“If the US economy moves into recession this year, world economic growth could slow to just 1.6 percent in 2008,” according to a recent United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs policy brief, an almost 50% percent decrease.
Conversely, today in our global economy, the trickle-down theory correctly predicts that the poorest person’s lot in the developing countries would be improved by our increasing GDP. But the Lieberman-Warner (S.2191) tax on hydrocarbon energy would reduce that possibility. According to CEI’s Iain Murray,
Economist Anne Smith testified to Congress that her state-of-the-art economic modeling estimates that Warner-Lieberman would cause net reduction in 2015 GDP of 1.0% to 1.6% relative to the GDP that would otherwise occur. That loss rises to the range of 2% to 2.5% after 2015. Smith found that the annual loss in GDP would increase to the range of $800 billion to $1 trillion, which is serious money. By 2020, Smith estimates losses of 1.5 to 3.4 million jobs – and that is net jobs, after adjusting for the new "green" jobs that might be created by the bill.
The world depends upon America’s pursuit of happiness. And as those Third World boats float in the world’s rising tide, only then will people in those countries begin to be able to afford to be environmentally conscious.
A front page story in the Washington Times by Patrice Hill reports that Americans are currently most worried by high energy prices. They should be. So far, the 110th Congress has passed and President Bush has signed an anti-energy bill, H. R. 6, that will raise gasoline, auto, food, and appliance prices. And the House and Senate are actively considering other bills that will increase gas and electricity prices a whole lot more (see, for example, S. 2191).
But now two members of the House have introduced a bill that would increase domestic oil and natural gas production and thereby lower prices over the long term. The American-Made Energy Act, H. R. 5890, was introduced by Representatives Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Mike Ross (D-Ark.) on February 14. According to Rep. Nunes’s press release, the bill will open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) areas to oil and gas exploration. The tens and hundreds of billions of dollars from leasing and royalty payments would be used to fund a wide range of tax credits, loan guarantees, and grants to encourage renewable vehicle fuels, plug-in hybrid vehicles, coal to liquids, and electricity production from renewable sources and nuclear power plants.
The 109th Congress failed narrowly to pass bills that would have opened the OCS and ANWR. The 110th Congress is much more hostile to increasing domestic energy production, so the Nunes-Ross bill isn’t going to become law anytime soon. But it is a most hopeful sign, nonetheless. It takes persistence to enact controversial legislation. By introducing H. R. 5890, Representatives Nunes and Ross have signaled that they are in this fight for the long haul.
CEI’s new online video spot, Where’s the Warming?, challenges global warming alarmists to justify their calls for restrictions on energy use. Carbon dioxide from man's energy use has continued to increase in the atmosphere in recent years, but recent studies show that average global temperatures have not.
The two-minute video, which can be viewed on YouTube, pays tribute to the famous “Where’s the Beef?” ads of two decades ago. It contrasts clips from Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, with actual temperature data.
The basic alarmist contention is that we must restrict affordable energy use because CO2 is the most important determinant of global temperatures. But this year’s unexpectedly cold winter and, more importantly, the temperature trends of the last few years tell a different story. There has been practically no global warming in the last five years or more. Even prominent climate modelers have admitted natural factors are coming into play.
CEI Senior Fellow Iain Murray commented, "Temperatures ought to be at a peak, but instead they've held steady for at least the last five years and by some accounts, they've actually dropped. The case for urgent action to restrict energy use is getting weaker, not stronger. Given that affordable energy is the best hope of escape from poverty for billions around the globe, politicians need to ask themselves "where's the beef" before pushing their anti-energy policies."
Citizens in Florida are outraged as they discover their power company’s true motivations for windmills and the costs to themselves. About Florida Power and Light’s wind turbine proposal Julie Zahniser writes in her local paper,
“This one is about corporate tax avoidance through massive tax subsidies lobbied for by Enron, which was the largest wind developer in the United States before its demise and which pioneered the tax shelter as a commodity. FPL Group paid zero federal income tax in 2002 and 2003 despite more than $2 billion in profits, largely because of the wind projects of its wind subsidiary, FPL Energy, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.
But, now it has gotten so bold that it is proposing putting wind turbines where we don’t have sufficient winds to get close to the 30 mph required to reach the turbines’ rated capacity.”
When the government chooses “winners and losers” in energy markets, consumers always lose.
You have probably heard that China is building new coal-fired power plants at the rate of one every week to 10 days. In late 2004, The Christian Science Monitor reported that three countries—the United States, China, and India—had plans to build nearly 850 new coal plants, “which would pump up to five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce.” These new plants would “bury” Kyoto. The Monitor elaborated:
By 2012, the plants in three key countries – China, India, and the United States – are expected to emit as much as an extra 2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, according to a Monitor analysis of power-plant construction data. In contrast, Kyoto countries by that year are supposed to have cut their CO2 emissions by some 483 million tons.
That was the situation in 2004. What has happened since?
Well, there’s been a lot of agitation to stop new coal plants from being built in the United States. In some cases, like TXU’s proposal to build 11 new coal-fired power plants in Texas, the anti-coal campainers carried the day.
But China and, to a lesser extent, India and other developing countries still dominate the big picture. The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday carried a front-page story on China’s booming demand for coal. China’s electric generating capacity increased 18% just from last July to December, almost all of it fueled by coal.
Chinese demand for coal is surging so fast that, for the first time, the country has become a net importer of coal. Also, just as China’s industrialization was a key cause of rising oil prices from 2004 to the present, so China’s electrification is now pushing up world coal prices. Coal mines in the United States and elsewhere are revving up to meet this surging demand.
Energy analysts interviewed in the WSJ article all foresee even greater demand for coal in China and other developing countries in the foreseeable future. Kyoto’s sustainability looks dimmer than ever.
Senator John McCain (R-Az.), now the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party, said this week in an interview with Darren Samuelsohn of Greenwire that he had shown stronger leadership on global warming than the two leading Democratic Party presidential candidates, Senators Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY). He noted that both Obama and Clinton are now co-sponsors of his climate bill, S. 2191, the Climate Security Act. Then he gave a quite extraordinary description of how his bill would work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. According to the Greenwire story, McCain said: “It’s not mandatory caps to start with. It’s cap and trade. That’s very different, OK, because that’s a gradual reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. So please portray it as cap and trade. That’s the way I call it.”
McCain is technically accurate in that if the Lieberman-McCain bill were enacted, it would not require mandatory reductions immediately. But it does put a cap on future emissions and that cap is mandatory. It’s what used to be called energy rationing. During the Second World War, the federal government gave people coupons each month which would allow them to buy a certain quantity of gasoline. If you wanted to buy more gas, you had to trade someone else for his coupons. That’s how cap and trade works. We just don’t call them rationing coupons any more.
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
CEI.org