According to an IPS interview with Richard Armstrong, a geographer at Colorado University’s National Snow and Ice Centre and the lead author of the first comprehensive study of the glaciers of High Asia, 96 percent of the water that flows down the mountains of Nepal into nine local river basins comes from snow and rain, and only 4 percent from summer glacier melt. Of that 4 percent, says Armstrong, only a minuscule proportion comes from the melting away of the end points of the glaciers due to global warming. The study debunks a long-held talking point of global warming alarmists, that climate change could incite a resource war between India and Pakistan by melting away Himalayan glaciers.

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CEI’s Chris Horner Testifies before Ohio House on Folly of Green Energy Policy

by William Yeatman on December 15, 2011

in Blog

Yesterday, CEI’s Chris Horner testified before the Ohio House of Representatives Committee on Public Utilities, on legislation to modify the state’s existing green energy production quota by expanding the number of electricity generators that qualify as clean energy.

Below is his presentation and written testimony.

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Keystone Wisdom

by William Yeatman on November 30, 2011

in Blog

Yesterday afternoon, my colleague Myron Ebell spoke at a panel hosted by the Heritage Foundation, on President Barack Obama’s recent decision to postpone until the first quarter 2013 a determination on whether or not to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline—the $7 billion, shovel-ready project to deliver up to 830,000 barrels a day of tar sands oil from Canada to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. He made the case that the President subordinated significant job creation to political pandering.

Myron was joined by Heritage’s Nicolas Loris and also Daniel Simmons, of the Institute for Energy Research. Video of his presentation is available below.

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Another Green Energy Lobby Talking Point Debunked

by William Yeatman on November 22, 2011

in Blog

Post image for Another Green Energy Lobby Talking Point Debunked

Environmentalists, green energy lobbyists, and their political benefactors rely on a number of bogus talking points in order to justify generous taxpayer subsidies to the renewable energy industry, without which it wouldn’t exist. At a Congressional hearing last week, for example, Energy Secretary Steven Chu testified that green energy subsidies are necessary so that the U.S. can win a renewable energy trade war with China. (I dispute this contention in a previous post). Yesterday, the Institute for Energy Research’s Robert Bradley debunked another such rationalization—recently, renewable energy enthusiasts have taken to arguing that “that government subsidies over many decades allowed the oil and gas industry to cement its perch atop the energy chain. The implication is that wind and solar may need the same long-lived subsidization to achieve commercial viability too.” This is the thesis of a much-hyped analysis published last month by DBL Investors, titled “What Would Jefferson Do? The Historical Role of Federal Subsidies in Shaping America’s Energy Future.” The paper received gobs of attention from the media, despite the fact that it was written by a venture capital firm that invests in green energy, and which, therefore, directly benefits from taxpayer handouts to the industry.

In any case, Bradley exposes the poor historical analysis that buttresses this latest justification for throwing ever-more taxpayer money at green energy boondoggles. From his post,

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A Tale of Two States

by William Yeatman on November 21, 2011

in Blog, Features

Yesterday morning, television magazine energyNOW! ran a surprisingly* good segment on the oil boom in North Dakota. Long story short: technological advances in drilling have made possible the recovery of vast reserves of oil, which has caused tremendous job creation. According to the segment, the average oil and gas worker makes $75,000, and there is a huge demand for labor. The whole northwestern part of the state is like a wild-west mining town. At one point, a supervisor at one rig offered a job to the energyNOW! cameraman. As a result of this oil rush, North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the country–a paltry 3.5 percent.

Compare this to California. Despite possessing mineral wealth, the Golden State wants nothing to do with the production of “dirty” hydrocarbons. Instead, it is the self-proclaimed leader in expensive “clean” energy technologies, like wind turbines and electric cars. To that end, the State next month is expected to finalize a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme. The idea is to make conventional, hydrocarbon energy more expensive, and thereby boost demand for green energy. The cap-and-trade scheme was originally planned to have been a regional policy, but last week, Arizona became the sixth State (after New Mexico, Washington, Oregon, Montana and Utah) to withdraw. In a statement, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality said it acted to “[avoid] the economic costs to industries that are subject to cap and trade.” Now, California will absorb these “economic costs” alone. This energy tax will only worsen the state’s unemployment rate: 11.9 percent, second worst in the nation.

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Congress, Not Steven Chu, Is To Blame for Solyndra

by William Yeatman on November 17, 2011

in Blog, Features

Post image for Congress, Not Steven Chu, Is To Blame for Solyndra

This morning, Energy Secretary Steven Chu was grilled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee over his role in the ongoing Solyndra debacle. In September 2009, the California-based solar panel manufacturer received a $535 million loan guarantee from a stimulus-funded green bank operated by the Department of Energy. Last September, Solyndra declared bankruptcy, and now taxpayers are on the hook for almost a half billion dollars. Lawmakers on the Energy and Commerce Committee want to lay responsibility for this fiasco at the feet of Secretary Chu, but they have misidentified the perp. In fact, the Congress has only itself to blame.

This is not to say that Secretary Chu is faultless. His stewardship of the stimulus-funded green bank was rash. From the outset, the Energy Secretary intended to rush money out the door, which is conducive to fiscal mismanagement. Two weeks after the creation of the green bank, Secretary Chu promised to “start cutting checks” within months, despite the fact that the Department of Energy was essentially creating an investment bank from scratch.

Secretary Chu’s need for speed, however, wasn’t enough for Members of Congress. In September 2010, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing decrying the supposedly languid pace of loans from the Energy Department’s green bank. A month before that, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) bemoaned that, “They [the Department of Energy] have been, in my opinion, very, very slow in putting that money out.”

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A Tale of Two Technologies

by William Yeatman on November 16, 2011

in Blog

Post image for A Tale of Two Technologies

There was a telling juxtaposition in the news yesterday. On the one hand, Energy Conversion Devices became the latest green energy company to flirt with bankruptcy, after benefiting from stimulus spending. On the other, oil and gas giant Anadarko announced that it would invest $1 billion annually to tap the Wattenberg field, part of the Niobrara shale formation in Colorado.

Such investments are fuel to the engine of job creation. A decade ago, the Niobrara shale deposits would have been worthless, because we couldn’t get the oil and gas out of the ground. But that changed thanks to two technological breakthroughs—horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

In fact, these two innovations are allowing for the recovery of big oil and gas plays across the country, which is why the industry is a leading job creator. Earlier this month, Reuters reported on a new analysis from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that jobs related to oil and gas drilling account for one in five of all net new private sector jobs in the United States since 2003. And according to a recent report by economics consulting firm EMSI, nine of the top eleven fast-growing jobs in the nation are in the oil and gas sector.

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Obama’s Green Albatross

by William Yeatman on November 15, 2011

in Blog, Features

Stimulus spending on environmentalist policy is a green albatross around the neck of President Barack Obama. Inspectors General are having a field day auditing stimulus-funded programs for so-called “green jobs,” and the media LOVES stories about wasted taxpayer money. What started as a sop to his environmentalist base, now threatens to become a slow-drip nightmare of negative press. The timing couldn’t be worse for the President. It takes time to disburse scores of billions of dollars, so we are only now starting to scrutinize stimulus spending. By November 2012, we’ll be able to account for most of the money, and unless the current trend changes radically, the Executive in Chief is going to look conspicuously incompetent.

Here’s the back-story: In early 2009, the Executive and Legislative branches of government had a popular mandate to defibrillate America’s moribund economy with a huge injection of taxpayer dollars. Instead of limiting this “stimulus” to state bailouts and infrastructure spending, the Obama administration (led by climate “czar” and former EPA administrator Carol Browner) and the Congressional majority (led by House Energy and Commerce Chair Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills)) also sought to advance environmentalist policy. As a result, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a.k.a. the stimulus, included almost $70 billion in spending for green jobs and renewable energy infrastructure.

Every single link along the green energy supply chain was showered with subsidies. There was funding for green jobs training, funding for factories to make green products, and funding to incentivize demand for green goods and services. It was as like a green Gosplan!

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Energy and Environment News

by William Yeatman on November 14, 2011

in Blog

Post image for Energy and Environment News

Rent-Seeker Glee
Robert Bradley, Jr., Master Resource, 14 November 2011

No Free Lunch: Green Energy Is Causing Costs To Rise for California Ratepayers
Garance Burke & Jason Dearen, AP, 13 November 2011

Obama’s Green Crony Capitalism
Peter Scweizer, Newsweek, 13 November 2011

Before Solyndra, a Long List of Failed Government Energy Projects
Steven Mufson, Washington Post, 13 November 2011

A Goldrush in Subsidies for Green Energy
Eric Lipton & Clifford Krauss, New York Times, 11 November 2011

Newt Gingrich’s Dumbest Idea

by William Yeatman on November 14, 2011

in Blog

Post image for Newt Gingrich’s Dumbest Idea

Newt Gingrich, currently campaigning for the GOP Presidential nomination, rightfully regrets appearing in a 2008 advertisement with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in which they both exhort political leaders to fight global warming (presumably by enacting a cap-and-trade policy that would ration energy use). The ad, which is available here, was produced by a global warming agitprop non-profit founded by former Vice President Al Gore.

According to the Daily Caller’s Jeff Poor, Gingrich last week told a panel on Fox’s “Special Report,” that the ad “is probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in years.” I agree with him that the ad was a bad idea, but I don’t think it’s the dumbest thing he’s done in years. The dumbest—and also the greediest and most inhumane—of Gingrich’s recent actions is his having shilled for ethanol.

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