This week National Journal’s Energy Experts Blog poses the question: “What’s holding back energy & climate policy.” So far 14 wonks have posted comments including yours truly. What I propose to do here is ‘revise and extend my remarks’ to provide a clearer, more complete explanation of Capitol Hill’s energy lethargy.

To summarize my conclusions in advance, there is no momentum building for the kind of comprehensive energy legislation Congress enacted in 2005 and 2007, or the major energy bills the House passed in 2011, because:

• We are not in a presidential election year so Republicans have less to gain from passing pro-energy legislation just to frame issues and clarify policy differences for the electorate;
• Divided government makes it virtually impossible either for congressional Republicans to halt and reverse the Obama administration’s regulatory war on fossil fuels or for Hill Democrats to pass cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, or a national clean energy standard;
• Democrats paid a political price for cap-and-trade and won’t champion carbon taxes without Republicans agreeing to commit political suicide by granting them bipartisan cover;
• The national security and climate change rationales for anti-fossil fuel policies were always weak but have become increasingly implausible thanks to North America’s resurgence as an oil and gas producing province, Climategate, and developments in climate science;
• Multiple policy failures in Europe and the U.S. have eroded public and policymaker support for ’green’ energy schemes;
• It has become increasingly evident that the Kyoto crusade was a foredoomed attempt to put policy carts before technology horses; and,
• The EPA is ’enacting’ climate policy via administrative fiat, so environmental campaigners no longer need legislation to advance their agenda.

Divided Government, Messaging Bills, Cap-and-Trade Casualties

Divided government can produce gridlock, yet the latter need not induce legislative torpor. In the 112th Congress, the House passed several energy- or climate-related bills drafted by the Energy and Commerce Committee. Those include the Energy Tax Prevention Act (H.R. 910), Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act (H.R. 1633), North American-Made Energy Security Act (H.R. 1938), Jobs and Energy Permitting Act (H.R. 2250), Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act (H.R. 2273), Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation Act (H.R. 2401), Cement Sector Regulatory Relief Act (H.R. 2681), Pipeline Infrastructure and Community Protection Act (H.R. 2937), Resolving Environmental and Grid Reliability Conflicts Act (H.R. 4273), Domestic Energy and Jobs Act (H.R. 4480), American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act (H.R. 5865), Hydropower Regulatory Efficiency Act (H.R. 5892), and No More Solyndras Act (H.R. 6213). All died in the Senate.

This flurry of legislative activity can in part be explained by the political dynamics of the 2012 presidential election cycle. By holding hearings on and passing those bills, Republicans sought to frame the issues and clarify policy differences for the electorate. A central objective was to focus public attention on which party supports and which opposes creating jobs through domestic energy production. House Republicans may launch another ambitious energy offensive as we get closer to the 2014 mid-term elections and/or the 2016 presidential contest, but not likely before then.

Why though is there is no momentum on the other side of the aisle for the “comprehensive energy and climate legislation” once proudly championed by the Obama administration and environmental activists?

Starting with the most obvious reasons, 29 Democrats who voted for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in June 2009 got pink slips from their constituents in November 2010. Key to defeating Waxman-Markey was its exposure as a stealth energy tax (“cap-n-tax”). This prompted a search for “other ways to skin the cat,” as President Obama put it, but finding other ways to fool the public was not easy.

With few options to pick from, some climate activists now advocate carbon taxes. But why should the public support an open, unvarnished energy tax when what doomed cap-and-trade was its outing as a sneaky energy tax? Cap-and-trade was in part an attempt to avoid a repeat of the political losses Democrats sustained in 1994 because of Al Gore’s Btu energy tax legislation in 1993. Most Democrats in Congress are reluctant to tax carbon unless the GOP gives them bipartisan cover, but most Republicans realize that if they cave on carbon taxes, they will demoralize and divide their base.

Even aside from partisan calculations, few members of Congress want to take responsibility for raising energy prices during a period of high unemployment and anemic economic growth.

Obsolescent Worldviews

Probing a bit deeper, we find that once-fashionable alarms about climate change and foreign oil dependence no longer have the intellectual cachet they did a few years ago. The period from 2005 through 2007 was not only a high watermark of U.S. oil import dependence, it was also a time when Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the Bali Road Map, and the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) set the terms of national debate on climate change. A lot has happened since then.

Washington’s angst about oil embargoes, supply disruptions, and the link between Mideast oil and terror was always overblown, as Cato Institute scholars Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren explain:

• Because oil is a globally-traded commodity, the U.S. can circumvent any likely embargo by purchasing oil via third parties. Indeed, U.S. oil imports actually increased after the 1973 Arab oil embargo – from 3.2 million barrels per day in 1973 to 3.5 mbd in 1974.
• Petro-states have more to lose from catastrophic disruptions than do their customers, which is why there hasn’t been one since the Iranian Revolution.
• There is no correlation between OPEC profits and cross-border incidents of Islamic terror. The likely explanation is that terrorist attacks are low-budget operations (the 911 plotters spent less than half a million dollars) and therefore are not much affected by changes in oil prices or petro-state revenues.

In recent years, the national security rationale for regulating America ‘beyond petroleum’ has become increasingly implausible, as advances in unconventional oil and gas production transform North America into a major producing region. Imports as a share of U.S. petroleum consumption declined from 60% in 2005 to 45% in 2011. More than half of those imports came from the Western hemisphere, and Canada’s share was more than double that of Saudi Arabia. In both 2011 and 2012, petroleum products were the top U.S. exports. Some experts now view hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling as a source of U.S. geopolitical influence, arguing for example that the ‘shale revolution’ undermines Russia’s leverage over Europe.

A March 2012 Citi report concluded: “With no signs of this growth trend ending over the next decade, the growing continental surplus of hydrocarbons points to North America effectively becoming the new Middle East by the next decade; a growing hydrocarbon net exporting center.” Analyses by Citi, Wood McKenzie, and IHS Global Insight support the assessment of Manhattan Institute scholar Mark Mills that “unleashing the North American energy colossus” could create millions of new jobs by 2020 and provide hundreds of billions in cumulative new federal, state, and local tax revenues.

In short, a bright future for hydrocarbon energy now competes in the public mind with yesteryear’s gloomy forecasts of increasing oil depletion and dependency.

As for climate alarm, the Climategate emails exposed some of the world’s most prestigious climatologists as schemers using the pretense of scientific objectivity for political purposes. This blow to their credibility also tarnished the UN-sponsored climate treaty negotiations.

Also deflating the push for coercive energy transformation is the lack of any net global warming over the past 16 years. There are competing explanations, but a plausible hypothesis, based on recent studies ably summarized by Cato Institute climatologist Chip Knappenberger, is that Earth’s climate is less sensitive to greenhouse forcing than “consensus” science had assumed. What cannot be denied is that there is a disconnect between the IPCC’s best estimate of projected warming and observations over the past decade.

In addition, numerous studies (summarized here and here) undercut the credibility of scary climate change impact forecasts. A few examples:

• 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.
• Weinkle et al. (2012): There is no trend in the strength or frequency of land-falling hurricanes in the world’s five main hurricane basins during the past 50-70 years.
• Chenoweth and Divine (2012): There is no trend in the strength or frequency of tropical cyclones in the main Atlantic hurricane development corridor over the past 370 years.
• Bouwer (2011): There is no trend in hurricane-related damages since 1900 once economic loss data are adjusted for changes in population, wealth, and the consumer price index.
• NOAA: There is no trend since 1950 in the frequency of strong (F3-F5) U.S. tornadoes.
• National Climate Data Center: There is no trend since 1900 in U.S. soil moisture as measured by the Palmer Drought Severity Index.
• Hirsch and Ryberg (2011): There is no trend in U.S. flood magnitudes over the past 85 years.
• Davis et al. (2003): As U.S. urban air temperatures have increased, heat-related mortality has declined.
• Goklany (2010): Global deaths and death rates related to extreme weather have declined by 93% and 98%, respectively, since the 1920s.
• Range et al. (2012): There is no evidence of carbon dioxide-related mortalities of juvenile or adult mussels “even under conditions that far exceed the worst-case scenarios for future ocean acidification.”

Skeptical blogs continually disseminate such findings to policymakers and the public.

During last year’s summer drought, NASA scientist James Hansen made a big splash with a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and a Washington Post op-ed arguing that global warming was the cause of the four biggest hot spells of the past 10 years. However, as noted in skeptical blogs, meteorological analyses of the European heat wave of 2003, the Russian heat wave of 2010, the Texas-Oklahoma drought of 2011, and the Midwest drought of 2012 attribute those events principally to natural variability.

Policy Failures

Last week the European Parliament refused to stop the EU carbon market from crashing. This debacle, a setback to all who tout Europe as a model for U.S. climate and energy policy, was all but inevitable.

For months EU policymakers had been groping for the carbon price sweet spot. Were carbon prices too low or too high? The answer: both! Prices were criticized by environmental activists as too low to incentivize hoped-for technology innovation but criticized by industry as too high for Europe to stay competitive in the global marketplace. EU governments had to establish a “carbon compensation fund” to keep domestic manufacturers from off-shoring their operations. European manufacturers still would not support intervention to prop up falling carbon prices. So the EU Parliament decided to just let carbon prices crater, embracing in deed if not in speech the carbon policy advocated by G.W. Bush. Ha!

Fiscal realities have also forced EU governments to scale back green energy subsidies. USA Today reported last month: “European governments have now realized this growth – which saw consumers footing the bill for investors’ soaring profit margins – was out of control: The UK and Czech Republic have already cut their subsidies in half, while Italy imposed a cap on new renewable energy providers. Germany cut subsidies by up to 30% and announced a major overhaul of the program Thursday.” In this respect, too, Europe has become a model of what U.S. policymakers should avoid.

The Obama administration, predictably, has decided to double down on renewables. The President’s Budget proposes to make the controversial renewable energy production tax credit (PTC) “permanent.” That, however, is a tacit confession wind and solar will never stand on their own feet without subsidy, despite the wind industry telling us for years that it is on the verge of becoming competitive with coal and gas. With the nation $16.8 trillion in debt, the President’s $23 billion PTC initiative is likely D.O.A. in the House.

The growing list of Stimu-Losers also undermines congressional support for green venture socialism. Besides Solyndra, failed or troubled recipients of DOE loans or guarantees include Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Range Fuels, Amonix, A123 Systems, Nevada Geothermal Power, Abound Solar, and, recently in the news, Fisker Automotive. According to a Privco report, Fisker lost over $1.3 billion in private and taxpayer capital, spending $660,000 for each $103,000 electric vehicle it produced before firing three-quarters of its employees.

Lawmakers from both parties have even begun to reconsider and challenge the once popular Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program. This 15-year central plan increases consumers’ pain at the pump, expands aquatic dead zones, makes food less affordable to the world’s poorest people, plows up millions of acres of wildlife habitat, and puts at least as much carbon in the atmosphere as the gasoline it displaces. Although the RFS still has defenders in Congress, hardly anyone on the Hill today talks about beefing up the RFS with flex-fuel vehicle mandates or subsidized biofuel pipelines, blender pumps, and storage tanks.

Can’t Get There from Here

Green activists blame “oil-fueled, coal-powered” politicians for Congress’s ‘failure’ to address climate change. The real reason, however, is that nobody knows how to sustain a modern economy with wind turbines, solar panels, and biofuel.

The Breakthrough Institute developed this point in its Death of Cap-and-Trade blog posts. Because affordable energy is vital to prosperity and much of the world is energy poor, it would be economically ruinous and, thus, politically suicidal to make people abandon fossil fuels before cheaper alternative energies are available. That, however, is exactly what “comprehensive energy and climate legislation” aimed to do.

As the Breakthrough folks argue, if you’re worried about climate change, then your chief policy objective should be to make alternative energy cheaper than fossil energy. Instead, the green movement attempted to make fossil energy more costly than alternative energy, or to simply mandate the switch to alternative energy regardless of cost. Al Gore’s call in 2008 to “re-power America” with zero-carbon energy within 10 years epitomizes this folly. More “moderate” variants would only do less harm, less rapidly.

EPA Is Legislating Climate Policy

Lastly, energy is on the legislative back burner because the EPA is already enacting the green movement’s agenda via administrative action. Why risk voter ire over controversial climate legislation when it is easier to sit back and watch the EPA take the heat or implement regulations few people outside of Washington even know about?

This situation is likely to persist as long as divided government persists. Many Democrats are content to let the EPA run roughshod over the separation of powers and implement policies the people’s representatives would reject if introduced as legislation and put to a vote. Many Republicans fear to challenge the EPA, knowing how difficult it is to overcome a presidential veto and how easily efforts to reclaim Congress’s authority to determine climate policy can be villified as attacks on science and children’s health.

Wouldn’t you know it, the day after I review Mark Mills’s analyses (in 1999 and 2011) of the digital economy as a key driver of demand growth for coal-fired electric power, I receive an EnergyFactsWeekly in my email box featuring new analysis by Mills on that very topic. It also contains links to two other related commentaries by Mills.

In The Efficiency Wall and the Future of the Internet’s Energy Cost, Mills reports that “the historic gains in computing energy efficiency started slowing down in 2005″ due to the “inherent physics” of existing chip technology. During the same period, however, ”the growth in global traffic on the Internet has continued rising at the same old staggering exponential rate.” The upshot? “This combination arithmetically guarantees a higher growth rate now in the total energy consumed by the Internet.”

Computing efficiency gains are rapidly approaching an “asymptotic wall” much as the power of jet engines and cruise speed of jet aircraft did in 1960.   

Jet engine power (measured in terms of the critical aviation metric, power per unit of weight) rose exponentially for the 20 years after invention, then hit a wall dictated by the inherent physics of the engines and materials. Consequently, the average cruise speed of jet aircraft also hit a wall.

“But,” notes Mills, ”there is a critical difference between aviation and digital traffic: the former rises linearly with population and wealth, while the latter grows exponentially as new applications continue to explode for Big Data.”

New materials and technologies are improving the energy efficiency of computing, but, says Mills, not enough to halt the growth in aggregate demand. He concludes with two predictions and a policy recommendation:

• Digital energy consumption will rise, locked into the physics of supply and economics of demand, and
• Energy costs will be increasingly dominated by factors external to the Internet, especially the cost of electricity. Cheap power will matter even more in the future.

We return to a familiar refrain? Dig more coal.

In Will the Cloud’s Efficiency Cut Energy (and Coal) Use?, Mills reviews Green Cloud Computing, a study by researchers at the University of Melbourne, in Australia. Key finding: Although “concentrated, shared and optimized use of massive computing assets is very efficient,” ”more energy is consumed in the Cloud, than on a PC, when the user accesses the Cloud frequently, or does high ‘intensity’ tasks.”

In Welcome to Earth Where Networks Gobble Power — and Coal, Mills examines whether improvements in the energy efficiency of cell phone networks will reduce overall energy demand and coal consumption. He looks at what has happened in China, where network energy efficiency has improved by 50% since 2005.

“As the above graph illustrates,” writes Mills, ”as the number of users expands, and the amount of traffic on the network expands even faster, energy use grows rapidly even with – or, as I have argued elsewhere in these Commentaries, because of – improving energy efficiency.”

As I sit here typing away, Amazon.Com’s Cloud Player serves up 320 tunes I’ve purchased over the past year and a half. I can play them anywhere, any time, on any computer with Internet access. I don’t have to lug around my laptop or even a flash drive. What’s not to like?

Our greener friends worry about all the power consumed by the data centers that deliver computer services over the Internet. Think of all the emissions!

A year-long New York Times investigation summarized in Saturday’s (Sep. 22) edition (“Pollution, Power, and the Internet“) spotlights the explosive growth of the data storage facilities supporting our PCs, cell phones, and iPods — and the associated surge in energy demand. According to The Times:

• In early 2006, Facebook had 10 million or so users and one main server site. ”Today, the information generated by nearly one billion people requires outsize versions of these facilities, called data centers, with rows and rows of servers spread over hundreds of thousands of square feet, and all with industrial cooling systems.”
• “They [Facebook's servers] are a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of data centers that now exist to support the overall explosion of digital information. Stupendous amounts of data are set in motion each day as, with an innocuous click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit card balances through Visa’s Web site, send Yahoo e-mail with files attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers online.”
• “To support all that digital activity, there are now more than three million data centers of widely varying sizes worldwide, according to figures from the International Data Corporation.”
• “Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.”
• “Jeremy Burton, an expert in data storage, said that when he worked at a computer technology company 10 years ago, the most data-intensive customer he dealt with had about 50,000 gigabytes in its entire database. (Data storage is measured in bytes. The letter N, for example, takes 1 byte to store. A gigabyte is a billion bytes of information.)”
• “Today, roughly a million gigabytes are processed and stored in a data center during the creation of a single 3-D animated movie, said Mr. Burton, now at EMC, a company focused on the management and storage of data.”
• “Just one of the company’s clients, the New York Stock Exchange, produces up to 2,000 gigabytes of data per day that must be stored for years, he added.”

The impact of the Internet — or, more broadly, the proliferation of digital technology and networks — on energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions has been a contentious topic since 1999, when technology analyst Mark P. Mills published a study provocatively titled “The Internet Begins with Coal” and co-authored with Peter Huber a Forbes column titled “Dig more coal: The PCs are coming.”

Mills and Huber argued that digital networks, server farms, chip manufacture, and information technology had become a new key driver of electricity demand. And, they said, as the digital economy grows, so does demand for super-reliable power — the kind you can’t get from intermittent sources like wind turbines and solar panels.

Huber and Mills touted the policy implications of their analysis. To wire the world, we must electrify the world. For most nations, that means burning more coal. The Kyoto agenda imperils the digital economy, and vice versa.

Others — notably Joe Romm and researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) — argued that the Internet was a minor contributor to electricity demand and potentially a major contributor to energy savings in such areas as supply-chain management, telecommuting, and online purchasing.

Although Mills’s “ballpark” estimates — 8% of the nation’s electric supply absorbed by Internet-related hardware and 13% of U.S. power consumed by the all information technology — were likely much too high in 1999, they may now be close to the mark. On the question of basic trend and direction, Mills was spot on.

Critics scoffed at Mills’s contention that, in 1999, computers and other consumer electronics accounted for a significant share of household electricity consumption. Ten years later, in Gadgets and Gigawatts, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that in many OECD country households, electronic devices — a category that includes televisions, desktop computers, laptops, DVD players and recorders, modems, printers, set-top boxes, cordless telephones, answering machines, game consoles, audio equipment, clocks, battery chargers, mobile phones and children’s games — consumed more electricity than did traditional large appliances. The IEA projected that to operate those devices, households around the world would spend around $200 billion in electricity bills and require the addition of approximately 280 Gigawatts (GW) of new generating capacity by 2030. The agency also projected that even with improvements foreseen in energy efficiency, consumption by electronics in the residential sector would increase 250% by 2030. Saturday’s New York Times article further vindicates Mills’s central insight (even if not his specific estimates).

Jonathan Koomey, one of the authors of the LBNL critique of Mills’s 1999 study, estimates that, nationwide, data centers consumed about 76 billion kilowatt-hours in 2010, or 2% of U.S. electricity use in that year. In a Forbes column published last year, Mills opined that if we factor in three other components of “digital energy ecosystem” — (1) the energy required to transport the data from storage centers to end users, (2) the “electricity used by all the digital stuff on desks and in closets in millions of homes and businesses,” and (3) the energy required to “manufacture all the hardware for the data centers, networks, and pockets, purses and desktops” — then the digital economy’s total appetite “is north of 10% of national electricity use.”

The Times laments that data centers “waste” vast amounts of power. On a typical day, only about 6% to 12% of a center’s computing power is actually utilized, yet most of the facility’s servers will be kept running around the clock. To call that wasteful, however, is to confuse the engineering concept of efficiency with the economic concept. In economics, what matters is value to the consumer. Consumers demand reliable, uninterrupted access to data. Keeping all the servers humming ensures the center can handle unexpected peaks in demand without crashing. A center that saves energy but bogs down or crashes will lose customers or go out of business. As one industry analyst told The Times, “They [data center managers] don’t get a bonus for saving on the electric bill. They get a bonus for having the data center available 99.999 percent of the time.”

Obviously, it is in a center’s interest to find ways to provide the same (or greater) value to consumers at lower cost, including lower energy cost. But, notes Mills, efficiency tends to increase consumption, not reduce it:

Car engine energy efficiency improved 500 percent pound-for-pound from early years to the late 20th century. Greater efficiency made it possible to make better, more featured, safer, usually heavier and more affordable cars. So rising ownership and utilization lead to 400 percent growth in transportation fuel use since WWII. The flattening of automotive energy growth in the West is a recent phenomenon as we finally see near saturation levels in road-trips per year and cars-per-household. We are a long way from saturation on video ‘trips’ on the information highways.

Efficiency gains are precisely what creates and increases overall traffic and energy demand; more so for data than other service or products. From 1950 to 2010, the energy efficiency of information processing improved ten trillion-fold in terms of computations per kWh. So a whole lot more data-like machines got built and used — consequently the total amount of electricity consumed to perform computations increased over 100-fold since the 1950s – if you count just data centers. Count everything we’re talking about here and the energy growth is beyond 300-fold.

Fundamentally, if it were not for more energy-efficient logic processing, storage and transport, there would be no Google or iPhone. At the efficiency of early computing, just one Google data center would consume more electricity than Manhattan. Efficiency was the driving force behind the growth of Internet 1.0 as it will be for the wireless video-centric Internet 2.0.

So what’s the solution? Where Mills once argued that the “Internet Begins with Coal,” he now argues that “The Cloud Begins with Coal (and Fracking)“:

Some see the energy appetite of the Cloud as a problem. Others amongst us see it as evidence of a new global tech boom that echoes the arrival of the automotive age. We’re back to the future, where the microprocessor today as an engine of growth may not be new, anymore than the internal combustion engine was new in 1958. It’s just that, once more, all the components, features and forces are aligned for enormous growth. With that growth we will find at the bottom of this particular digital well, the need to dig more coal, frack more shale….

Yes, argues Daveed Gartenstein-Ross in The Atlantic (Sep. 17, 2012). Gartenstein-Ross is the author of Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror. I haven’t read the book, but judging from the favorable reviews, Gartenstein-Ross has the ear of defense hawks of both parties. Does he offer sound advice on global warming?

In his Atlantic article, Gartenstein-Ross chides Republicans for taking a “decidely unrealistic tack” on climate change. “The available evidence overwhelmingly suggests that climate change is real; that extreme weather events are increasing; and that this dynamic will have an impact on American national security, if it hasn’t already,” he avers. He goes on to blame this summer’s drought on global warming, citing NASA scientist James Hansen’s claim that the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Russian heat wave, and the 2011 Texas-Oklahoma drought have “virtually no explanation other than climate change.” (For an alternative assessment, see these posts.) 

Since 2010, notes Gartenstein-Ross, the Department of Defense has classified climate change as a conflict accelerant — a factor exacerbating tensions within and between nations. Well, sure, what else is Team Obama at DOD going to say in an era of tight budgets when no rival superpower endangers our survival? The concept of an ever-deepening, civilization-imperilling climate crisis is an ideal mission-creep accelerant. 

Gartenstein-Ross concludes by urging Republicans to face “reality” and take action on climate change. However, he offers no advice as to what policies they should adopt. Does he favor cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulatory cascade, ’all of the above’? Gartenstein-Ross doesn’t say. He ducks the issue of what economic sacrifices he thinks Republicans should demand of the American people. 

Below is a lightly edited version of a comment I posted yesterday at The Atlantic on Gartenstein-Ross’s article: 

Dear Mr. Gartenstein-Ross,

Some Republicans have taken an “unrealistic tack” on climate change — for example, denying that global warming is real or doubting whether carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. This, however, is an unfortunate consequence of the climate alarm movement’s rhetorical trickery. Al Gore and his allies pretend that once you accept the reality of global warming, then everything else they claim (e.g. sea levels could rise by 20 feet this century) or advocate (cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, Soviet-style production quota for wind turbines) follows inexorably, as night the day. Consequently, some GOP politicians and activists now believe they must deny or question a tautology (“greenhouse gases have a greenhouse effect”) in order to oppose Gore’s narrative of doom and agenda of energy rationing.

As a thoughtful analyst, you should see through this rhetorical trap. Yes, other things being equal, CO2 emissions warm the planet. That, however, does not begin to settle the core scientific issue of climate sensitivity (the amount of warming projected to occur from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations). It tells us nothing about impacts, such as how much Greenland and Antarctica will contribute to sea level rise by 2100 (BTW, a realistic projection is inches rather than feet or meters). It does not tell us whether the costs of “inaction” are greater or less than the costs of “action.”

James Hansen’s attribution of the ongoing drought to global warming, which you cite, is a testable hypothesis. Patrick Michaels examines how the U.S. Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) matches up over time both with the U.S. temperature record and that portion of the record attributable to global temperature trends. Turns out, there is zero correlation between global temperature trends and the PDSI, but a significant correlation between plain old natural climate variability and the PDSI.

One massive fact conveniently swept under the rug by the climate alarm movement is that since the 1920s — a fairly long period of overall warming — global deaths and death rates attributable to extreme weather have declined by 93% and 98%, respectively. The 93% decline in aggregate deaths is remarkable, given that global population has increased about four-fold since 1920. The most deadly form of extreme weather is drought, and since 1920, worldwide deaths and death rates attributable to drought have fallen by an astonishing 99.98% and 99.99%, respectively. 

As Indur Goklany, author of the study just cited explains, the increasing safety of humanity with respect to extreme weather came about not in spite of mankind’s utilization of carbon-based fuels but in large measure because of it. Fertilizers, plastics for packaging, mechanized agriculture, trade between food surplus and food deficit regions, emergency response systems, and humanitarian assistance — advances that have dramatically increased global food security — all presuppose fossil fuels and the wealth of economies powered by fossil fuels.

A just-published study by Jeff Keuter of the George C. Marshall Institute finds that “environmental factors rarely incite conflict between states or within states.” For example, Israel and her Arab neighbors have gone to war several times — but never over access to water. Keuter finds that “efforts to link climate change to the deterioration of U.S. national security rely on improbable scenarios, imprecise and speculative methods, and scant empirical support.”

You mention the hunger crisis of 2008. Ironically, one of the contributing factors was a global warming policy – the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which artificially raises the demand for and price of corn. As you note, soaring corn prices also pull up the price of wheat.

Which brings me to a final point. It is one-sided and, well, risky to assess the security risks of climate change without also assessing the security risks of climate change policies. For example, economic strength is the foundation of military power. A great power cannot have a second-rate economy. Affordable energy is vital to economic growth. Carbon mitigation schemes have a vast potential to chill job creation and growth because they are designed to make energy more costly. That is the main reason Congress and the public rejected cap-n-tax.

The worse the economy, the more painful the trade-offs between guns and butter. How to cut the deficit without gutting core military capabilities is a key issue White House and congressional budget negotiators are grappling with right now. The revival of North America as an energy producing province is one of the few economic bright spots today, a source of new tax revenues as well as new jobs. From a national security perspective, now is the worst possible time to ramp up the already considerable regulatory risks facing the coal, oil, and natural gas industries.