GlobalWarming.org

A pithy column in Foreign Policy by the Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger says that ”twice-fooled” Democrats, who have been “BTUed” by two Democratic administrations, “are unlikely to sign up for more of the same in the next Congress” (cap-and-trade being the regulatory form of a BTU tax on carbon-based energy).  

The phrase “BTUed” calls to mind Paul Simon’s great ’60s cut-the-hype, get-out-of-my-face folk anthem, A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission), and inspired me to attempt a bit of musical parody. Here it is, with apologies to Rhymin’ Simon:

I been Al Gore’d and Yvo de Boer’d.
I been Rajendra Pauchauri’d and regulatory’d.
I been UN’d and CRU’d till I’m blind.
I been Climategated and often hated
Called a skeptic ‘cause I follow the data
That’s what real science is about, well, never mind!
I been BTU’d and cap-and-traded.
I been Hockey Sticked, Hide-the-Decline-Tricked.
Well, I paid all the taxes I want to pay.
And I learned to doubt by debating these louts,
And offsets don’t mean no regrets,
So I blog about Gorethodoxy each day.

Dr. Rob Bradley, CEO of the Institute for Energy Research, documents in Political Capitalism how fraud and corruption at Enron were the inevitable consequence of a business strategy emphasizing the political pursuit of market-rigging regulations as a strategy to reap windfall profits and grow market share.

Enron, for example, was a key lobbyist for the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty calculated to increase demand for Enron’s services as a natural gas distributor, renewable energy seller, and cap-and-trade broker.

Today at MasterResource, the free-market energy blog, Bradley reveals that Enron also spearheaded the push for renewable energy mandates that made Texas the leading windpower state in the country.

Bradley worked at Enron for 16 years and frequently clashed with senior management over its infatuation with get-rich-quick green energy schemes. “Oh how sad I am that Enron purchased Zond [Corporation, a struggling wind energy company] and did so much to enable the artificial windpower boom in Texas and United States,” he writes.

The tragedy in Haiti can teach us something about the extreme policies of global warming alarmists.

The 1989 San Francisco earthquake measured a 7.1 on the Richter scale and the death toll was 62 people killed.

The recent earthquake in Haiti was measured at 7.0 on the Richter scale and the death toll could reach 50,000-100,00 people killed.

Why did Haiti suffer so many more lost lives than San Francisco?  The answer is  the country doesn’t possess the wealth necessary to build better infrastructure.

Yet, the alarmists want to push policies, such as cap and trade, which would drastically reduce our wealth.  They want countries like Haiti and other developing countries to take steps to reduce carbon emissions at the expense of their national well-being, including their health and infrastructure.

If we want to best survive the impact of natural disasters, wealth generation is the best means to do so.  Ask Haitians if they would have preferred to be in Port-Au-Prince or San Francisco when the earthquakes hit.

Assuming (for the sake of it) that global warming will lead to natural disasters, building better infrastructure and adapting to any changes is a far wiser choice than pushing policies that will have no measurable impact on global temperature while undermining any chance countries like Haiti would have to protect themselves from such disasters.

Pushing damaging policies that undermine wealth generation and having the arrogance to impose those policies on nations like Haiti is unethical, to say the least. If developing countries have to give up what we as Americans already enjoy, such as good infrastructure, the death toll for what should be relatively minor earthquakes will remain astronomical.

In early December I reported in this space that Penn State University Climategate scientist Michael Mann received $541,184 in stimulus funds, which the school claimed was creating 1.62 (presumably “green”) jobs. Today the National Center for Public Policy Research called for the return of the funds to the U.S. Treasury:

Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State University because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science. Emails and documents mysteriously released from the previously-prestigious Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom revealed discussions of manipulation and destruction of research data, as well as efforts to interfere with the peer review process to stifle opposing views. The motivation underlying these efforts appears to be a coordinated strategy to support the belief that mankind’s activities are causing global warming.

How about he returns all $6 million he’s received from the government over the years?

Whaddaya know — ever since Climategate and brutal cold (snap!) sawed in half the global warming illusion that the formerly mainstream media had sold as reality, all of a sudden there’s massive upheaval: dogs and cats living together; news networks hosting climate debates; CBS exposing taxpayer-funded boondoggle junkets to Copenhagen; and politicians (other than Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe) boldly denouncing fraudulent research about the “benefits” of “solutions” to global warming. Just check out last Friday’s press release from Michigan State Rep. Tom McMillin:

McMillin made the call following a plan from the global-warming advocacy group the Center for Climate Strategies that likely overstated possible job growth and will cost Michigan taxpayers millions of dollars to follow a political agenda.

“To expend taxpayer money on such a biased group as CCS was just wrong and exemplifies how Governor Granholm has run this state into the ground – by putting political agendas ahead of truth and Michigan job creation,” said McMillin, R-Rochester Hills. “There will not be a net 129,000 jobs created. To follow the recommendations of this study may actually result in net job losses for Michigan.”

McMillin noted the long history of questionable action from the Center for Climate Strategies that can be found here.

“The report is intentionally false in order to promote CCS’s radical agenda, which always conveniently leave out costs to taxpayers and job providers,” McMillin said. “The results of this so-called study is as bogus as the far left group the governor chose to stage this charade – that group, CCS, is closely aligned with scientists who hide data, delete emails and contrive to bully peer review methods in order to promote their radical, non-scientific, highly questionable agenda. In effect, Michigan now has its own version of Climategate. Let’s see if, in Michigan, they’ll come clean or hide.”

McMillin is right, of course — CCS has proven to engage in the same fudge-factoring and half-baked analysis as the Climategate cooks. The failure of Copenhagen and the poor election-year forecast for national cap-and-trade passage may mean the Greens return to the state-level, pressure-up strategy. It would help if more state lawmakers like McMillin engage to expose how this scheming has worked around the country.

This fellow from New Zealand appears to think that Climategate proves that the big money is in climate skepticism. How does that work?

Here’s my attempt to follow his argument: The US Government has spent $79 billion in the past two decades on climate science. But Big Oil and Big Coal want a piece of this. They spend heavily on lobbyists to get it. They would be well served by certain provisions in bills and international treaties. [I agree with this so far…] But “the aims of the climate change lobby groups and the large industries they represent dovetail quite nicely with the arguments put forward by the sceptics.” So [he implies] therefore the skeptics have all the money.

Huh?

Global warming skeptics don’t want carbon capture and storage. They don’t want targets for emissions reduction. They don’t want international treaties and thousand page bills that take money out of the productive class and spend it on vastly expensive ways of doing things we know how to do already. Global warming skeptics do not want “a seat at the table.” They don’t think there should be a table in the first place.

Our science blogger friend has confused skeptic with rent-seeker. We skeptics have a grudging respect for our ‘alarmist’ opponents. In most cases they have a sincere belief that there is a serious problem and want to solve it. (Part of the problem revealed by climategate was that many of them, however, want to solve the problem by any means necessary and are insincere in their methods). Rent-seekers, on the other hand, want to exploit such beliefs for personal/corporate gain*, at the expense of the rest of us. Therefore rent-seekers are a bigger problem than alarmists, because they do indeed bring the big bucks. That’s why rent-seeking businesses want carbon capture and storage, which they will be paid handsomely for. They want international treaties and thousand page bills that contains nice incentives for them, their executives and their shareholders. They want the free market distorted to their benefit. The ends they desire, however, are completely different from those desired by the skeptics. Their aims do not dovetail with the ends of the skeptics in the slightest.

That’s why the big money is with those looking to establish a regime for emissions reduction. Now those thieves have certainly fallen out, and there are still some honorable types who want no handouts to big energy companies at all, but the money is certainly on that side of the aisle.

If genuinely skeptical groups have gotten as much as $790 million total worldwide for global warming efforts since 1989 – 1 percent of that devoted to climate science – I’d be extremely surprised. A tenth of that amount is more likely in the right ballpark. You can’t change that by lumping rent-seeking industries in with skeptics. Rent-seekers really do follow the money.

* Rent-seekers are also only too happy to exploit belief in the free market, arguing for free enterprise up until they can see a benefit from government restricting market entry, and so on.

A federal biofuels program enacted in the name of fighting global warming and reducing dependence on foreign oil is instead killing jobs while perhaps doing more harm than good and costing taxpayers half a billion dollars, reports the Washington Post.

“It sounded like a good idea: Provide…government money to convert wood shavings and plant waste into renewable energy.” But it is now killing jobs by “driving up the price of raw timber, undermining an industry that…used sawdust and wood shavings to make affordable cabinetry.”  Meanwhile, “the Biomass Crop Assistance Program…has mushroomed into a half-a-billion dollar subsidy.” It’s a “Biomass Blunder,” says environmental law professor Jonathan Adler.

At least this program isn’t resulting in malnutrition and death, unlike ethanol mandates and subsidies, which cause starvation and unrest in the Third World.  Ron Bailey writes about the “global food crisis” that has resulted in food riots across the world, including countries like Mexico, Pakistan, Indonesia, Yemen, Haiti, and Egypt.  The crisis, he noted, is caused by “stupid energy policies” in the form of ethanol “mandates” and subsidies, which result in the world’s farmers producing less food and more ethanol.

Food rioting spread throughout Haiti in 2008, endangering the government of its “U.S.-backed president”:  “A desperate appeal from the president Wednesday failed to restore order to Haiti’s shattered capital, and bans of looters sacked stores, warehouses, and government offices.”   The government responded with tear gas and bullets, as this video shows. Food riots also occurred in Ivory Coast and El Salvador.

As the Washington Post earlier noted, “the increasing use of land to produce ethanol” “has led demand for food to outstrip supply.”

In the U.S., “The federal government’s love affair with ethanol subsidies drove up food prices, depleted plains-state aquifers, and subsidized the destruction of water fowl habitat.”

For all this cost, ethanol subsidies do not even reduce net greenhouse gas emissions.  Indeed, ethanol subsidies threaten to cause an enormous amount of environmental damage, deforestation, and soil erosion. For this and other reasons, the New York Times advocates getting rid of ethanol subsidies.

Wheat production is down in the world’s breadbaskets, like the United States, as farmland shifts away from wheat to ethanol production.  In Egypt, a major wheat importer, the fall in worldwide wheat production has triggered bread shortages and unrest as poor people find it difficult to get enough to eat.  The unrest is strengthening support for Islamic extremists opposed to Egypt’s relatively pro-American government.

Many Afghans, facing higher food prices, now have little choice but to grow opium to pay for food: the Soviet invasion and occupation destroyed their irrigation works (and roads), making large-scale food production and transport extremely difficult. And when food prices went up in 2006 and 2007 as a result of ethanol mandates and rising demand for food in India and China, thousands of Afghan children starved to death.

Harmful ethanol subsidies and mandates are likely to expand, thanks to Obama and congressional leaders.  In 2008, Obama repeatedly attacked John McCain for opposing ethanol subsidies, which McCain opposed as a form of corporate welfare for powerful corporations like ADM.

Obama backs expanded ethanol subsidies contained in a huge cap-and-trade carbon tax bill that would do little to protect the environment, while costing the economy trillions. The cap-and-trade bill was pushed through the House before its text even became available. The bill was over 1090 pages long and contained special interest giveaways to a legion of big corporations and their lobbyists. At the last minute, 300 more pages were added to the bill that few in Congress had even read, and had to be manually inserted into the existing 1000 pages after the bill was passed, based on guesses about where those pages would fit in. Thus, the bill did not even really exist at the time it was passed.

In 2008, Obama privately admitted to a San Francisco Chronicle reporter that his cap-and-trade carbon tax would cause people’s electric bills to “skyrocket.” The cap-and-trade bill supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases, administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise. “Officials at the Treasury Department think cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to the Washington Times” by CEI. It could raise household taxes by $1761 per year, equivalent to a 15 percent tax increase. It would also result in “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs.”

The cap-and-trade bill will do little to cut greenhouse gas emissions, since it contains so many special interest giveaways and environmentally-destructive provisions like subsidies for ethanol.  Instead, notes the Examiner, it will result in massive destruction of the Earth’s forests.  Although the bill’s supporters claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them by driving industry overseas to places where there are fewer air pollution curbs, resulting in dirtier air.

Meanwhile, Obama has thwarted more use of nuclear energy, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions, by blocking use of the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste disposal site after billions of dollars in taxpayer money had already been spent developing it.

In other news, a $75 billion Obama mortgage bailout program is actually harming the economy, the housing market, and the construction industry, economists and real estate experts say.  Nobel-Prize winning economist Gary Becker says that Obama’s policies in general are harming the economy.  The $800 billion stimulus package has failed to stem rising unemployment, while reducing the size of the economy over the long run.