Marlo Lewis

Antarctica: New Evidence Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age Were Global

by Marlo Lewis on March 23, 2012

in Blog, Features

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Did the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) occur only in Europe, or were they global in scope?

This is a hotly debated question, because it is harder to make the case that the warmth of recent decades is “unusual,” ”extraordinary,” or “unprecedented” and therefore something to stress about if global climate oscillates naturally between warming and cooling periods. The catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) crowd tend to write off the MWP (~1000-1200 A.D.) and LIA (~1300-1850 A.D.) as regional phenomena, largely confined to Northern Europe. A new study finds evidence of the MWP and LIA in a region 10,000 miles south of Northern Europe: the Antarctic Peninsula. [click to continue…]

Sen. Wyden’s Anti-Keystone Amendment Goes Down in Flames

by Marlo Lewis on March 8, 2012

in Blog, Features

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The Senate just voted down two highway bill amendments on the Keystone XL Pipeline: the Hoeven amendment to permit the pipeline (56-42) and the Wyden amendment prohibiting exports of Keystone crude and petroleum products made from it (34-64). Both amendments required 60 votes for passage. Hoeven’s amendment missed by four votes, Wyden’s by 26.

Eleven Democrats voted for Hoeven’s amendment: Kay Hagan (N.C.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Jim Webb (Va.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Mark Begich (Alaska), Bob Casey (Pa.), Kent Conrad (N.D.) and Max Baucus (Mont.). Bottom line: There is now clear majority support in both the House and Senate for expeditious approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

As this blog has argued previously, proposals like Wyden’s to ban exports of U.S. petroleum products would violate U.S. treaty obligations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Wyden claims an export ban would increase domestic supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel and, thus, lower prices, benefiting consumers. But the ban would likely backfire, increasing pain at the pump. It would drive refining-related investment, production, and jobs out of the USA, curbing production at home while making higher-priced foreign imports more competitive.

Banning petroleum product exports is also just plain dumb if you’re one of those people – like Wyden — who deplore America’s trade deficit with China. Well, okay, what Wyden deplores most (or only) is America’s trade deficit in “environmental goods” like solar panels. If you don’t understand the economic logic behind this selective indignation, it’s because there is none.

Gross self-contradiction is not uncommon in politics, but the angst and handwringing over Keystone XL as an “export pipeline” by many self-styled trade hawks is material suitable for a Monty Python skit. In the meantime, sober commentary will have to do. ExxonMobil’s Ken Cohen hit the key points in a recent post.   [click to continue…]

Senate to Consider Pickens-Your-Pocket-Boonedoggle Bill

by Marlo Lewis on March 8, 2012

in Features

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This afternoon the Senate will begin voting on highway bill amendments, which include the Burr/Menendez amendment, a.k.a. the New Alternative Transportation To Give America Solutions (NAT GAS) Act. Its chief lobbyist and beneficiary is billionaire T. Boone Pickens. If Congress were subject to truth in advertising laws, the amendment would be called the Pickens Payoff Plan or the Pickens-Your-Pocket-Boondoggle-Bill.

The Texas gas mogul’s lobbying for billions of dollars in tax credits for natural gas vehicles, fueling stations, and motor fuel 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,” Pickens told the New York Times.

Only the Shadow knows what lurks in the minds of lobbyists, but the circumstantial evidence – Pickens’s huge investments in companies that would profit directly from Congress ramping up demand for natural gas vehicles, motor fuel, and infrastructure — is rather overwhelming. For some juicy details, see the commentary I posted on this site last year when the Boonedoggle Bill looked like it might actually go somewhere in the House.

None of this is to denigrate the potential of natural gas as a transportation fuel. Over the past few years, natural gas prices have fallen as petroleum prices have increased. Responding to this price disparity, GM and Chrysler plan to produce thousands of bi-fuel picks that can run on either natural gas or gasoline,  Rob Bradley points out today at MasterResource.Org. [click to continue…]

No Faith With Skeptics

by Marlo Lewis on March 2, 2012

in Blog, Features

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(Revised March 8, 2012)

Donna Laframboise asks the key question about Fakegate: “Where do Gleick Apologists Draw the Line?”

In a recent post on her Web site, No Frakking Consensus, she provides excerpts from scientists, ethicists, and activists who excuse or even lionize Peter Gleick for stealing Heartland Institute budget documents, impersonating a Heartland board member, misrepresenting himself to bloggers as an anonymous “Heartland insider,” and palming off as genuine – maybe also authoring — a fake climate strategy document in which Koch supposedly funds Heartland to keep opposing voices out of Forbes magazine, sell doubt as their product, and dissuade teachers from teaching science.

Laframboise comments: “Climate change is a strange beast. When it enters the room, even ethicists lose the ability to think straight.”

At the end of her post, she asks Gleick’s apologists what other unlawful actions they believe would be justified if necessary to advance their cause:

I get it. Lying and stealing and misleading are OK so long as they help advance a good cause. What else is acceptable? Old fashioned burglary? Arson? Car bombs?

Where is the line? [click to continue…]

Why Doesn’t Greenpeace Demand a Congressional Probe of James Hansen’s Outside Income?

by Marlo Lewis on February 24, 2012

in Blog, Features

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The Heartland Institute plans to pay Indur Goklany, an expert on climate economics and policy, a monthly stipend to write a chapter on those topics for the Institute’s forthcoming mega-report, Climate Change Reconsidered 2012. Earlier this week, Greenpeace and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) called for a congressional investigation of Goklany. In addition to being an independent scholar, Goklany is a Department of Interior employee. Federal employees may not receive outside income for teaching, writing, or speaking related to their “official duties.”

But as I pointed out yesterday on this site, climate economics and policy are (to the best of my knowledge) not part of Goklany’s “official duties.” It would be shocking if they were. Goklany is a leading debunker of climate alarm and opposes coercive decarbonization schemes. Why on earth would the Obama Interior Department assign someone like that to work on climate policy?

Greenpeace and Grijalva have got the wrong target in their sites. The inquisition they propose might actually have some merit if directed at one of their heroes: Dr. James Hansen of NASA. Hansen has received upwards of $1.6 million in outside income. And it’s not unreasonable to assume that most or all of that income was for teaching, writing, and speaking on matters “related to” his “official duties.” [click to continue…]

Climate McCarthyism: Democrat Congressman Demands Hearing on Interior Employee Linked to Heartland

by Marlo Lewis on February 23, 2012

in Blog, Features

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Yesterday, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) requested that the House Resources Committee investigate whether Department of Interior employee Indur Goklany accepted “illegal outside payments” from the Heartland Institute, and “what confidential information Goklany may have shared with Heartland officials in the course of negotiating his payment agreements.”

Grijalva made this request in a letter to Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) and Ranking Member Ed Markey (D-Mass.). The alleged ‘issue’ arose because one of the stolen Heartland documents, the Institute’s 2012 budget, proposes to pay Goklany $1,000/m to write a chapter on economics and policy for a forthcoming book, Climate Change Reconsidered: 2012 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.

Grijalva, citing a letter from Greenpeace to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, claims federal employees are not allowed to take payment from outside organizations, particularly for “teaching, speaking and writing that relates to [their] official duties.”

I fully understand why Greenpeace and Grijalva want to harass and silence Goklany. Goklany is one of a handful of indispensable thought leaders in the climate policy debate.  He has demonstrated, for example, that, largely because of mankind’s utilization of fossil fuels, global deaths and death rates related to extreme weather have declined by a remarkable 93% and 98%, respectively, since the 1920s. He has also demonstrated that, even assuming worst-case impacts from the UN IPCC’s high-end warming scenario, developing countries in 2100 are projected to be much richer than developed countries are today. Nobody takes the hot air out of climate hype like Indur Goklany! So naturally, Greenpeace guttersnipes want to besmirch and muzzle him. [click to continue…]

From Climategate to Fakegate

by Marlo Lewis on February 22, 2012

in Features

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Anthony Watts’s indispensable Web site, Watts Up with That?, has a trove of hard-hitting commentaries on climate scientist Peter Gleick’s theft and publication of the Heartland Institute’s fund-raising documents and apparent forgery of a “confidential” climate strategy memo. Gleick earlier this week confessed to stealing the documents, but not to fabricating the strategy memo, although textual and other evidence point to him as the culprit.

Gleick, who described his conduct as a “serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics,” has resigned from his post as Chair of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Task Force on Scientific Integrity. He nonetheless tried to blame the victim, claiming “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”

Yep, it’s the small underfunded band of free market think tanks who are stifling the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the National Academy of Sciences and their numerous brethren overseas, the European Environment Agency, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the EPA, NRDC, Greenpeace, etc. etc. Heartland invited Gleick to attend a public event and debate climate change just days before he stole the documents. Gleick turned down the invitation. Yet Gleick has the chutzpah to plead ”frustration” at those trying to “prevent this debate.”

Among the key posts on Anthony’s site to check out: Joe Bast’s Skype interview with the Wall Street Journal; Dr. Willis Eschenbach’s Open Letter to Dr. Linda Gunderson, who succeeds Gleick as Chair of the AGU Scientific Integrity Task Force; and Megan McCardle’s column in The Atlantic reviewing among other things evidence fingering Gleick as the author of the fake strategy memo. [click to continue…]

Stolen Heartland Documents: DeSmog Blog Keeps Blowing Smoke

by Marlo Lewis on February 21, 2012

in Features

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Updated 4:34 pm, Feb. 21, 2012

“Climate scientist Peter Gleick has acknowledged that he was the person who convinced the Heartland Institute to hand over the contents of its January Board package, authenticating the documents beyond a doubt and further exposing the disinformation campaign Heartland has pursued in the last week, trying to discredit the information,” writes DeSmog Blog in a post titled “Whistleblower Authenticates Heartland Documents” (Feb. 20, 2012).

Gleick is indeed the culprit, but he is not a “whistleblower” because to be a candidate for that honorable title, he’d have to be a current or former employee. Gleick acknowledges that he, an outside critic of the organization, solicited and received Heartland documents under false pretenses, an action he describes as a ”serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics.”

More importantly, contrary to DeSmog’s spin, Gleick does not claim to authenticate the document titled ”Confidential Memo: Heartland 2012 Climate Strategy,” the only document among those posted on the DeSmog Web site that even vaguely resembles the stuff of scandal.

Even more pathetic is the sanctimonious open letter by Michael Mann and six colleagues who suggest that Heartland merely got its comeuppance for cheering and publicizing the release of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) emails that sparked the Climategate scandal. [click to continue…]

DeSmog Blog’s Bogus Exposé of the Heartland Institute

by Marlo Lewis on February 17, 2012

in Blog, Features

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Updated February 18, 12:34 a.m.

Earlier this week, the climate hysterics at DeSmog Blog and ThinkProgress tried (but failed) to manufacture a scandal by posting board-meeting and fund-raising documents stolen under false pretenses from the Heartland Institute, the Illinois-based free-market think tank. You can read Heartland’s response to the document heist here.

In the climate debate, Heartland is perhaps best known as organizer and host of six international climate conferences and as publisher of Climate Change Reconsidered: The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

The Heartland conferences transformed the disparate ranks of climate-alarm skeptics into a confident, energized, networked movement. The NIPCC report and related publications not only debunk Al Gore’s “planetary emergency” but also provide the only comprehensive, fully-documented alternative to the alleged “scientific consensus” represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

So it’s not hard to understand why eco-bloggers are desperate to sully Heartland’s good name and damage the Institute’s funding. But, it turns out, one of the documents is a fake, one of the facts headlined in the exposé is an error, and all that the documents show is what everybody already knows: Heartland seeks financial support from like-minded individuals, foundations, and corporations to combat climate alarmist propaganda, and, to its credit, generously seeks to help fund other worthy organizations to build the larger movement of which it is a part. [click to continue…]

Will Markey’s Keystone Export Ban Come Back to Bite Him?

by Marlo Lewis on February 15, 2012

in Blog, Features

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File this one under “be careful what you wish for.” Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) must have thought he was being very clever. At a recent House Energy and Commerce Committee meeting on legislation to authorize construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, Markey introduced an amendment banning U.S. exports of petroleum products made from Keystone crude.

For Markey, the amendment was never a serious legislative proposal. For one thing, as explained on this site and MasterResource.Org, an export ban would violate U.S. treaty obligations under both the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In addition, Markey knew Republicans could not support the ban without jeopardizing the long-term supply contracts that pipeline builder-operator TransCanada Corp. had negotiated with Gulf Coast refiners — contracts on which the project’s commercial viability depends.

In fact, Markey was counting on Republicans to vote against the ban, as that allegedly would expose them as duplicitous shills who care only about oil industry profits, not about reducing dependence on OPEC or alleviating pain at the pump. As also explained in the previous columns, Markey’s exposé is itself bogus, because (1) Keystone crude would displace OPEC crude whether the associated refined products were sold domestically or overseas, and (2) much of the refined product would likely be sold in the USA.

This just in: What Markey introduced as a rhetorical prop may be sprouting legislative wings in the Democrat-controlled Senate, where it could win votes to overturn President Obama’s rejection of Keystone XL. [click to continue…]

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