I subscribe to an Internet newsletter called Energy Central and the news is getting more depressing every week. Every time I scan the headlines I realize I'm looking at another piece of a gathering energy debacle.
Most generations face large and daunting challenges. But few generations have the promise of leadership that could address them rationally. Fortunately, President-elect Obama is uniquely positioned to achieve such a feat and help the world solve some of its most entrenched issues.
First, it was called “global warming.” But then it stopped warming, so alarmists changed it to “climate change.” But that’s insufficiently scary, especially when it goes head to head with the much more ominous sounding “financial crisis" that has relegated global warming/climate change to the backburner over the last two months.
Obviously, a new, more frightening label was needed. Cue Al Gore, who yesterday wrote an oped in the New York Times in which he never referred to global warming/climate change, but instead to the “climate crisis.”
Catchy!
Problems ensure whenever governments substitute targets for a viable strategy. This is oft evident in climate policy, where talk is cheap and targets even cheaper. Consider the United Kingdom’s goal of getting 15% of its electricity from renewable energy like wind power by 2020. On paper, bureaucrats and regulators no doubt composed a smashing plan to achieve the UK’s wind energy targets. In real life, these best laid plans are falling apart.
According to the Guardian, “Executives say difficulties in building [wind] farms and connecting them to the national power grid, unwillingness by investors to fund them and a shortage of turbines could stop Britain hitting its target of generating 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.”
No funds, no farms, no turbines, no towers…Really, could anything else possibly go wrong?
It would indeed create jobs, but it would do so by killing other jobs. Is that really what Americans want?
Michael Crichton, RIP
The Cooler Heads Coalition notes with sadness the death of Michael Crichton. May he rest in peace.
Mr. Crichton was a well-informed, energetic, and eloquent critic of global warming alarmism. We recommend reading his speech at Cal Tech, “Aliens Cause Global Warming,” as well as his best-selling thriller, State of Fear.
Announcements
CEI’s Chris Horner, author of the New York Times bestselling Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism), has a new book out, Red Hot Lies, an exposé of the hypocrisy, deceit, and outright lies of the global warming alarmists and the compliant media that support them. Shocking, frank, and illuminating, Chris Horner's Red Hot Lies explodes as many myths as Al Gore promotes. To buy a copy, click here.
The Cooler Heads Coalition invites you to a Congressional Staff and Media Briefing on “The European Union’s Climate Policies: The Effects of the Global Financial Crisis and other Realities,” with Dr. Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University and Instituto Juan de Mariana, Madrid. The briefing will be on Friday, November 14th from noon to 1:30 PM at 1334 Longworth House Office Building. Lunch is provided. Please RSVP by e-mail to wyeatman@cei.org. Please call William Yeatman at (202) 331-2270 for further information.
In the News
Financial Meltdown Threatens Obama’s Climate Plans
David Fogarty, Reuters, 6 November 2008
Europe in Full Retreat on Climate Plan
UPI, 6 November 2008
Green Jobs, or Gone Jobs?
David Kreutzer, Heritage Foundation Web Memo, 5 November 2008
Climate Change Law Is No Cash Cow
William Yeatman, Orange County Register, 5 November 2008
Coal in Your Stocking
Max Schulz, NRO, 4 November 2008
Are Evangelicals on the Global Warming Bandwagon?
Dr. Calvin Beisner, CrossWalk, 3 November 2008
Predictions of Sea Level Rise Are Way Off
William Yeatman, News Journal, 2 November 2008
News You Can Use
Carbon Collapse
The price of carbon allowances in the European Union’s European Trading Scheme has fallen more than 40% since July, thereby destroying the argument that a cap-and-trade program provides “a measure of certainty to the energy industry in estimating the future price of carbon for the purpose of planning investments in new power generators.”
Inside the Beltway
Election Post-Mortem
CEI's Myron Ebell
For opponents of further energy-rationing policies, the good news is that Senator John McCain (R-Az.) lost the presidential election. The bad news is that Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) won. There are two views of what Senator Obama will do as President. Some guess that he will cautiously pursue a modest agenda of progressive social and economic change. Others guess that he will rapidly pursue a radical agenda. In short, will he follow the path of Tony Blair or of Juan Peron or some weird combination?
President-elect Obama’s record is so brief and so thin that a plausible case can be made for either guess. We will start to find out soon enough when he appoints his cabinet. The day after the election someone in the Obama campaign leaked word that Robert F. Kennedy, jnr., was likely to be named Secretary of a new Department of Environmental Protection. Appointing Kennedy would be a sure sign that at least on climate and environmental issues Obama’s agenda will be radical. And inept: suffice it to say that Kennedy is not the brightest compact fluorescent bulb in the chandelier. As my colleague Marlo Lewis detailed in a post on National Review Online in July 2007, Kennedy’s main talent is slandering anyone who disagrees with him. But the next day, another leak came out of the Obama team that it was early days and there were a number of other less lunatic candidates for the top environmental job.
In the House and Senate elections, it appears that the Democrats have picked up six and possibly seven Senate seats and around twenty House seats. That translates into a net gain of two votes in favor of cap-and-trade legislation (although not necessarily of the same bill). Six more Democrats means only two more votes for cap-and-trade because four Republicans who supported cap-and-trade were defeated. The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act received 48 votes to invoke cloture in June, which was twelve votes short of the necessary 60. McCain and Obama didn’t vote, so that adds two more. Thus the sponsors of cap-and-trade in the Senate will start the new Congress with at least 54 votes.
I haven’t had a chance to look at the election returns in the House yet, and there are still several races to be decided. However, the day after the election brought big news from the House. Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) announced that he would challenge Representative John Dingell (D-Mich.) for the Chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Dingell has been in the House since 1955. In the 1980s and early ’90s, he was the most powerful member and his committee was the most powerful in Congress.
Whether Waxman will overthrow Dingell is unclear. Last year I would have bet on Dingell. The new younger members of the Democratic Caucus elected in 2006 were mostly moderates and in line with Dingell’s cautious big government agenda. The Democrats elected to the House this year may not be so moderate. Clearly, Waxman has Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) support. Pelosi and Dingell do not conceal their contempt for each other.
If Waxman becomes Chairman of Energy and Commerce, there is no doubt that he will try to move the most radical energy-rationing legislation as quickly as possible. This might (or might not) wake up some big companies that have taken comfort in the Dingell-Boucher draft cap-and-trade bill. Dingell-Boucher puts the noose around their necks (and around consumers’ necks), but doesn’t tighten it for some years. Waxman wants to yank the rope as soon as the noose is in place.
I have written up my initial reactions to what the election returns might mean for global warming and energy-rationing issues in two more detailed articles posted here on GlobalWarming.org.
The IPCC’s Different Time Scales
CEI's Julie Walsh
Richard Courtney provides an excellent refutation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s breathless claim—“Current warming sharpest climate change in 5,000 years.”
“A key – and blatantly misleading – statement in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of AR4 says; “The linear warming trend over the last 50 years is nearly twice that for the last 100 years”. But this statement was not in the drafts provided for peer review. It was inserted into the final draft of the report and that final draft was only submitted to government representatives for comment…(Also, the IPCC’s non-peer reviewed) published graph (Page 104 on this link) shows the slope over the last 25 years is significantly greater than that of the last 50 years, which in turn is greater than the slope over 100 years. This is said to show that global warming is accelerating….Thus, policymakers who only look at the numbers (and don’t think about the different timescales) will be misled into thinking that global warming is accelerating. Of course, the IPCC could have started near the left hand end of the graph and thus obtained the opposite conclusion! In case this is not obvious, I provide the following graph that does it together with an explanation of the presentation of the data.” (Parentheses added)
Ha! So using the IPCC’s misleading shifting of time scales, one could also say that the linear warming trend over the first 50 years of the twentieth century is nearly twice that for the whole century, too!
Across the States
California
Two energy initiatives failed in California on Tuesday. Proposition 7 would have required California to get 50% of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2025. In fact, California already has a requirement to produce 20% of its electricity from renewables by 2010, but the California Energy Commission says that the Golden State will fall well short of that goal. Proposition 10 would have required the Golden State to use compressed natural gas for public vehicles. It was funded primarily by Texas natural gas magnate T Boone Pickens, who stood to reap a windfall profit if the measure had passed.
The press is reporting that President-elect Barack Obama is giving serious consideration to tapping Robert F Kennedy Jr. as EPA Administrator.
Last year my colleague Marlo Lewis wrote an insightful, incisive piece on the troubling rhetoric of RFK Jr. Read it here. It should be mandatory for all Senators responsible for confirming the EPA administrator.
Californian Representative Henry Waxman is going to challenge John Dingell (D-MI) for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over climate change legislation. Given that Dingell has clashed openly with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and President-elect Barack Obama, the threat to his post is clear and present.
So is the danger to the American economy. Waxman represents Hollywood. That is, he answers to movie stars, who are invariably clueless, but especially so about all tings “green.” As the Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Waxman would try to placate his Hollywood constituents by advancing laws that would condemn all Americans to energy poverty so as to reduce their carbon footprint. Of course, Waxman’s movie star backers are too rich to feel the pinch of expensive energy policies, but the rest of us will.
It looks like the Democrats will pick up six Senate seats (and possibly seven if Senator Saxby Chambliss loses a runoff in Georgia) and up to two dozen House seats. In the Senate, supporters of legislation to save the planet from global warming have picked up two votes with the elections of Representative Mark Udall to the open Senate seat in Colorado and of Representative Tom Udall to the open Senate seat in New Mexico.
The Udall first cousins will replace Senator Pete Domenici in New Mexico and Senator Wayne Allard in Colorado, both of whom are retiring. Domenici and Allard have been leaders in the effort to allow more oil and natural gas production on federal lands and waters, and both opposed the Lieberman Warner cap-and-trade bill that would ration use of coal, oil, and natural gas. Since the U. S. gets 85% of its total energy from those three fuels, rationing will force people to pay more and thereby to use less, which will lower greenhouse gas emissions.
But in winning the open seat in Virginia, Democrat Mark Warner replaces Republican John Warner, chief sponsor of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, the cap-and-trade bill that crashed on the Senate floor in early June. Senator Elizabeth Dole lost her North Carolina seat to Kay Hagan. Dole was a sponsor of Lieberman-Warner.
Senator John Sununu lost to Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, and Senator Gordon Smith appears to have lost to Jeff Merkley in Oregon. Both Sununu and Smith voted for cloture on Lieberman-Warner. It might be fair to say that, although the switch to Democrats in New Hampshire and Oregon doesn’t increase the vote count for cap-and-trade, it does increase the enthusiasm for it.
To sum up the Senate, it appears that cap-and-trade has picked up two votes. A majority of Senators now probably support some version of cap-and-trade, but not the sixty required to invoke cloture and proceed to a final vote. What cannot be gauged yet is how hard and effectively President Obama might push Democrats to support cap-and-trade or how much slippage there might be among squishier Republicans. In regard to the latter, the good news is that Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma was elected handily to a third term and will continue to lead opposition to energy-rationing policies and global warming alarmism as the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee.
In the House, I think there was a small majority in this Congress for cap-and-trade in general. With the Democratic gains, there is probably now a majority for some specific bill, such as the Dingell-Boucher draft bill. However, where Democrats have defeated Republicans in States that depend on coal for most of their electricity, it should not be assumed that the new Representative will be a vote for cap-and-trade. Regional economic interests will still play a strong role in the debate to come.
Cap-and-trade is closer to enactment in the 111th Congress than it was in the 110th Congress. In my estimation, it would have been closer had Senator McCain been elected President. McCain is much more committed to the global warming issue than Obama. His support for a deal with the House and Senate Democratic leadership would have made it difficult for the Republican leadership to oppose it effectively. But Republican congressional leaders now have every reason to oppose cap-and-trade energetically.
There are three external factors that work against enacting cap-and-trade in the 111th Congress. First, since the Kyoto global warming treaty was negotiated in 1997, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have continued to rise, but the global average temperature has remained flat. There may still be some warming, but it isn’t showing up yet, which suggests that the climate is not as sensitive to carbon dioxide levels as Al Gore claims. Second, the European Union ratified Kyoto and has been spending lots of money and has implemented a cap-and-trade program to reduce emissions, yet emissions continue to rise. Emissions in many EU countries have been rising faster in percentage terms than in the U. S. Reality is often slow to penetrate Congress, but at some point they will not be able to ignore these two facts.
The third factor is the credit crunch and the looming recession. As Senators found out in June when Lieberman-Warner came to the floor, it wasn’t easy to vote for a bill that would raise electricity and gasoline prices when people were angry about skyrocketing gas prices. Similarly, it won’t be easy to vote for higher energy prices when people are concerned about losing their jobs and paying their bills during an economic downturn. So cap-and-trade still has a long way to go to enactment.
President-elect Barack Obama promises a bold energy plan to develop green technology, slash oil imports from unfriendly nations and tax more of the profits of oil companies, but the cost of the Wall Street bailout and an expected U.S. recession may impede his efforts.
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