[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wStc-gKtxY 285 234]
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Signaling a departure from the Bush administration’s environmental policies, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has named Todd Stern as special envoy for climate change and vowed that America will “vigorously pursue negotiations, those sponsored by the United Nations, and those at sub-global, regional, and bilateral level that can lead to binding international climate agreements.”
By now the practice of educational indoctrination by environmental extremists is well known, from public school showings of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” to widespread emphasis every year on Earth Day, to daily guilt trips thrown at students by eco-conscious teachers.
In a letter dated January 26th, 2009 Al Gore’s company Generation Investment Management sent a coalition letter along with other institutional investors representing $1.7 trillion in assets to Senate Majority leader Harry Reid. The letter asked for:
1) longer-term economic incentives including extending the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for five years or more,
2) funding for energy efficiency programs – such as retrofitting buildings,
3) federal funds to flow to states that allow utilities to treat energy efficiency comparable to new supply; states that adopt energy efficiency resources standards to achieve energy savings goals; or, states that adopt strong building codes to encourage energy savings, and
4) that part of the funding in the stimulus package should be directed toward modernizing and improving the electric grid system.
Today, two days later, Al Gore, The Climate Protector, testified to the Senate Foreign relations Committee of the need for:
1) renewable tax credits and “small” grants for wind power and solar,
2) energy efficiency and conservation,
3) decoupling (giving utility companies a guaranteed source of revenues and Gore’s declared “single most important measure”), and
4) the need for a new electric grid.
He also frequently mentioned solar energy (an extremely expensive source of energy), deforestation (big area of carbon trading) and soil carbon credits (they need the farm votes).
Of course, Chairman Gore punctuated these requests by the possibility of every earthly catastrophe befalling us if we don’t grant him his requests.
Apparently, global warming is now irreversible. Or, at least, it is if you don’t consider any of the policy options that might, you know, reverse it. As Roger Pielke Jr points out, the study didn’t examine the potential for geoengineering:
Geoengineering to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was not considered in the study. “Ideas about taking the carbon dioxide away after the world puts it in have been proposed, but right now those are very speculative,” said Solomon.
Then only reason geoengineering remains speculative is because the global warming industry is locked into one policy model: mitigation. If adaptation is the red-headed stepchild of global warming research, geoengineering is the unacknowledged bastard, kept tied up in the basement and fed only with a bucket of fish heads.
Meanwhile, the McKinsey Global Initiative has come out with version 2 of its “we can save the world very cheaply” report, which is available if you register and give them your email address via the links here. The fiendish consultants have disabled the ability to cut their charts out, so you’ll have to get a copy for yourself, but their Exhibit 1 shows that all the “affordable” options are to do with energy efficiency, not grand new green energy projects, which are much more expensive and require aggressive carbon pricing (and this needs to be born in mind as well). Furthermore, these are truly global initiatives – something has has to be done everywhere, around the world – as Exhibit 4 makes clear. Something we can do quite affordably may be a different kettle of fish heads for the developing world. If you can’t afford an incandescent lightbulb, you can’t afford an LED lamp, whatever the CO2 abatement potential is. I hope to provide a full response to the McKinsey paper soon.
In his remarkable rise to power, President Barack Obama has overcome some of the country’s most formidable politicians–from the Bushes and the Clintons to John McCain. But he may have more trouble coping with a colleague he professes to admire: former Vice President Al Gore.
Boy, that wacky Paul Krugman. The newly-crowned Nobel laureate (they should be allowed to wear a laurel wreath everywhere they go, so we’d know of their brilliance), fresh from revealing how little he understands the history – or purpose – of liberalism, shows he knows diddly-squat about Air Traffic Control.
In today’s column he argues, plonkingly,
Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.
Unfortunately for Krug, the fact is that the public sector does a pretty poor job of Air Traffic Control. Not because of large numbers of accidents – that doesn’t happen anywhere much these days – but in terms of waste and inefficiency. American ATC is based on a system of beacons from the early days of air transport. Those have long since been superseded in safety terms by GPS and other innovations, but the system is still based on them. Liberalizing ATC actually makes a huge amount of sense, which is why plenty of governments around the world have done it, without seeing mid-air collisions, erm, explode. As I say in the new Agenda for Congress:
Liberalize Air Travel. … Privatization and modernization of the air traffic control system not only would allow faster flights and less delay at airports but save up to 400,000 barrels of oil per day, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions accordingly. And there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Canada’s successful air traffic control privatization offers a useful model.
You can only really object to that if you’re a socialist dogmatist, or your thinking is stuck in the 1930s. I’m not sure which is the case with El Krug.
For a broader picture, Jon Henke does a great job of commenting on the entire column over at The Next Right.
Barack Obama in his inaugural speech promised to “roll back the spectre of a warming planet.” In this context, it is worth contemplating a passage from his book Dreams from My Father. It reveals a lot about the way we view the world’s problems.
At the end of “Science and Government,” his Godkin Lectures at Harvard nearly a half-century ago that revealed some disastrous wartime scientific misjudgments of the British government, Sir Charles P. Snow offered one reason why it is important to have scientists in government: They have something to give that “our kind of existential society is desperately short of: That is foresight.”
Greenwire has a long lead story (subscription required) in today's edition by Daniel Cusick about the plans of the Navajo Nation to build three huge new coal-fired power plants totaling 5,300 megawatts in order to exploit their enormous coal resources. These new plants could supply enough electricity for approximately four million homes in the rapidly growing cities of the Southwest.
In an interview accompanying the story, Navajo President Joe Shirley, Jr., responded to a question about whether he was concerned about all the greenhouse gas emissions that these plants would produce by saying:
“That's a resource that was put there by the Creator for us to use. … To have the Creator bring that about, and then to say, 'Hey, we don't want that,' I don't think that's right. We need to develop it.”
While many of the nation's major utilities advocate energy-rationing policies, such as cap-and-trade, that would price coal out of the market and thereby lead to rapid increases in electricity prices for consumers and manufacturers and probably to chronic regional blackouts, it's great to see the Navajos stepping forward to help supply the energy that America needs.
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