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Odd Bedfellow Coalition Blasts “Havoc” Caused by Corn Ethanol Mandate

by Marlo Lewis on October 11, 2013

in Features

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An odd-bedfellow coalition of agriculture, engine manufacturer, food retail, environment, hunger, taxpayer, and free-market public interest groups are asking the House Energy & Commerce Committee to ensure that any legislation proposed to reform the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) address the “havoc that the corn ethanol mandate” has imposed on a “multitude of stakeholder interests.”

In their joint letter to the E&C Committee, the 44 signatories state in part:

While our reasons vary, all of us have long maintained that the RFS is a uniquely flawed policy. The mandate on corn-based ethanol in particular has had a devastating effect on the entire food economy from livestock and poultry producers facing record feed costs, to food retailers facing record food costs, to consumers here and abroad struggling to balance food budgets in tough economic times. Some signers of this letter also question the propriety of Congress establishing production quota and guaranteed market shares for any type of commercial business. Ethanol from corn also is concerning to many due to its global warming impact and the use of natural resources such as water and native grassland for producing fuel. The corn-based ethanol mandate is also having a devastating impact in communities throughout the world, where people living in poverty are facing increased food prices that threaten their food and land security.

The coalition advises that “any RFS proposal advanced by the Committee should include significant, meaningful and permanent decreases in the conventional biofuels (corn ethanol) mandate.”

Click here to read the joint letter in full.

Update (added 5:30 pm)

A Reuters article by Cezary Podkul underscores the timeliness of the odd bedfellows coalition letter. Podkul reports that House E&C “is weighing a proposal to cap the ethanol requirement at below 10 percent for two or three years, according to a person close to the committee. The proposal, which is not yet finalized, would give the industry time to study the use of higher ethanol blends . . . and then raise the target above 10 percent, according to this source.”

Although this sort of stop-gap measure would postpone the impending blend wall crisis, it falls short of the “significant, meaningful and permanent decreases” in the corn-ethanol mandate that the odd bedfellows coalition is advocating. [click to continue…]

Global Warming: Planet’s Most Hyped Problem

by Marlo Lewis on October 9, 2013

in Blog, Features

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Last week, National Journal’s Energy Insiders blog hosted a discussion on the question: “Is Global Warming the Planet’s Biggest Problem?” The blog has been experiencing technical difficulties, and several posts, including mine, are invisible (though they still exist on some server somewhere). So I have decided to repost my contribution here.

* * * * *

Is global warming the planet’s biggest problem? Not even close.

Globally, poverty is by far the leading cause of preventable disease and premature death, and will likely remain so for decades to come.

The World Health Organization is hardly a hotbed of climate skepticism. Nonetheless, climate change ranks near the bottom of the WHO’s list of global health risk factors, well behind “mundane” problems like indoor air pollution, waterborne disease, and vitamin A deficiency, notes economist Indur Goklany. Global warming remains low in the ranking, Goklany finds, even if one accepts the UK Government’s climate impact assessments that informed the alarmist Stern Review.

Other problems that arguably pose greater threats to the health and welfare of millions include nuclear proliferation, uncontrolled entitlement spending, and tyrannical governments.

Al Gore and many other influential people claim global warming is “a planetary emergency – a crisis that threatens the survival of civilization and the habitability of the Earth.”

That is correct, however, only if one or more of their favorite doomsday scenarios is credible. Let’s examine the evidence.

In the mid-2000s, Gore and other pundits warned that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could collapse, plunging Europe into an ice age, with all manner of terrible repercussions for the global economy and international stability. The AMOC is the oceanic “conveyor belt” that pulls warm water up from the equator to Northern Europe. In this scenario, melt water from the Greenland ice sheet so decreases the salinity (density) of North Atlantic surface water that it no longer sinks fast enough to drive the AMOC. A Pentagon-commissioned study on abrupt climate change gave credibility to this warming-causes-cooling scare. Climate activists were jubilant: ‘Even the generals are worried!’

The scenario rests on two assumptions: (1) the AMOC is chiefly responsible for Europe’s comparatively mild winters; (2) global warming is melting enough Greenland ice to shut down the AMOC. The first assumption is dubious, the second is highly implausible.

Richard Seager of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and colleagues found that the chief factor making England 15-20°F warmer in January than comparable latitudes in North America is not maritime heat transport via the AMOC but the very different prevailing winds that blow across northeastern North America and Western Europe. During the winter, “South-westerlies bring warm maritime air into Europe and north-westerlies bring frigid continental air into north-eastern North America.” Thus, Europe should continue to enjoy mild winters even if global warming weakens the AMOC. [click to continue…]

New York Times Covers the Ethanol Scam: Ethanol Mandates Spawn Credits That Enrich Wall Street Speculators, Rip Off Consumers

by Hans Bader on September 16, 2013

in Politics

The New York Times ran a front page story Sunday  on a new outrage resulting from one of the biggest scams in America today, ethanol mandates, and how they have made American consumers poorer, while enriching Wall Street profiteers through ethanol credits.  The story is entitled “Wall St. Exploits Ethanol Credits, and Prices Spike,” and focuses on

the rapidly growing role of Wall Street banks in gaming the ethanol credits market. Ethanol credits (or RINs, as they’re called) were created by the Environmental Protection Agency and Congress as a way to assure the inclusion of ethanol in gasoline as an energy-saving measure. But gasoline producers who couldn’t or didn’t want to include ethanol could buy credits from those who did. . . In stepped the speculators, amassing millions of credits and making a killing on the wide spread between the bid and ask prices of the credits. Predictably, this drove the price through the roof: the credits, which cost 7 cents each in January, peaked at $1.43 in July and now are trading for 60 cents.

The net result is that consumers will pay at the pump, notes investment adviser David Kotok of Cumberland Advisors.  As he  observes, ethanol mandates are having very negative “geopolitical effects” as well.  He agrees that “Ethanol was a bad policy, primarily to buy and reward grain-state votes. It spurred grain planting to meet the mandate, but not fast enough, so prices called out for more. The poor were hurt overseas,” and unrest in the Middle East ensued.  As Kotok points out, ethanol is

a massive scam. Our national policy diverts 40% of the U.S. corn crop (14% of the global corn crop) in order to produce a fuel that requires almost as much energy to produce as it supplies. Our ethanol mandate has starved millions of people; I’ve watched it with my own eyes in many countries in my travels. A 2011 study by the National Academy of Sciences estimates that, since 2007, the expanding U.S. biofuels subsidy has fueled 20%-40% of the increase the world has seen in the prices for agricultural commodities. In a country like Guatemala, that means that tortilla prices double and egg prices triple. (Source: [New York Times]).  Ethanol damages engines, too — ask any user; I’ve seen it myself throughout the US, and Popular Mechanics concurs [Link]. Corn ethanol has poisoned our planet while it has lined certain private and politically connected pockets with billions. It has succeeded in raising our costs, for minimal net energy gains. . . .Global urban dwellers at the low end suffered again. . . .The spike in prices this year was a reaction to the shortage in corn caused by the drought last year. Rather than pay high prices for corn, blenders bought stockpiled RINs. The real story of the market was the explosion from $0.02 per RIN, when nobody wanted them, to $0.07 in August 2012 when the short corn crop became clear. This surge attracted the Wall Street players. They benefited when corn prices spiked again in Jan-Feb on the perception that South America crops would not clear the market before US crops came in in August-September. . . .Please remember that this all starts in the corn-farmed, politically charged Iowa caucuses. Which means, it is our sick and rotten political system that produces these behaviors.  That will likely continue until we repeatedly and mercilessly pound the politicians who have sold our nation down a river of ethanol.

[click to continue…]

Is Climate Change Causing Climate Models to Fail?

by Marlo Lewis on August 21, 2013

in Features

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A visitor to Anthony Watt’s blog, Watts Up With That, who identifies himself simply as “Craig,” today posted one of the funniest comments I’ve ever seen in a debate where 97% of scientists seem to have no sense of humor. Enjoy!

STUDY: Climate change causing climate models to become less reliable

A groundbreaking new study has shown that climate change is the underlying cause of increasingly frequent and severe climate model failures. Researchers at Pennsylvania State Community College have discovered a critical link between atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration and general circulation model errors.

“Climate change has made it increasingly difficult to predict climate change,” says Dr. Manyard Michael, the lead scientist behind the study. “The current 16 year pause in global warming illustrates just how serious this situation has been; if not for climate change, we now know that we would have been able to accurately predict the current break in warming and clearly show that climate change is actually accelerating faster than forecast – not stopping as climate change is making it appear to those outside of the climate science community.” Dr. Michael also noted that they stumbled on this important finding almost by accident. “We just happened to notice that the higher carbon dioxide concentrations climbed, the more we had to adjust the data to get the results we knew to be right, and the more we adjusted the data, the bigger the error in the models. It’s a very strong positive feedback.” [click to continue…]

IER’s Robert Murphy on the Social Cost of Carbon

by Marlo Lewis on July 24, 2013

in Blog, Features

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Last week the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) held a hearing titled “Climate Change: It’s Happening Now.” That’s right folks, global warming is not going to strike “The Day After Tomorrow,” as alarmists previously predicted. It’s going to happen “Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow” — today. 

But before you sell the beach house, move to North Dakota, or join a survivalist group, you might want to read the testimonies by University of Colorado Prof. Roger Pielke, Jr., University of Alabama in Huntsville Prof. Roy Spencer, and Institute for Energy Research scholar Robert Murphy.

I’ll discuss Murphy’s testimony today and Pielke, Jr.’s later this week. (I covered the basic argument of Roy Spencer’s testimony in a previous post: Climate Models: “Epic Failure” or “Spot on Consistent” with Observed Warming?)

Murphy challenges the intellectual bona fides of the Obama administration’s May 2013 Technical Support Document (TSD) on the social cost of carbon (SCC). Climate activists increasingly invoke SCC estimates to justify the imposition of carbon taxes, fuel economy mandates, Soviet-style production quota for wind farms, fracking bans, and other interventions to rig the marketplace against reliable, affordable, fossil energy. They speak as if SCC estimates disclose an objective reality like the boiling point of water or the specific gravity of iron. In fact, SCC estimates are assumption-driven hocus-pocus or, as my colleague Myron Ebell prefers to say, “hogwash.”

SCC analysts purport to measure the damage, in monetary terms, that an incremental ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions inflicts on humanity and the biosphere. As discussed previously on this blog, SCC estimates depend on assumptions about highly speculative issues such as climate sensitivity (how feedback mechanisms, positive or negative, will amplify or damp down the direct warming effect of rising greenhouse gas concentrations), climate impacts (how projected warming will affect weather patterns, ice-sheet dynamics, and eco-system services), economic impacts (how projected changes in global temperature, weather, and sea-level rise will affect agriculture, forestry, tourism, and other climate-related activities), and technological change (how adaptive capacities will develop as climate changes).

Each layer of the analysis is fraught with uncertainty and is educated guesswork at best. By adjusting the assumptions, the SCC analyst can get pretty much any result he desires.

Murphy zeroes in on the simplest part of the analysis: Which discount rates federal agencies use to estimate the present value of future projected climate change damages.   [click to continue…]

More Industrial Emissions, Fewer Hurricanes

by Hans Bader on July 2, 2013

in Blog, Politics, Science

People who are unfamiliar with science — like President Obama — have erroneously blamed hurricanes on greenhouse gas emissions, even though they do not trigger more hurricanes.

Ironically, hurricanes may actually diminish due to greenhouse gases and aerosols, as the Washington Post and Daily Caller note. As the Washington Post points out, research suggests that “by the end of the 21st century, greenhouse gases will reduce tropical storm frequency.”  Right now, other emissions — aerosols — are already reducing the frequency of tropical storms such as hurricanes, notes the the Daily Caller:

Stricter pollution controls may lead to an increase in tropical storms in the Atlantic Ocean, according to an article published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The article, written by scientists from the Met Office Hadley Center in the United Kingdom, suggested that environmental protection laws will lead to more hurricanes for at least 20 years, reports the New Scientist.

Nick Dunstone of the Hadley Center explained that man-made aerosols lead to longer low-level clouds over the ocean. The clouds keep the water temperature cooler and therefore less likely to birth hurricanes.

Dunstone specifically said that pollution controls that reduce aerosols will produce ”record numbers of tropical storms for the next decade or two.”

There also appears to be a direct correlation between the economy and hurricanes. During economic boom times, there is more pollution in the atmosphere due to industrialization, leading to lower numbers of hurricanes. Recession periods mean less aerosols and therefore more hurricanes.

This pattern has been seen with fewer hurricanes in the 1960s to the mid-1990s, versus higher numbers during 1930s through 1950s. The number drastically increased however in 1995 when aerosol bans went into effect. There were 28 hurricanes reported in 2008 and 19 every year since then.

[click to continue…]

Climate Models: “Epic Failure” or “Spot on Consistent” with Observed Warming?

by Marlo Lewis on June 10, 2013

in Blog, Features

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NASA scientist Roy Spencer recently posted on his Web site some startling graphs produced by John Christy, his colleague at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The graph immediately below compares the linear-trend temperature projections of 73 climate models with the linear trend of observed temperatures for the bulk tropical atmosphere during 1979-2012.

CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT

The 73 models are part of the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP-5), a collaborative effort of 20+ modeling groups to inform the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). The Project’s three main objectives are to “evaluate how realistic the models are in simulating the recent past,” “provide projections of future climate change” out to 2035 and 2100, and “understand some of the factors responsible for differences in model outputs” such as different estimates of feedback effects.

Christy’s graph reveals what Spencer calls an “epic failure” of the models to match the actual behavior of the tropical atmosphere. Models that overestimate recent warming are likely to overestimate future warming as well.

Of course, observational systems may have biases and errors, but that is an implausible explanation for the mismatch. The observations come from two satellite and four radiosonde (weather balloon) datasets, which all independently give “virtually identical trends.”

What about the subset of U.S.-designed models — do they get the trend right? Nope. Take a gander at the next graph.

CMIP5-19-USA-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT

[click to continue…]

Social Cost of Carbon: Interagency Group Predictably Predicts Climate Change Worse Than Predicted

by Marlo Lewis on June 5, 2013

in Blog, Features

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Hold the presses! A U.S. Government interagency working group has just released its updated Technical Support Document (TSD) on the social cost of carbon (SCC).

This is joyous news in some circles. “The ‘Social Cost of Carbon’ Is Almost Double What the Government Previously Thought,” Climate Progress enthuses. Why are they pleased? Because the higher the SCC, the stronger the (apparent) case for suppressing the production and export of hydrocarbon energy in general, and for blocking the Keystone XL pipeline in particular.

SCC is an estimate of how much damage an incremental ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions does to humanity and the biosphere. SCC estimates are driven by assumptions about such issues as climate sensitivity (how much warming results from a given increase in CO2 concentrations), climate impacts (how warming will affect weather patterns and sea-level rise), economic impacts (how changes in global temperature, weather, and sea-level rise will affect agriculture and other climate-sensitive activities), and technological change (how adaptive capabilities will develop as climate changes).

Modelers feed the assumptions into computer programs called “integrated assessment models” (IAMs). By tweaking those values, the modeler can get pretty much any result he desires. Outcomes also vary based on the discount rate selected, i.e., how much people are assumed to value income in the future compared to income in the present.

Using three IAMs, three discount rates (2.5,% 3,% and 5%), and a fourth value representing low-probability catastrophic impacts, the interagency group calculates four SCC estimates for the year 2020. In the working group’s 2010 TSD, the SCC estimates were $7, $26, $42, and $81 (2007$). In the updated TSD, the corresponding estimates are $12, $38, $58, and $129 (2007$). Excuse me, but even for the high-impact projections, the updated estimate ($129) is 59% higher than the 2010 estimate ($81), which is more than a tad shy of “almost double.”

Let’s cut to the chase. Those who say the SCC is bigger than the government previously thought merely recycle the old saw that climate change is “worse than scientists previously thought.” They are mistaken. The climate change outlook is better than we have long been told.

One reason the updated estimates are higher is that the IAMs contain an “explicit representation” of sea-level rise “dynamics.” Are the modelers keeping up with the scientific literature? Consider two recent studies

  • King et al. (2012): The rate of Antarctic ice loss is not accelerating and translates to less than one inch of sea-level rise per century.
  • Faezeh et al. (2013): Greenland’s four main outlet glaciers are projected to contribute 19 to 30 millimeters (0.7 to 1.1 inches) to sea level rise by 2200 under a mid-range warming scenario (2.8°C by 2100) and 29 to 49 millimeters (1.1 to 1.9 inches) under a high-end warming scenario (4.5°C by 2100).

If 21st century sea-level rise is more likely to be measured in inches rather than feet or meters, shouldn’t SCC estimates decline?

And what about the 15-year period of no-net warming, which the climate science establishment did not predict and still struggles to explain? The warming pause is hard to square with the mantra of “worse than we thought.” It is evidence that the SCC is lower than they thought.

Let’s look at the disconnect between what they predicted and what happened.  The graph below comes from NASA scientist Roy Spencer:  [click to continue…]

The Inanity of the Global Solar Panel Market

by William Yeatman on June 4, 2013

in Blog

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Last week, the Wall Street Journal gave a fascinating snapshot of the stupidity of the global solar market. As it is with all good news reports, the first paragraph says it all:

BEIJING—Solar-panel makers in China are open to raising prices and limiting exports to the European Union as a way to avoid steep trade tariffs, industry representatives said Thursday.

Allow me to put this in perspective. European consumers want solar panels. Indeed, they are forced to want them, due to Soviet-style green energy production quotas enacted by the EU. That’s the context: Europeans wanting/having to buy this product.

Against this backdrop, manufacturers in China are OFFERING to raise prices. They aren’t colluding to make more money; rather, they are voluntarily raising prices against their better judgment. Why? Because EU officials are threatening to raise prices by slapping tariffs on imports of Chinese solar panels (which, again, are products that Europeans want to buy).

Keep in mind as well that the EU’s threatened tariff would co-exist with national-level subsidies, known as “feed in tariffs,” designed to suppress the price of solar panels. This is true in Germany and Spain, off the top of my head, and likely true in other countries.

So there’s an EU policy that forces Europeans to buy solar panels. Yet there is also an EU policy meant to make solar panels much more expensive. Finally, there are several European policies meant to make them much cheaper. Got that?

Such are the endless and inefficient complexities wrought when government creates an industry out of whole cloth, as any member of the Gosplan could have told you.

CBO Kinda Likes Carbon Tax

by Myron Ebell on May 25, 2013

in Blog, Features

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The Congressional Budget Office this week released a study on the “Effects of a Carbon Tax on the Economy and the Environment.”  CBO admits that a carbon tax would raise the costs of producing goods and services and raise consumer prices.  On the other hand, some of the negative effects could be offset by using the revenues generated to lower the federal deficit and to lower marginal rates of other damaging taxes, such as corporate and individual income taxes.

In terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the best the CBO can come up with is this: “Given the inherent uncertainty of predicting the effects of climate change, and the possibility that it could trigger catastrophic effects, lawmakers might view a carbon tax as a reflection of society’s willingness to pay to reduce the risk of potentially very expensive damage in the future.”

Professor Robert Murphy commented on the CBO study for the Institute for Energy Research here, and Dr. David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation posted his comment here.

Another contribution to the carbon tax debate from earlier in the month has just come to my attention.  On 2nd May, fifty-four trade groups sent a letter to the chairmen and ranking members of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee explaining why they are opposed to a carbon tax.  Attached to their letter is a study produced by NERA Consulting earlier this year for the National Association of Manufacturers that details the negative economic effects of a carbon tax.

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