William Yeatman

Hans’ blog post draws attention to unrest in Egypt caused by inflation in the price of food caused by ethanol production quotas enacted by rich country governments.

Now, for the tooting of my own horn: I predicted ethanol unrest in Egypt last September, in a piece I wrote for National Review Online’s “Energy Week.”

So now that I’ve built up credibility as a seer, here’s another prediction: America will suffer a drought sometime in the next five that will cause the price of a bushel of corn on the international market to pass $10 (now, it’s at an all time high of $6).

In China, the price of pork, a politically sensitive commodity, will skyrocket, because pigs are fed corn. The Communist government will step in and try to ration swine. That will create a robust black market in “the other white meat,” which will allow the rich will buy up all the pork. The poor will be reminded of China’s gross inequality and they will start to agitate.

One of the striking features of how concern over global warming has risen to the top of our political agenda is the extraordinary unanimity with which it has been taken up by our political establishment.

Imagine, there is a UN climate conference, and hardly anybody seems to note or care. This is what appears to have happened with the latest round of post-Kyoto negotiations that ended in Bangkok last Friday. While delegates from more than 160 nations met at yet another United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change confab in the Thai capital, much of the media seemed indifferent to its deliberations or did not bother to report about it.

The Washington Post still can’t bring itself to openly address the reality of greenhouse gas emissions vs. the rhetoric. Instead, they obsess with serially nasty editorials complaining specifically about our lack of European-style promises, all of which pieces (and their news articles) have consistently ignored how the U.S. has led the world in growing the economy while reducing the rate of growth of emissions.

Sunday’s story went with the following: “Even developed countries are not cutting greenhouse gases as fast as they had anticipated.”

The obvious implication is that, unlike the U.S., these countries are cutting greenhouse gas emissions, if not as fast as they had anticipated. Actually, not one developed country is actually cutting emissions at all since making the Kyoto promise a decade ago. The U.S. approach – in practice – has shown far superior to Europe’s “cap” approach, Japan’s various efforts, Canada’s…well, Canada hasn’t done a whole lot policy-wise but they have increased emissions quite a bit, but without the economic downsides of a more interventionist policy.

But in typical Washington fashion, the Post reveals a dogma that “doing something” has nothing to do with what is actually done, by the wealth-creating private sector of the economy, but about how deeply the regulators insert themselves. This is why journalists should stick to things other than governance; getting back to the basics of journalism is a good place to start.

As if on cue, the New York Times also weighed in today with the editorial “It’s about laws, not light bulbs,” with the risible construction:

“As it has for years, America's inertia remains in sharp contrast to the work by Europe, which took an early lead in efforts to curb global warming by establishing the world's most comprehensive carbon management system. Recently, Europeans pledged to cut emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.”

Again, notice how they cleverly elide actual discussion about who is doing what in favor of obsessing about who is saying what. This would put “America’s inertia in sharp contrast to the work by Europe,” indeed, but in a more accurate light. And we can’t have that.

The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing on Wednesday on Big Oil's big profits and record-high gasoline prices.  Senior executives from the five largest publicly-owned oil companies testified.  Chairman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) criticized them for making record profits as a result of record gas prices.  I note that Mr. Markey is one of the House's most enthusiastic promoters of cap-and-trade legislation, which will raise energy prices for consumers far above current levels. 

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee also held a hearing  on Wednesday to discover why the Secretary of the Interior has not yet decided whether to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.  Since Secretary Dirk Kempthorne declined to testify, Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and the other members of the committee didn't discover why.  But the hearing did provide an opportunity for newspapers around the country to run photos of polar bears looking threatened by melting ice.  I couldn't find any photos of polar bears eating seals, but here's a link to a video on You Tube

California Energy Policy: A Cautionary Tale for the Nation, by Tom Tanton, has been posted online at www.cei.org.

Key lawmakers are now promoting California’s energy and global warming policies as a model for the federal government and other States to follow.  Thomas Tanton’s paper reviews California’s policies and show that they have had significant costs as well as other detrimental effects and are likely to have even higher costs and even worse effects in the future.  California’s policies have led to the highest electricity and gasoline prices in the continental U. S. and contributed to the de-industrialization of California.  While per capita electricity consumption has remained flat, total electricity demand has increased 65% since 1980.

The first round of negotiations for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol is taking place this week in Bangkok.  The head of the “G-77 plus China” group (which now represents 130 developing countries) told a reporter for Inter Press Service that the developed countries were going to have to meet their Kyoto commitments before asking the developing countries to make commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Dr. John Ashe, Antigua and Barbuda's ambassador to the UN, told Marwaan Macan-Markar of Inter Press, “Those who have ratified the Kyoto Protocol have to meet their targets first….  We are concerned that the (industrialized nations) have not given sufficient priority to the legal mandate of achieving quantified emissions limitations and reduction commitments through national actions.”

The G-77 are keen on Kyoto because of its two wealth-transferring programs, which are called the Clean Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation.  But they are making a larger, very strong point: how can poor countries be expected to sign a new agreement to reduce emissions if the rich countries have failed to reduce emissions?

In related news, it was reported this week that the European Union's emissions went up again in 2007.  That's on top of the 2006 increase of 1.6 per cent.

Former Vice President Al Gore's three-year, $300 million advertising campaign to sell the American public on global warming alarmism kicked off on Wednesday with television and print ads.  I can't figure out what the goal is, but I guess with that much money they'll eventually develop a coherent message. 

The first full-page newpaper ad, which I saw in the Washington Post, announces in huge letters, “You can't solve the climate crisis.”  So far, so good.  But then there's the fine print, which asks people to sign up with the Alliance for Climate Protection so that we can solve the climate crisis together.

My Google search turned up the web site for the “We” campaign (as they call it), www.wecansolveit.org, as the thirteenth site listed.  It took me about a minute to join, as the ad promised.  If that's all that's needed to solve the crisis, then I've done my part, but I suspect that further commitments will be expected.

CBS's Sixty Minutes helped Gore's campaign get started with an interview Sunday night.  It showed Gore in a totally rosy light, but—alas—he just can't help embarrassing himself with his pettty, vindictive, and laughably untrue comments about anyone who disagrees with him.  When Leslie Stahl said that there was still a lot of skepticism about global warming alarmism and some pretty impressive people disagreed with him, Gore responded, “I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view.  They're almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the earth is flat.  That demeans them a little bit [oh, really?], but it's not that far off.”

So climate realists are now in the same class of people as politicians who claim to have invented the Internet?  For a different view, I invite you to watch CEI's television ad, which is part of a $60,000 campaign, and to read my comments posted by Google News on Juliet Eilperin's comprehensive story about Gore's campaign in the Washington Post.