy story about a documentary filmmaker’s mysterious disappearance…

As it leaps between song and story, and past and present, “The Great Immensity” sometimes feels as if it were constructed by an impassioned college student with a brain full of facts and a fierce determination not to turn to Big Pharma to control that pesky attention-deficit problem. The show jumps around like a jittery monkey …

Hot-button topics fly by: the disappearing rain forests, the increasingly hungry polar bears, and so on …

Other highlights include a saucy song about the allure of “charismatic megafauna” (“I want a cute strong predator to fawn upon”)…

As it winds toward a somewhat preposterous conclusion, Mr. Cosson’s text is pocked with speeches about the urgent necessity of mending man’s rapacious ways…

“The Great Immensity” sounds very stupid, to be sure, yet it’s not even the stupidest waste of NSF dollars on climate alarmism that was brought to the public’s attention this week. Today, ClimateWire reports that the National Science Foundation has funded a 3 month role-play game of the “Cli-Fi” genre, i.e. the science fiction of global warming.* According to ClimateWire,

FutureCoast is a three-month-long climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” project created by Columbia University’s Polar Partnership with funding from the National Science Foundation. One part of the game involves participants hunting for physical chronofacts that have been planted in cities across the United States. The other involves people calling in from around the world to leave their own “voice mail from the future,” which is added to the FutureCoast website.

You can’t make this stuff up! I know that $1 million or so is a drop in the bucket relative to federal spending, but, yowsers, these stories do not inspire confidence in the stewardship of public monies at the National Science Foundation.

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In a previous post, David Bier exposed the sleight of hand, known as partial equilibrium sector modeling, used by EPA to make the agency’s rules appear cost-effective. Partial equilibrium modeling entails an analysis of a regulation’s effect on only the directly affected industries, i.e., the regulated industry and the relevant pollution control industry, rather than an economy-wide analysis.

If, for example, EPA promulgated new sulfur dioxide emission standards for power plants, then a partial equilibrium sector modelling of the rule’s economic impact would project the employment changes on the utility sector and also the sulfur scrubber industry. Such an analysis would NOT take into account the economic effects of higher energy prices. In practice, EPA invariably finds that job creation in the pollution control industry more than offsets job losses in the regulated industry. Unbelievable as it sounds, EPA’s default assumption is that each $1 million spent on pollution control will engender a net increase of 1.5 jobs, with no ceiling.

Pause for a moment to let that sink in. Under EPA’s default assumption, there is no end to the employment benefits of the agency’s rules. If a given regulation costs $1 billion, it’ll create 1,500 jobs; and if it costs $1 trillion, it’ll create 1,500,000 jobs. And so on, all the way to infinity. Of course, this is plainly stupid.

Don’t take my word for it! Below, I’ve reposted an excerpt from an actual EPA regulatory analysis that employs this absurd assumption (from the Utility MACT):

At the behest of Sen. David Vitter, Ranking Member on the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, EPA has now started the process of updating its ridiculous employment analysis. To be precise, the agency is considering the use of full-economy modeling. Economy-wide modeling, if adopted, should limit EPA’s ability to pull such tricks and thereby result in a better regulatory impact estimate. In late 2013, in exchange for lifting his opposition to the nomination of Gina McCarthy to become EPA Administrator, Vitter won a concession that the Science Advisory Board, an EPA advisory body, would investigate the propriety of full economy modeling. That process has now begun.

In today’s Federal Register, EPA announced it is seeking nominations to staff the Science Advisory Board. If you know of a qualified economist, one that doesn’t suffer fools lightly, then please nominate him or her. Here’s the link to the notice. I’ve re-posted the announcement in its entirety below.

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Summary: Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling in EPA v. EME Homer Generation, which upheld the EPA’s 2011 Cross State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), clarified more than a decade of contradictory interpretations of the Clean Air Act by the D.C. Circuit. For this, we can be thankful.  At the same time, however, there is reason to be wistful, because there can be little doubt that this Supreme Court would’ve upheld CSAPR’s predecessor, the 2005 Clean Air Interstate Rule. That rule was remanded by the D.C. Circuit Court in 2008, but the Bush administration didn’t have time for an appeal.

1. Michigan (2000) & North Carolina (2008): D.C. Circuit  Gives Conflicting Interpretations of the Clean Air Act’s Good Neighbor Provision; Judge David Sentelle’s Key role 

The Clean Air Act’s aptly named “Good Neighbor” provision addresses interstate pollution by prohibiting in-state sources from “emitting any air pollutant in amounts which will … contribute significantly” to downwind States’ non-compliance with national ambient air quality standards. See 42 U.S.C. §7410(a)(2)(D)

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Ruling below. Ginsburg delivered the Court’s opinion, in which Roberts, Kennedy, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan joined. Scalia filed a dissenting opinion, in which Thomas joined.

SCOTUS CSAPR

On Friday last week (April 25), climate economists Richard Tol of Sussex University and Robert Stavins of Harvard University separately posted critiques of the process by which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) drafts, edits, and approves the Summaries for Policy Makers (SPMs) of its huge assessment reports.

Tol caused a stir last month when Reuters reported that, in September 2013, he quit the 70-member team authoring the SPM of Working Group II (Impacts) of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). Tol said he pulled out because, “The drafts became too alarmist.”

According to Reuters (Mar. 27):

Tol said the IPCC emphasized the risks of climate change far more than the opportunities to adapt. A Reuters count shows the final draft has 139 mentions of “risk” and 8 of “opportunity”.

Tol said farmers, for instance, could grow new crops if the climate in their region became hotter, wetter or drier. “They will adapt. Farmers are not stupid,” he said.

He said the report played down possible economic benefits of low levels of warming. Less cold winters may mean fewer deaths among the elderly, and crops may grow better in some regions.

“It is pretty damn obvious that there are positive impacts of climate change, even though we are not always allowed to talk about them,” he said. But he said temperatures were set to rise to levels this century that would be damaging overall.

In an op-ed a few days later (Mar. 31), Tol explained his basic disagreement with the SPM perspective on climate impacts: “The idea that climate change poses an existential threat to humankind is laughable.”

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On Friday, thirty-one non-profit organizations (including the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, where I work) sent a coalition letter to congressional leaders, urging lawmakers to resist reinstating the wind production tax credit, the wind industry’s lucrative subsidy that expired at the end of 2013. I’ve reposted the letter below.

Ptc Coalition Letter 4-25