GlobalWarming.org

At Bigjournalism.com, Woody Hochswender puts global warming alarmism in the context of a long tradition of doomsaying — which wasn’t invented by Al Gore and need not necessarily be about climate —  by looking at the dismal career of author Jonathan Schell.

1. Schell argued that given the incredibly dire state of things, a world-destroying nuclear exchange was inevitable. A nuclear exchange was virtually certain to happen, sooner or later, he said, and when it did radioactive clouds would blot out the sun and create a “nuclear winter” resulting in the extinction of human life. Once it started, there was no going back. The concept of inevitability was mortised into the framework of the argument.

2. It was also depicted as a race against time! We had only a teeny-weeny window in which to reverse the horrendous policies and mindset of our ignorant, bellicose leaders (read: Republicans). It was, like, so super urgent, action had to be taken, like, yesterday.

3. But, almost paradoxically, it was already too late! In the bottomless pit of his despair and revulsion at the civilized world for imperiling the planet, Schell contended that we were already too far gone, and it really was too late to stop the nuclear holocaust, although everyone had a moral duty to try.

Sound familiar? What we have here, as Yogi Berra would say, is déjà vu all over again. The eerie parallels between the nuclear-freeze movement and the global-warming movement are clear: the direness of the forecast (which resembles prophecy and has a teleological dimension); the dramatic, race-against-time urgency of the healing project; the element of existential threat as a goad to activism; the notion of human extinction and the “fate” of the earth hanging in the balance, as if suspended by a slender thread; and finally, the admonition that it is probably already too late. The nuclear clock is about to strike midnight; the ice caps are already melting. Fear and trembling all around.

Like other neo-Malthusians, Schell has been spectacularly wrong time and again, but that’s not likely to make him or his correligionists give up on despair. For doomsayers, every year is 2012.

For a more uplifting — and accurate — view of human history, see here.

In the Wall Street Journal, Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker and others explain how President Obama’s policies are delaying and retarding the inevitable economic recovery, keeping unemployment high even though the recession Obama inherited was similar to others in the past that gave way to rapid recoveries:

In terms of U.S. output contractions, the so-called Great Recession was not much more severe than the recessions in 1973-75 and 1981-82. Yet recovery from the latest recession has started out much more slowly. For example, real GDP expanded by 7.7% in 1983 after unemployment peaked at 10.8% in December 1982, whereas GDP grew at an unimpressive annual rate of 2.2% in the third quarter of 2009. Although the fourth quarter is likely to show better numbers–probably much better–there are no signs of an explosive take off from the recession. …

In terms of discouraging a rapid recovery, other government proposals created greater uncertainty and risk for businesses and investors. These include plans to increase greatly marginal tax rates for higher incomes. In addition, discussions at the Copenhagen conference and by the president to impose high taxes on carbon dioxide emissions must surely discourage investments in refineries, power plants, factories and other businesses that are big emitters of greenhouse gases.

Congressional ‘reforms’ of the American health delivery system have gone through dozens of versions. The separate bills passed by the House and Senate worry small businesses, in particular. They fear their labor costs will increase because of mandates to spend much more on health insurance for their employees. The resulting reluctance of small businesses to invest, expand and hire harms households as well, because it slows the creation of new jobs and the growth of labor incomes. …

Even though some of the proposed antibusiness policies might never be implemented, they generate considerable uncertainty for businesses and households. Faced with a highly uncertain policy environment, the prudent course is to set aside or delay costly commitments that are hard to reverse. The result is reluctance by banks to increase lending–despite their huge excess reserves–reluctance by businesses to undertake new capital expenditures or expand work forces, and decisions by households to postpone major purchases.

Several pieces of evidence point to extreme caution by businesses and households. A regular survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) shows that recent capital expenditures and near-term plans for new capital investments remain stuck at 35-year lows. The same survey reveals that only 7% of small businesses see the next few months as a good time to expand. Only 8% of small businesses report job openings, as compared to 14%-24% in 2008, depending on month, and 19%-26% in 2007.

Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which failed to cut unemployment, is now pressuring states to raise taxes, thanks to costly requirements it imposed on states at the behest of powerful public-employee unions.

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package actually would shrink the economy “in the long run.”  Unemployment has skyrocketed past European levels, as big-spending countries have fared worse than thrifty ones.  The Obama Administration claims credit for creating imaginary jobs in non-existent Congressional districts.

As the Examiner notes, “If his stimulus program was approved, Obama promised, unemployment would not go above 8 percent this year. The reality is that it passed 10.3 percent in October. So now the stimulus books are being cooked to mollify an anxious public worried that real-world jobs continue to disappear and angry that Obama has thrown almost $1 trillion down the stimulus rathole.”

The stimulus package actually destroyed thousands of real world jobs by triggering trade wars with Canada and Mexico that killed jobs in America’s export sector (the stimulus package barred a measley 97 Mexican truckers from U.S. roads, a minor NAFTA violation that led to massive Mexican retaliation against U.S. exports of 40 farm products and kitchen goods worth $2.4 billion).  It also is wiping out jobs by inflicting costly mandates on state governments (such as repealing welfare reform, and imposing costly “prevailing wage” regulations and expensive racial set-asides).

The stimulus package has since spawned countless examples of government waste and corruption.  Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.  Obama’s alleged justification for firing the inspector general turned out to be false.

In a column for USA Today, Julianne Malveaux writes that climate change is a civil right issue.  The comments posted on the USA Today site regarding her column make it clear that readers were amused by her column more than persuaded.

This is actually problematic because some of her column covers a very important point regarding global warming policies: They do have a disproportionate effect on the poor.  As I have written, almost every single policy pushed to address global warming by environmental groups hurts the poor.

Roy Innis and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) have done excellent work on the key point that climate change policies are a civil rights issue.

Unfortunately, Ms. Malveaux combines very different issues.  The problematic part of the column is at the start where she argues that climate change (not policies) are the civil rights issue.   She writes about how African-Americans produce less greenhouse gas emissions than other Americans and at the same time African-Americans bear the greatest brunt of climate change based on where they live.

It is easy to see where these arguments can be interpreted as a hint towards compensation for African-Americans.  These arguments completely take away from what she does get right: She goes on to make the accurate point that policies to reduce greenhouse emissions disproportionately hurt the poor.

I hope that Ms. Malveaux will continue to bring up the problems with global warming policies.  However, she needs to drop the weak arguments about how climate change is a civil rights issue and instead stay focused on climate change policies.

In this two–part post on MasterResource.Org, the free-market energy blog, I argue that the EPA’s proposed Tailoring Rule is a temporary, legally questionable, and incomplete antidote to Massachusetts v. EPA’s legacy of “absurd results.”
 
Here is the gist of the column:
 
Congress did not intend to apply the Clean Air Act’s preconstruction permitting (PSD) and Title V operating permits programs to small entities, did not intend for those programs to implode under their own weight, did not intend for PSD to stop development, and did not intend for Title V to undermine Clean Air Act compliance.
 
However, those are the inexorable consequences of the greenhouse gas endangerment finding and motor vehicle emission standards that the Court authorized and indeed pushed EPA to make. To avoid this mess, which would likely produce a fierce political backlash against EPA and the Obama administration, the Agency now proposes via the Tailoring Rule to amend the PSD and Title V programs.
 
This breach of the separation of powers only compounds the constitutional crisis inherent in the Court’s attempt to legislate global warming policy from the bench.

Even if the Tailoring Rule survives judicial scrutiny despite its flouting of clear statutory language, it will provide no defense against Mass. v. EPA’s most absurd result: regulation of carbon dioxide under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) program.

Congress must step up to the plate and either overturn Mass. v. EPA, overturn the endangerment finding, or, at a minimum, prohibit EPA from regulating carbon dioxide from stationary sources.

Proponents of the Waxman-Markey (W-M) cap-and-trade bill assure us it will cost the average household less than a postage stamp a day. The Heritage Foundation’s energy team — David Kreutzer, Ben Lieberman, Karen Campbell, William Beach, and Nicolas Loris — have rebutted this claim six four ways from Sunday (see here, here, here, and here).

Some postage stamps, of course, cost more than most people’s homes. For example, this rather plain looking item, a two-pence stamp issued by the Mauritius post office in 1847, sells for $600,000 or more.

Now, nobody is saying that Waxman-Markey will cost the average household what it costs to buy a mansion, but the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates that W-M could increase the purchase price of a new home by $1,371 to $6,387, and that this would have the effect of making 337,000 to 1.57 million households unable to qualify for a home mortage. Repeat after me: “Law of Unintended Consequences!”

NAHB summarizes its analysis on pp. 13-14 of its December 30, 2009 comment on various EPA rulemakings regarding greenhouse gases (GHGs) under the Clean Air Act. Here are the main steps:

1. To produce the materials used to construct a typical single-family home (2,420 square feet plus two-car garage), manufacturers emit 55.42 metric tons (MT) of carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2-e) GHGs.
2. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), using a 4% discount rate, projects that under W-M, carbon allowances in 2030 would cost between $19 and $87 per MT.
3. Manufacturers’ costs for producing homebuilding materials would increase by $1,037 to $4,831 per single family home (when I do the arithmetic, I get an increase of $1,052 to $4,821).
4. Factor in additional financing and broker commissions, and the price of a typical single-family home would increase by $1,371 to $6,387.
5. To qualify for a mortgage, borrowers may not exceed a specific “front end ratio” — the percentage of income that would be consumed paying principal and interest on the mortage, plus property taxes and insurance. A common standard is that these payments should not exceed 28% of household income.
6. In the low-cost case (carbon permit price = $19/MT CO2-e), roughly 337,000 households that would qualify for a mortgage before the W-M-induced price increase, no longer qualify. In the high-cost case (carbon permit price = $87/MT CO2-e), approximately 1.57 million U.S. households are priced out.

Some enterprising reporter should jump on this. What do Reps. Waxman and Markey have to say about NAHB’s analysis? When they drafted the bill, what assumptions did they make about its potential impacts on housing prices and homeownership? Indeed, can they adduce any evidence that they gave even a moment’s consideration to these important matters?

Accuweather’s meteorologist Joe Bastardi has a new video titled “Worldwide Cold not Seen Since 70s Ice Age Scare.” Bastardi points out that the frigid conditions affecting significant parts of the world today – North America, Europe, and Asia – are very similar to the patterns in the 1970s, when fears of a new Ice Age were hyped by the media. He repeatedly compares maps of the cold spots from January 1-10, 1977 and current ones and notes the strong similarities:

Here’s what we had then, here’s what we have now.  Then, now.  Then, now.

In referring to the current global warming alarms, Bastardi asks:

How could this be global warming, but 34 years ago, that was an Ice Age coming?

Good question.

Certain influential forces in the environmental movement – most notably James Hansen of NASA – have expressed disquiet with the inability of democracies to deal with their imagined “climate crisis,” leading to sentiments like this one from Australian authors David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith:

We need an authoritarian form of government in order to implement the scientific consensus on greenhouse gas emissions

Climatologists Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch discuss this argument at Roger Pielke Jr’s blog.  Thankfully, the demands for an “Ecologocracy,” for want of a better term, are not yet universal in the environmental movement.  They conclude:

Finally, the growing impatience of prominent climate researchers constitutes an implicit embrace of now popular social theories. We think in this context especially of Jared Diamond’s theories on the fate of human societies. Diamond argues that only those societies have a chance of survival which practice sustainable lifestyles. Climate researchers have evidently been impressed by Diamond’s deterministic social theory. However, they have drawn the wrong conclusion, namely that only authoritarian political states guided by scientists make effective and correct decisions on the climate issue. History teaches us that the opposite is the case.

Therefore, today’s China cannot serve as a model. Climate policy must be compatible with democracy, otherwise the threat to civilization will be much more than just changes to our physical environment.

Indeed.  In fact, there may be another reason for those who despise greenhouse gas emissions also to despise democracy. and it is precisely linked to the threat to civilization.  We know that the best indicator of low greenhouse gas emissions is poverty.  As Daron Acemoglu shows, rejecting Diamond, poverty is strongly linked to the lack of market institutions that democracy protects:

People need incentives to invest and prosper; they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep that money. And the key to ensuring those incentives is sound institutions — the rule of law and security and a governing system that offers opportunities to achieve and innovate. That’s what determines the haves from the have-nots — not geography or weather or technology or disease or ethnicity.
Put simply: Fix incentives and you will fix poverty. And if you wish to fix institutions, you have to fix governments.

To put it another way, the authoritarian solution to the global warming problem, in so far as it exists, is the imposition of poverty, for that is the inevitable result of the restriction of energy use that is the authoritarians’ sine qua non. Those of us who are trying to think of alternative solutions to the problem, however, are convinced that it is the same institutions that have delivered us from poverty that will deliver us from whatever ills a warmer world might impose. To see more on this, check out Marlo Lewis’ film Policy Peril, in particular this segment.

The cover of Al Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, features a satellite image of the globe showing four major hurricanes – results, we’re meant to believe, of man-made global warming. All four were photoshopped. Which is nice symbolism, because in a sense the whole hurricane aspect of warming has been photoshopped.

As I note in my article in Forbes, it was all really based on just two data points – with the names “Katrina” and “Rita.”

Now with both greenhouse gas emissions and levels in the atmosphere are at their highest, but this year had the fewest hurricanes since 1997, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the first time since 2006 no hurricanes even made landfall in the U.S.; indeed hurricane activity is at a 30-year low.

Whoops! So much for Gore’s cover and all the hullabaloo.

In a 2005 column, I gave what now proves an interesting retrospective.

“The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name was global warming.” So wrote environmental activist Ross Gelbspan in a New York Times op-ed that one commentator aptly described as “almost giddy.” The green group Friends of the Earth linked Katrina to global warming, as did Germany’s Green Party Environment Minister.

The most celebrated of these commentaries was Chris Mooney’s 2007 book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming. Mooney, for the record, is also author of the best-selling book The Republican War on Science.

Yet there were top scientists in 2005 such as Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, publishing data showing the Rita-Katrina blowhards had no business building a case around two anomalies. But his paper was squelched by Kevin Trenbarth of “Climategate” fame.

It’s fascinating stuff. Read it!