April 2008

Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch

Minnesota has developed into the nation’s state-level combat zone on global warming, where groups and individuals have aligned to oppose what their state’s climate commission is trying to sell them. Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who many political observers perceive is angling for the vice presidential nomination, has invested his credibility and stature heavily in the issue, especially as chair of the National Governors Association. The blowback began in February when fellow executives from other states took him behind the woodshed.

The resistance elevated last month when one of the state’s free-market think tanks, the Center of the American Experiment, brought in economist Dr. Margo Thorning of the American Council for Capital Formation to discuss the staggering costs that would result from federal and state proposals to reduce greenhouse gases.

Yesterday another bomb dropped in St. Paul: a coalition of free-marketers, property rights, social conservatives, state legislators, and disaffected members of the Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group held a press conference at the legislature and released two separate reports criticizing the junk economics, alarmist climate forecasts, and nonexistent feasibility study of the proposals coming from MCCAG. Minnesota Majority, the social conservatives, and the American Property Coalition joined forces to commission the Beacon Hill Institute to critique the MCCAG’s recommendations (PDF). The Minnesota Free Market Institute also did their own study. For once local mainstream media outlets were virtually forced to report that more than just a small, dissenting group of “deniers” or “skeptics” oppose dramatic increases in energy costs that will come from these global warming “solutions.” But the reports also revealed the disingenousness of the MCCAG majority members and its advocates. From the Star-Tribune:

Edward Garvey, director of the state Office of Energy Security and a coordinator of the climate change advisory panel, said the recommendations are intended to be an ongoing dialogue. As such, they couldn't yield a precise price tag, he said.

"The charge is to move thoughtfully, deliberately and incrementally, understand and think through what the next steps are with the knowledge you have," Garvey said.

Similarly, from Minnesota Public Radio:

(MCCAG member J. Drake) Hamilton says the advisory group was never supposed to do a cost-benefit analysis. She says its work was a start, and the Legislature will study it carefully before enacting any of the recommendations.

This is, in abbreviated form, B.S. The process memo that lays out the work of MCCAG and the work of its manager, the Center for Climate Strategies, explains that they were tasked for:

Development and recommendation of a comprehensive set of specific policy recommendations and associated analyses to reduce GHG emissions and enhance energy and economic policy in Minnesota by 2025 and beyond….

Results of MCCAG decisions will include explicit descriptions of policy design parameters and results of economic analysis. Recommendations can include both quantified and non-quantified actions, with emphasis on quantification of GHG reduction potential and cost or cost savings for as many recommendations as possible.

CCS and MCCAG fully intended to give the impression that they gave attention to responsible economic analysis for their proposed measures – hence their claims of “net savings” for some of the ideas and “net costs” for others, without providing any data substantiation for their findings. If they weren’t supposed to yield a “precise price tag,” then why make unproveable assertions that their proposals will only cost the state economy $726 million by 2025, or as CCS boasted in its New Mexico findings, that they would save that state $2 billion? And remember that these are “recommendations” from a so-called objective study commission in order to achieve the necessary greenhouse gas emission reductions to save the planet. Anything less than full implementation and it would plunge us further into economic and environmental harm.

Pawlenty cannot be happy that such a significant coalition, many of whom probably help put him in office, are publicly embarrassing him on an issue on which he has based much of his reputation. They should be commended for their courage in bringing reality to a debate which for too long has been owned by the absurd.

Latest unstable country to experience riots as a result of increasing food prices brought on, at least in part, by the Ethanol Mandate is our old friend Haiti: 

“Hungry Haitians stormed the presidential palace Tuesday to demand the resignation of President Rene Preval over soaring food prices and U.N. peacekeepers battled rioters with rubber bullets and tear gas.

Rioters were chased away from the presidential palace but by late afternoon had left trails of destruction across Port-au-Prince. Concrete barricades and burned-out cars blocked streets, while windows were smashed and buildings set on fire from the capital's center up through its densely populated hills.

Outnumbered U.N. peacekeepers watched as people looted businesses near the presidential palace, not budging from the building's perimeter. Nearby, but out of sight of authorities, another group swarmed a slow-moving car and tried to drag its female driver out the window.

"We are hungry! He must go!" protesters shouted as they tried to break into the presidential palace by charging its chained gates with a rolling dumpster. Moments later, Brazilian soldiers in blue U.N. helmets arrived on jeeps and assault vehicles, firing rubber bullets and tear gas canisters and forcing protesters away from the gates.

Food prices, which have risen 40 percent on average since mid-2007, are causing unrest around the world. But nowhere do they pose a greater threat to democracy than in Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries where in the best of times most people struggle to fill their bellies.”

Haiti follows Egypt, Indonesia and Mexico to suffer such unrest in recent months.  If you want to destablize poor countries, raising food prices is a good way to do it, and supporting ethanol mandates is a good way to do that.  The poor Haitians have been reduced to eating dirt:

“For months, Haitians have compared their hunger pains to "eating Clorox" because of the burning feeling in their stomachs. The most desperate have come to depend on a traditional hunger palliative of cookies made of dirt, vegetable oil and salt.”

What a triumph for the socially-conscious!  Henceforth, in the spirit of Cobden and Bright, I shall be referring to the ethanol mandate as the Food Tax.

The former vice president has been the front man on global warming – winning both an Academy Award and the Nobel Peace Prize last year in the process. The former vice president also refuses to publicly debate the issue with leading skeptics face to face.

Bullying bloggers are no strangers to online media – especially when they're Single Issue Fanatics (SIF). "They're deeply emotional, they're bullies, and they often don't get out enough," the BBC's Adam Curtis noted here last year. This week, campaigner Jo Abbess is boasting about how she browbeat the BBC into modifying a story about Global Warming. The BBC has defended the changes to its story.

Food prices, which have risen 40 percent on average since mid-2007, are causing unrest around the world. But nowhere do they pose a greater threat to democracy than in Haiti, where most people live on less than US$2 (euro1.27) a day. The protests began a week ago in the southern city of Les Cayes and escalated as protesters tried to burn down a U.N. compound and leaving five people dead.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=216v5AoQcFQ 285 234]

Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch

Iowa is among the recent states to create a climate change commission, but unlike most other states, the legislature did so by enacting a law. As I’ve reported in the past, most of these state climate commissions are put together by governors via executive order, who then often hire the Center for Climate Strategies (or in the cases of Illinois and Wisconsin, the World Resources Institute) to manage them. CCS, a global warming alarmist advocacy organization, then runs the state climate commissions with firm controls to implement their CO2-reducing agenda.

In Iowa the Climate Change Advisory Council was created when last April Gov. Chet Culver signed into law a bill passed by the Iowa General Assembly, but no money was appropriated to run the commission. Therefore it was incumbent upon the state’s Department of Natural Resources to provide staff support for the panel process, and also to find money to run the commission itself. Both the governor’s people and DNR were aware of CCS, but were not ready to move the process forward for a few months.

The “due diligence” began in earnest in July last year, based on documents obtained from the state, with not-surprising suspects involved in putting key parties together. Michael McGuire, head of strategic development for The Climate Group, introduced CCS’s Tom Peterson to Gov. Culver’s policy liaison, Erin Andrew, via email. The Climate Group, as you might suspect, is an international “nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing business and government leadership on climate change.” Here’s how they explain their approach:

The next five years will prove decisive for the world’s climate. It’s a short window of opportunity in which we need nothing less than a revolution: the world must begin to halt the rise in greenhouse gas emissions and move towards new ways of generating and using energy.

Next Bob Mulqueen, Gov. Culver’s policy director, corresponded with Michael Northrop, program director for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund ("Earth is running a fever"), the bazillion-dollar alarmists who are CCS’s chief sugar daddy. In a July 31 email Northrop passed along Peterson’s contact information to Mulqueen and helpfully attached a November 2006 Environmental Finance article penned by himself that sung the praises of CCS’s work.

Apparently that wasn’t convincing enough for Mulqueen, who sought out further advice. On September 24 he emailed Howard Learner, executive director of the Midwest-oriented Environmental Law and Policy Center, which “focuses on environmental solutions that can dramatically reduce carbon pollution.” Their Web site alleges that “Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin account for 20 percent of the nation’s carbon pollution, with only 5 percent of the world’s population.” So who better to recommend a global warming policy manager, right? So Mulqueen asked:

“I know that your group retained the World Resources Institute. Others retained the Center for Climate Strategies. I would like your view on WRI’s usefulness, effectiveness. We are trying to figure out 1) how, if we choose a nationally recognized organization, we would possibly pay them since we have no money to do so, 2) whether we would do the data and facilitation in-house. Comments?”

Learner’s response: Let’s talk about this on the phone. Meanwhile Richard Leopold, director of Iowa DNR, and Sharon Tahtinen, a legislative liaison for Iowa DNR, conducted their own searches for funds for the Climate Change Advisory Council. Leopold inquired with the Energy Foundation (and was told “the well is dry”), and recommended looking into the Garfield Foundation (Leopold: “lots of $$$$”) and the Joyce Foundation.

Where did they end up? With that good ol’ standby, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, as Northrop guaranteed the funding for CCS in Iowa would be provided.

Post script: In every state where they work, CCS trumpets how transparent their work is, apparently because they post lots of meaningless documents on their state commission Web sites. But that transparency does not extend to disclosure about their budgets or funding sources, and Iowa is the perfect illustration. Early versions of the process memo that establishes ground rules for the ICCAC include a budget chart that shows the cost for Iowa’s commission will be $506,000. But Iowa DNR and CCS would rather keep that to themselves, as one email explained:

“For the public version we place on the Web site for ICCAC the project budget chart on pages 14-15 will be removed.”

I guess it’s good enough for the public to know that there is a budget to address their state’s global warming policy development, and it’s none of their business to know how much it is or who is paying for it.

It’s been a bad week for China’s global image. French police had to extinguish the Olympic torch three times due to “Free Tibet” agitators, who harried the torch’s passage through Paris to protest the “cultural genocide” that China, the host of this year’s Games, has allegedly perpetrated against Tibet.

It was a stunning humiliation for Chinese officials that regard the Beijing Olympics as a coming out party for the world’s newest great power. China pushed hard to land the Olympics because it wanted to demonstrate to the world that it was no longer a developing country.

These same officials are fast learning that there are drawbacks to joining this elite club of sovereign nations. When China was a mere “developing” nation, its poverty was a shield, and no one cared about things like Tibet or China’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, China is important enough to host the Olympics, which means that it is rich enough to be criticized. Today, it’s the “Sinefication” of Tibet. But tomorrow, it will be global warming. After all, China is the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases. Before, Chinese officials were spared the obloquy heaped upon the world’s #2 emitter, the United States, because they were “developing.” After the Olympics, that argument won’t work anymore.

This revolution in public relations has profound consequences for the diplomacy of climate change. To date, no country has been willing to “do something” about global warming because no rational leader would put his or her no country at a disadvantage by adopting costly emissions controls alone while all other states go on emitting. In practice, this means that Europe is loathe to act without the U. S., which is loathe to act without China.

So far, the U. S. has been the odd man out. The EU could point the finger at America, and China could point a finger to its “right to development.” The U. S., however, had no excuse.

The Olympics changes all that, because “developing nation” and “Olympic host” are incompatible modifiers for China. You can’t have your cake, and eat it, too.

As a result of the Beijing Olympics, China, which overtook the U. S. as the world’s #1 emitter only last year, will also overtake the U. S. as the global climate scapegoat.

Hans’ blog post draws attention to unrest in Egypt caused by inflation in the price of food caused by ethanol production quotas enacted by rich country governments.

Now, for the tooting of my own horn: I predicted ethanol unrest in Egypt last September, in a piece I wrote for National Review Online’s “Energy Week.”

So now that I’ve built up credibility as a seer, here’s another prediction: America will suffer a drought sometime in the next five that will cause the price of a bushel of corn on the international market to pass $10 (now, it’s at an all time high of $6).

In China, the price of pork, a politically sensitive commodity, will skyrocket, because pigs are fed corn. The Communist government will step in and try to ration swine. That will create a robust black market in “the other white meat,” which will allow the rich will buy up all the pork. The poor will be reminded of China’s gross inequality and they will start to agitate.