Green groups in Wisconsin are attacking a bill that would allow utilities and electric cooperatives to comply with the state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS) by importing hydroelectricity from Manitoba, Canada, today’s Climatewire reports. The bill (SB 81) passed in the state Senate earlier this week.
Talk about dumb and dumber. Wisconsin’s RPS mandates that 10% of the state’s power come from renewable sources by 2015. A soviet-style production quota, an RPS props up electricity sources — such as wind and solar power — that can’t compete on the basis of cost and quality. As economic policy, an RPS is about as cheesy as it gets.
But as long as a state is going to have an RPS, why not at least allow electric service providers to obtain renewable electricity at the lowest price and the highest quality? That is the objective of SB 81. [click to continue…]
One hundred eighty-six Members of Congress have signed on to H.R. 1830, the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions (NAT GAS) Act of 2011, better known at this Web site as the Pickens-Your-Pocket Boonedoggle Bill, in honor of its chief lobbyist and beneficiary, billionaire T. Boone Pickens.
The bill would provide targeted tax breaks to subsidize the manufacture and purchase of natural gas vehicles, installation of natural gas refueling infrastructure, and production of compressed and liquefied natural gas for use as motor fuel. The bill includes no overall budget authorization. Moreover, many of the provisions modify current sections of the tax code, which in turn refer to other sections, and the Congressional Research Service inexplicably has yet to provide a bill summary. So the total amount of the tax breaks is anybody’s guess.
Nonetheless, the final tab has got to be huge even by Washington standards. Each manufacturer could claim credits of $4,000 per vehicle up to an overall amount of $200 million per year. Each purchaser could claim credits ranging from $7,500 to $64,000 per vehicle depending on how much the vehicle weighs. Each property installing natural gas fuel dispensers could claim a credit up to $30,000 (or $100,000 — it’s unclear). Each maker of compressed or liquefied natural gas could claim a credit of 50¢ per gallon for every gasoline-equivalent gallon sold. With anywhere from 225,000 to 400,000 18-wheelers sold in the USA each year, the vehicle purchase credits alone could cost billions.
T. Boone’s lobbying for these tax subsidies is all about patriotism and energy security and has nothing to do with rent seeking or corporate welfare. Just ask him! “I’m sure not doing this for the money,” the Texas Gas Mogul told New York Times columnist Joe Nocera. [click to continue…]
Al Gore, Greenpeace, and the “consensus of scientists” tell us that global warming endangers agriculture and global food security. A study published last week in Science magazine finds global warming has taken significant bites out of potential global corn and wheat production since 1980.
The study also finds, however, that climate change has not adversely affected U.S. corn and wheat production. How so – because of Yankee ingenuity? Not according to the study. The explanation, rather, is that America has been a “notable exception” to climate change. The USA “experienced a slight cooling” during the study period (1980-2008).
This is bizarre. Here we have an alarmist study that finds a “lack of significant climate trends” in the USA for the past 30 years. If true, that makes hash out of all those dire pronouncements by Gore and others that global warming is already contributing to hurricanes, tornadoes, snow storms, forest fires, floods, etc. in the USA. Are the study’s authors aware of this implication? Are the editors of Science? Apparently not.
How do the authors know that climate change is depressing corn and wheat production globally, even if not in the USA? The biggest loss in wheat production, according to the study, is in Russia. Do they adjust Russian crop yields for the Russian economic meltown and financial crisis of the 1990s? As far as I can tell, they don’t. I would not bet the farm on the validity of this study. [click to continue…]
A study published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society reports that an extinct species of giant ant (Titanomyrma lubei, from the Greek word “Titan”) lived in Wyoming during the Eocene Epoch, about 50 million years ago. As colorfully described by Physorg.Com, the ant “had a body just over five centimeters long — comparable to a hummingbird — a size only rivaled today by the monstrously large queens of an ant species in tropical Africa.”
[click to continue…]
If you’ve been following the global warming debate for any length of time, you know how boringly predictable the “consensus” narrative has become. Global warming is good for bad things — poison ivy, ticks, toxic algae blooms, malaria-carrying mosquitoes — but bad for good things — polar bears, ski resorts, Vermont’s maple sugar industry, and the weather patterns on which agriculture (hence human survival) allegedly depend.
And supposedly, one of the cures for global warming is to “repower” America with zero-carbon energy, especially electricity generated from wind turbines.
But that creates a bit of a conundrum for warmists. If global warming is going to play havoc with the weather, how do we know that the best locations for siting wind farms today will remain optimal (or even marginally productive) in the allegedly topsy turvy greenhouse planet of tomorrow?
Never fear! A new study funded by the National Science Foundation finds that global warming will not significantly change America’s wind patterns over the next 50 years. [click to continue…]
“Storms Kill Over 250 Americans In States Represented By Climate Pollution Deniers,” announces a blog post on ThinkProgress.Org. If the blogger does not actually claim that the southland is being punished for its sins of emission, he apparently sees poetic justice in the devastation, or at least irony:
The congressional delegations of these states — Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, and Kentucky — overwhelmingly voted to reject the science that polluting the climate is dangerous. They are deliberately ignoring the warnings of scientists.
The real irony, though, is that blaming tornadoes on global warming is unscientific. [click to continue…]
Has the EU met its emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol? Not if emissions associated with goods Europe imports from Asia are taken into account. So finds a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The study, Growth in emission transfers via international trade from 1990 to 2008, calculates the net increase in global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions resulting from developed countries’ imports of goods produced in developing countries. The study provides additional evidence of Kyoto’s futility, although the authors, a team of Norwegian, German, and U.S. researchers, don’t draw this conclusion and would likely deny it.
Some key findings: [click to continue…]
I just checked the Web sites of eight leading eco-activist groups, curious as to how prominently the organizations are featuring Earth Day messages and activities.
Surprisingly, seven of the groups — Center for Biological Diversity, EarthJustice, Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council — say nary a word about Earth Day.
Sierra Club is the sole partial exception — they’re offering a $15 gift if you join the organization on Earth Day. It’s almost as if green pressure groups are as sheepish about Earth Day as their congressional allies are about the policy that dare not speak its name — cap-and-trade.
So if they’re not advertising Earth Day, what are they talking about? Six of the eight groups’ Web sites feature strikingly similar photos and messages about the April 2010 BP oil spill:
- Center for Biological Diversity – “Gulf Disaster One Year Later”
- EarthJustice – “One Year After the Gulf Oil Spill”
- Environmental Defense Fund – “One Year After BP Disaster, Congress Lags Its Response”
- Greenpeace – “Deep Water Horizon One Year On”
- National Wildlife Federation – “Status of the Gulf: Wildlife and Wetlands One Year after the Gulf Oil Disaster”
- Natural Resources Defense Council – “Disaster in Gulf Lives On”
Groupthink (“We are Borg . . .”) can afflict partisans of any agenda, but it is endemic to ideologies demanding ever-greater political control over economic decisions.
♫ You don’t have to live like a refugee ♫
You’ve probably heard the dreary narrative many times. By increasing the frequency and severity of floods, storms, droughts, and famines, and by accelerating sea-level rise, anthropogenic global warming will drive millions of people from their homelands. Wave after wave of “environmental refugees” will inundate poor countries barely able to feed their own populations. Fragile governments will tumble. Regional conflicts will intensify. Moral of story: “Global warming is a national security threat — even the generals are worried.”
Google “climate change” and “environmental refugees,” and about 5 million sites pop up. So you might be inclined to think, where there’s so much smoke, there’s bound to be some fire.
Many of these sites — for example, National Geographic News — reference a November 2005 United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report predicting there would be as many as 50 million climate refugees in 2010. What actually happened?
Today’s (pre-Earth Day) edition of the Wall Street Journal reports that the 50 million climate refugees did not materialize. In fact, many of the places UNEP supposed would be hardest hit by global warming are rapidly gaining population! [click to continue…]
Google “global warming” and “flooding,” and you’ll find 3.96 million sites where these topics are discussed together. The overwhelming majority of sites, it’s safe to assume, warn of global warming-induced increases in the frequency and severity of flooding.
And if you’ve paid any attention to the global warming debate, you know that alarmists predictably predict that climate change impacts are even worse than they previously predicted.
But, as noted in an earlier post, a recent study based on global tide gauge data (Houston and Dean, 2011) found that the rate of sea-level rise over the past 80 years did not accelerate and, in fact, slightly decelerated. Just the opposite of what we usually hear.
A new study (Bouzotias et al., 2011) by scientists with the National Technical University of Athens brings more good news: Discharge records of the world’s river basins show a decreasing trend in floods over the past 50 years.
The researchers examined extreme floods at 119 stations worldwide with records longer than 50 years. In particular, they analyzed “trends and persistence (else known as Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics), which characterizes the temporal streamflow variability across several time scales.”
Noting the “common belief” that “the severity, frequency and consequences from floods have been increased in recent years,” the Bouzotios team sought to determine “whether there is a general increasing tendency worldwide, especially considering the last climate period (after 1970) when the effects of global warming are believed to be apparent.”
Here’s what they found:
Analysis of trends and of aggregated time series on climatic (30-year) scale does not indicate consistent trends worldwide. Despite common perception, in general, the detected trends are more negative (less intense floods in most recent years) than positive. Similarly, Svensson et al. (2005) and Di Baldassarre et al. (2010) did not find systematical change neither in flood increasing or decreasing numbers nor change in flood magnitudes in their analysis.
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