In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group One, apanel of experts established by the World Meteorological Organization and theUnited Nations Environment Programme, issued its Fourth Assessment Report.The Report included predictions of dramatic increases in average worldtemperatures over the next 92 years and serious harm resulting from the predictedtemperature increases. Using forecasting principles as our guide we asked: Arethese forecasts a good basis for developing public policy? Our answer is “no”.
December 2007
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Monday threw cold water on a major energy bill that Democrats are hoping to pass before the end of the year, saying it contains "troublesome" measures that would force electric utilities to generate a greater share of their power from renewable sources.
"That would be very troublesome for all of us in the Southeast," McConnell told reporters. "That's a mandatory rate increase and would produce a lot of difficulty."
A national coalition of distributors and contractors associated with heating, ventilation, air-conditioning and refrigeration (HVACR) today criticized Congress for inserting unprecedented "regionalization" provisions in the Energy Bill that will pit consumers against special-interest environmental groups in Washington, DC.
With the Bush administration’s support, Congress is pushing to increase fuel economy standards for American autos. The measure is supposed to save energy and reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil, but these rules have proved far more effective at increasing automaker costs and killing drivers.
CBS News likely had no idea just how perfectly it encapsulated the state of environmental journalism with the ad for an eco-reporter it just placed in JournalismJobs.com. They want you to know that “A deep interest in the environment and sustainability issues will serve you well”, at least when it comes to gaining employment as an environmental reporter. To bring “a dash of humor to our coverage” the successful applicant must be “wicked smart, funny, irreverent and hip, [and] oozing enthusiasm.” Knowledge of the issues, well, not so much.
It seems that aspiring applicants capable of reading further into the ad – titled “Seeking Vibrant Reporter/Host for Eco Beat”, which one must admit revealed a bit of a sense of humor in its own right – will learn that “Knowledge of the enviro beat is a big plus, but not a requirement.”. Having seen much CBS coverage of environmental matters, I’d say actual knowledge of the issues would be a tremendous demerit.
But don’t go thinking that any old fool without a grasp on the issues is a sure thing. There are of course requirements. For example, the “position requires” a knack for “story telling.”
Tell me about it. CBS environmental reporters have shown remarkable imagination. Consider Scott Pelley, whose global warming alarmism is so ham-fisted that when asked in a (not wicked funny) interview with colleagues about his bias he explained the he doesn’t need to seek the other side of the story because skeptics are like Holocaust deniers, who he has no need to interview.
Of course, that not long after making this claim he flew halfway around the world to actually interview Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad only further confuses his analogy. Anyway, it seems the real kind is apparently okay.
So, we see the sort of sense of humor CBS is looking for, and they certainly exhibit plenty of experience in the running joke the press is playing on the public when it comes to story telling about the environment and particularly “global warming,” the greatest threat since that other greatest threat just before it.
We all know our planetary goose is cooked, so why would factual knowledge do anything but get in the way of our panic? Eco-reporting is easy: just claim a continuing, indeed worsening warming trend, and leave it to losers to deal with facts like it has now been a decade since warming peaked in 1998.
There is the occasional pitfall (maybe we should say pratfall, to show CBS we’re wicked funny!). Just this week we were told — by Reuters’s Africa portal, if you happened to be surfing it — that those predictions from January 2007 of the “hottest year on record”, well, they just didn’t pan out. It seems that promising us the year’s weather in January is about as reliable as, oh I don’t know, promising us what it will be like a century from now.
But, hey, that’s funny! Get it? Take a hot day and predict the hottest month ever; take a warm year and predict the end-of-days unless of course the U.S. tosses the United Nations the keys to our sovereignty, in which case they promise to fix things up just right, with a thermostat on the wall of the world in the form of what hardly missed ex-President of France Jacques Chirac called “the first component of an authentic global governance.”
He of course referred to the Kyoto Protocol or global warming treaty, and in fact I was in the audience when he said that, in The Hague, in November 2000 while the Florida recount was going on. I didn’t think that was funny.
Neither did my editor at the press service for which I was covering the negotiations, who excoriated me for daring to put words in the mouth of a foreign dignitary. He would never say anything like that. She refused to run the piece. Talk about not having a sense of humor. I knew right then she wouldn’t cut it in the eco-journalism biz. I hear she’s planting questions in Iowa now.
So, show the right mix of wit and vapidity about that on which you are to write and you might get hired by CBS to tell stories about that very same Kyoto Protocol, from which our yuk-yearning friends in the environmental press corps cannot wean themselves if it means no longer writing dire stories about the state of America’s international relations because President George W. Bush “refused to sign” it. Some even go so far as to also assure us in the very same story of a metaphysical impossibility, that he withdrew from it, as well as never agreeing to it in the first place. Wicked smart.
Of course, regular readers of HUMAN EVENTS (or my book) know full well that the United States signed Kyoto on November 12, 1998, that Bush like President Clinton never asked the Senate to ratify it, but that this signature is all the permission that the Senate requires under our Constitution and laws. The press don’t write things like that. They don’t want to. Doing so would take away the issue, would bestow ownership of our blessed exclusion from that pact in its rightful place, and make the media tell a different story. The truth.
Now, that would be funny.
When Nobel laureate Al Gore collects his peace prize in Oslo on Monday, he should tell the gathered Norwegians exactly what he meant when he remarked about global warming:
"I believe it is appropriate to have an overrepresentation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are," Gore said in the May 9, 2006, issue of Grist magazine.
"Overrepresentation"? Is that anything like "misrepresentation"?
Offering Americans cars they do not want is a recipe for economic disaster. Doug Bandow, CEI, says the proposal could cost the major U.S. automakers $110 billion to retool their assembly lines, at a time when they are reeling from huge pension and health insurance costs.
By 2010, China would produce over 40 per cent of world coal output, compared to 38 per cent in 2006.
From 2002 to 2006, China's coal production saw average annual growth of 13 per cent, reaching 2.38 billion tons in 2006.
An unofficial document prepared by China demands that leading industrialized nations significantly cut their greenhouse gas emissions as part of an international framework on ways to reduce such emissions after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, The Yomiuri Shimbun learned Monday.
The Cooler Heads Coalition hosted Neil O’Brien, Director of Open Europe and author of
“Europe’s Dirty Secret: Why the Emissions Trading Scheme isn’t Working” on December 3rd in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. This is his handout/notes for the briefing.
Emissions Trading: The EU Experience
Neil O’Brien, Director of Open Europe and author of
“Europe’s Dirty Secret: Why the Emissions Trading Scheme isn’t Working” (http://www.openeurope.org.uk/research/etsp2.pdf)
What are we interested in? – the cheapest ways to reduce emissions, not whether there should or should not be a target for reductions. ETS is beautiful in theory, but in practice its complexity leads to politics and lobbying and failure to achieve the theoretical advantages of trading. Result: more distortions, higher costs.
History of EU's Emissions Trading System
Phase One: (2005-2007)
– Permits allocated for free. No link to other systems.
– Overall too many allocations (no scarcity), 1,829 Mt credits vs 1,785 Mt emissions.
– Price crashes from €33 to €0.01. Emissions in covered sectors up.
Phase Two (2008 – 2013)
– Still only 1.5% of permits auctioned.
– System being used to deliver subsidies to polluters, e.g. Brown coal.
– Now linked to Kyoto mechanism credits. (CDM and JI)
– Should now be scarcity in EU, but it can be covered by imports of credits.
– Nothing wrong in principle with paying for cuts elsewhere – but CDM is flawed – too many projects, either no cutting or even increasing emissions.
– Also, there is a huge oversupply of Kyoto credits – will the price fall again?
Issues raised by the EU ETS experience
How close is the practice to initial hopes: a single price for carbon, dynamic effects?
Moving price: Means uncertainty & hampers long term planning.
Auctioning: If you are handing out permits you don’t have a real market, and free allocations, such as Congress handing out billions of dollars, may be hard to stamp out – think farm spending, etc.
Administration and size of plants to include: 43% of installations produce 1% of the emissions. Lots of small installations mean high administrative costs. (approx £650m total for EU)
What sectors / industries to include: Many industries and sectors excluded in EU.
Uncertainty and getting the allocation “right”: Guesswork about growth, energy prices.
How long a period? Too short and business can’t plan, too long and mistakes can’t be fixed.
Avoidability: A high and visible price will lead to avoidance – exit to other countries. Subsidies, as well as many domestic taxes and regulations, don’t suffer the same problem.
Energy security: Unlike other emissions controls, ETS may reduce security. (coal switching)
Linking to Kyoto: Major problems with CDM and JI – subsidising polluters.
Is ETS good because it’s stealthy? “The only politically realistic way to reduce emissions”? No – the costs to firms are clear, and they are mobile. ETS creates a highly political process.
Protectionism: Cap and Trade with free allocations lends itself to protectionism and trade disputes – linking tariffs to the Emissions Trading System is already being discussed in the EU.
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