October 2008

Maryland’s Masters of Obstruction

by Paul Chesser, Heartland Institute Correspondent on October 10, 2008

Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch

Apparently I have made a few enemies (surprise!) after my "Axis of Weasels" comment a few weeks ago about the University-Environmentalist-Media complex that disregards a measured, realistic approach to science and economics, especially when it comes to the global warming issue. First the president of the Society of Environmental Journalists accused me of slandering his organization's members (scroll to comments), and now Dave Nemazie of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science wants me to pay an exorbitant amount to obtain documents that pertain to UMCES's collaboration with left-wing activist foundations.

How much? Try somewhere between $11,900 and $14,677 (PDF). How he narrowed it to those precise figures, I don't know. What I asked for were copies (electronically) of all correspondence between UMCES and the four environmental activist groups who either did work on, or paid for, the alarmist report (PDF) that UMCES did for the Maryland Commission on Climate Change. The charges are supposed to represent "a reasonable fee related to the recovery of actual costs that will be incurred in responding to the [records] request." I've been down this road before with the Free (but don't call us Open) State, when I sought records from the Maryland Department of the Environment many months ago.

So, what can we assume about the relationship between UMCES and these environmental activists, based upon the five-figure blockade Nemazie has thrown up? Either:

1. This is a cozy relationship beyond anything we can imagine. That this public institution is influenced by an extremist group like the Town Creek Foundation ("Global climate change may be the most important challenge of our time. Twenty years from now our children and grandchildren will find it hard to understand how we fiddled away a half trillion dollars (and counting) in Iraq as the planet burned") is undoubtedly an embarrassment, thus making it necessary to prevent details of the relationship from becoming public.

Or:

2. That there really is up to $14,677-worth of paper that addresses my inquiry, and it can be presumed that all four activist groups (the others being the World Wildlife Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment) had pretty much total control over the report's contents.

Sometimes it's just more fun to speculate about what the truth is, given limited evidence, than it is to get what you ask for.

UPDATE 4:30 p.m., Oct. 13:

Just received this response from Dave Nemazie after asking how many pages he said were responsive to my request:

Your Maryland PIA request to UMCES dated 11 September 2008 basically seeks nearly all, if not all, communications of the Science and Technical Working Group of the Maryland Commission on Climate Change since its members include representatives from the World Wildlife Fund and National Wildlife Federation. The Science and Technical Working Group of the Maryland Commission on Climate Change had multiple meetings over several months in which comprehensive information including various publications, websites, and drafts were exchanged between members. I estimate that this portion of the request would make up the vast bulk of the response requiring approximately 30,000 pages to fully respond to your request.
 
Please let me know if you would like to narrow your request and I would re-estimate the costs.

Cooler Heads Digest

by William Yeatman on October 10, 2008

in Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

Five-Star Green Hypocrisy
Steven Milloy, FoxNews, 9 October 2008

Michigan Sacrifices for the Climate
Henry Payne, Planet Gore, 9 October 2008

Putin’s Useful Idiots
William Yeatman, Foreign Policy, 8 October 2008

Failure To Communicate
Max Schulz, NRO, 8 October 2008

Energy Department Warns of Higher Energy Bills
H Josef Herbert, AP, 8 October 2008

The Greening of Thomas Friedman
William Tucker, American Spectator, 6 October 2008

EU: Saving the Economy or Saving Green Dreams
Joshua Chaffin, Financial Times, 5 October 2008

News You Can Use
Blackouts Imminent?

The U. S. faces the prospect of demand-driven blackouts as soon as 2009, according to a report issued last week by the NextGen Energy Council. The study, “Lights Out in 2009?,” says that U.S. base-load generation capacity reserve margins "have declined precipitously to 17 percent in 2007, from 30-40 percent in the early 1990s."  A 12-15 percent capacity reserve margin is the minimum required to ensure reliability and stability of the nation’s electricity system.  Compounding this capacity deficiency, the projected U.S. demand in the next ten years is forecast to grow by 18 percent, far exceeding the projected eight percent growth in baseload generation capacity between now and 2016.

Inside the Beltway
Dingell Unveils Climate Plan
CEI’s Myron Ebell

Representatives John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Rick Boucher (D-Va.) this week released a 461-page draft bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Their cap-and-trade proposal is full of detailed plans for distributing and auctioning the rationing coupons. The most obvious difference between it and most of the other cap-and-trade bills that have been introduced in this Congress is that the targets start out easy before reaching roughly the same level by 2050. The Dingell-Boucher draft would start reducing emissions in 2012 to reach a target of six percent below 2005 levels by 2020, then 44% below by 2030 and 80% below by 2050.

Since Dingell is Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Boucher is Chairman of the subcommittee of jurisdiction, this is where the debate will start in the 111th Congress. However, Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), and Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) have attracted a lot of support in the House Democratic Caucus for a plan with much more ambitious targets.   

The Debate
What’s the Difference?
CEI’s Myron Ebell

This week’s debate between the presidential candidates again offered slim pickings on global warming and energy. There was one question specifically about global warming, while energy prices and energy security came up briefly in several contexts.

Senator John McCain (R-Az.) actually began his answer to the first question by saying that the solution to the financial crisis was energy independence. “Now, I have a plan to fix this problem and it has got to do with energy independence.” 

Neither candidate brought up global warming as a major problem that needed to be addressed by the next President until asked about it. Both then agreed that it was a huge challenge that had to be faced. McCain said that he would solve it and address our energy problems by building lots of new nuclear plants. Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said that he would solve it by creating five million new green jobs. Obama also denied that he was against new nuclear power plants, clean coal technology, or more offshore oil production.

Obama said that McCain had voted against subsidies for alternative fuels 23 times.  McCain said that the reason he did that was because those bills were loaded down with billions of dollars for the oil companies. Obama also mentioned his plan to end all oil imports from the Middle East within ten years by spending $150 billion on researching and developing alternative energy. 

While Senator McCain has been the leader in the Senate on promoting cap-and-trade legislation for the past six years and Senator Obama supports cap-and-trade, neither mentioned cap-and-trade during the debate. The major economic and environmental issue of the decade thus remains ignored and undebated in the campaign. The American people might be in for a surprise next year.

I am reminded of Governor George Wallace’s comment on the Democratic and Republican Parties when he ran for President in 1968 as a third party candidate.  At least on global warming and energy issues, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between McCain and Obama.

Gore (and McCain) Hijinks
CEI’s Myron Ebell

Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate for President, said last week that he would ask former Vice President Al Gore, Jr. to help lead the U. S. effort to negotiate a new international global warming treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of 2012. The Democratic candidate, Senator Barack Obama, did not make a similar pledge.

Around the World
EU Climate Plan in Limbo

In March 2007, EU member states pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20% by 2020, and the EU Commission (the executive branch of the EU) has since proposed a skeleton strategy to meet the 2020 target.

Substantial disagreement among member states exists for almost every component of the Commission’s plan, and as a result, Brussels has postponed decisions on virtually all of the important issues, most important among them: Which economic sectors in which countries will pay what?

The European Parliament (the legislative branch of the EU) tried to partially answer that question on Tuesday, when it endorsed a proposal that would force utilities to buy 100 % of their emissions quotas from an auction starting in 2013.

The Parliament’s recommendation, if adopted, would make the use of coal to generate electricity much more expensive. That’s why Poland, which gets 95% of its electricity from coal, now leads a group of six coal-dependent states, including Greece, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, that are trying to thwart the 2013 emissions auctions with a blocking minority. Without coal, these states fear increasing energy dependence on Russia.

Meanwhile, the global financial crisis gave pause to some EU member countries in Old Europe. Italy’s environmental minister, Stefania Prestigiacomo told the press that “in this period of international economic difficulties it is absurd that Europe alone should take on a heavy burden of costs to achieve very modest environmental benefits.”

Two weeks ago in Berlin, German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told a conference that “the crisis changes priorities…One cannot rule out that interest in protecting the climate will change because of such a crisis.” German officials have already said that they would exempt domestic energy-intensive industries from the ETS, and Chancellor Angela Merkel has lobbied conspicuously for weaker fuel efficiency regulations to protect Germany’s powerful automakers.

In the Community

The Washington Policy Center  hosted Czech President Vaclav Klaus in Seattle, where he gave a speech on the dangers posed to liberty by environmentalism. A transcript of President Klaus’s remarks are available at the WPC website, here. Earlier, the Cascade Policy Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute and Americans for Prosperity-Oregon co-hosted a lunch and a press conference with President Klaus in Portland.

Capital Research Center has published an interactive list of the “worst environmental prophecies of catastrophic doom.” It is a list of eleven of the most interesting and pointed cases of environmental activists raising the red alert, and the unintended fall out from it.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Iain Murray has a new video,”Squaring the Geopolitical Circle,” that dissects the intractable interstate issues inherent to all global warming mitigation policies.

Last week State Policy Network member Texas Public Policy Foundation hosted Dr. Roy Spencer at a breakfast in Houston. 

Five Star Green Hypocrisy

by William Yeatman on October 9, 2008

in Blog

"Join us on a remarkable 25-day journey by luxury private jet," invites the WWF in a brochure for its voyage to "some of the most astonishing places on the planet to see top wildlife, including gorillas, orangutans, rhinos, lemurs and toucans."

Final Make-Up Applied in North Carolina

by Paul Chesser, Heartland Institute Correspondent on October 9, 2008

Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch

The Center for Climate Strategies and their fellow economic holocaust deniers in North Carolina continued their shenanigans this week as they formally released 56 recommendations to create artificial green jobs at the expense of useful ones. The state's Climate Action Plan Advisory Group (CAPAG — sounds like some kind of garment, doesn't it? "That's one ugly CAPAG you're wearing!") posted its final report this week, which is not dissimilar to what they've done with other state climate commissions.

What is different with North Carolina, as opposed to the other states, is that CCS went out of their way to go to an outside entity — Appalachian State University's (should be called "Alternative") Energy Center — to conduct an additional economic analysis of their recommendations. The reason for this is obvious: my colleagues at the John Locke Foundation have pounded away for over a year at CCS's/CAPAG's willful disregard for current climate science and trends; their absurd economic claims; and their suspect changing of numbers, seemingly on a whim. It got so bad that CCS felt the need to shore up their credibility by overhauling the personnel page on their Web site to emphasis more economics credentials.

Anyway, CCS subcontracted the Energy Center to put lipstick on their pig, and the ASU gang used a distinctly rosy shade (PDF) in doing so. Here's what the swine left on the CAPAG collar: a projection that the state would realize 15,000 new jobs, $565 million in "employee and proprietor income," and $302 million in gross state product by 2020. Compare that to what the Beacon Hill Institute, who analyzed CAPAG's recommendations for the Locke Foundation earlier this year, found: "By 2011, the state would shed more than 33,000 jobs, annual investment would drop by about $502.4 million, real disposable income by more than $2.2 billion, and real state Gross Domestic Product by about $4.5 billion." So I guess the question boils down to, whose analysis do you believe: a political science graduate student's or PhD economists'?

But wait, there's one final knee-slapper: In an effort to legitimize the Energy Center's study, they enlisted Adam Rose to track down six peer reviewers for comment. That wouldn't be so unusual except that Rose is listed by CCS as one of their "team members," and has been paid for work he's done for CCS in the past. So not surprisingly these peer review comments (kept anonymous, and do you really wonder why?) lavished praise on the Energy Center's work:

  • "I find no logical errors and am impressed by the sophistication of the analysis; it is superior to most impact analyses written over the last decade."
  • "I must say that the document is superior to many I see."
  • "There is an abundance of careful and thoughtful work on converting the options to reduce greenhouse gases to some accounting measures."
  • "Two thumbs up!" (oops — clicked on the "Ebert and Roeper" tab by accident)

All in all, a "certified fresh" review if you're projecting a fantasy tale, but if reality is your measuring stick, then you've got splat.

Did Wisconsin Gov James Doyle Violate the Constitution?

by William Yeatman on October 9, 2008

Wisconsin Governor James Doyle (D) last week signed a partnership agreement with the German government to collaborate on renewable energy. Like most global warming statesmanship, the agreement is primarily a public relations stunt, and will produce little substantive policy. It does, however, raise serious legal questions, because Governor Doyle’s climate diplomacy could violate the Compact Clause of the U. S. Constitution.

Michigan Sacrifices for the Planet

by William Yeatman on October 9, 2008

in Blog

Crutzen concedes that sacrificing economic prosperity on the green altar might sound “cruel.” Yes, and the idea that two leading scientists seriously discuss things like vandalism and the benefits of financial meltdown only shows how silly the global warming movement really is.

Shock, Shock … the Climate Catastrophe Lobby is Telling Fibs

by William Yeatman on October 8, 2008

This undoubtedly will shock readers, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has a tendency to shade the truth. And only in one direction. It seems … drumroll, please! … that the member governments have their own agendas and aren't above lying to the people to achieve their ends.

With activists and politicians continuing to push draconian energy control schemes even with no net increase in temperature over the past decade, it is ever more important for the public to understand the myths being presented as facts.

The article is a bit old, but is worth rereading. Writing from Bali, Christopher Monckton, who contribiuted to the 2007 IPCC report, explained:

As a contributor to the IPCC’s 2007 report, I share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the British House of Lords – through our hereditary element the most independent-minded of lawmakers – profoundly disagree on fundamental scientific grounds with both the IPCC and my co-laureate’s alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth, which won this year’s Oscar for Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror.

Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer weather.

My contribution to the 2007 report illustrates the scientific problem. The report’s first table of figures – inserted by the IPCC’s bureaucrats after the scientists had finalized the draft, and without their consent – listed four contributions to sea-level rise. The bureaucrats had multiplied the effect of melting ice from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets by 10.

The result of this dishonest political tampering with the science was that the sum of the four items in the offending table was more than twice the IPCC’s published total. Until I wrote to point out the error, no one had noticed. The IPCC, on receiving my letter, quietly corrected, moved and relabeled the erroneous table, posting the new version on the internet and earning me my Nobel prize.

The shore-dwellers of Bali need not fear for their homes. The IPCC now says the combined contribution of the two great ice-sheets to sea-level rise will be less than seven centimeters after 100 years, not seven meters imminently, and that the Greenland ice sheet (which thickened by 50 cm between 1995 and 2005) might only melt after several millennia, probably by natural causes, just as it last did 850,000 years ago. Gore, mendaciously assisted by the IPCC bureaucracy, had exaggerated a hundredfold.

Recently a High Court judge in the UK listed nine of the 35 major scientific errors in Gore’s movie, saying they must be corrected before innocent schoolchildren can be exposed to the movie. Gore’s exaggeration of sea-level rise was one.

Others being peddled at the Bali conference are that man-made “global warming” threatens polar bears and coral reefs, caused Hurricane Katrina, shrank Lake Chad, expanded the actually-shrinking Sahara, etc.

Failure to Communicate

by William Yeatman on October 8, 2008

in Blog

Drudge called it “B-O-R-I-N-G.” Mark Steyn was even more brutal, labeling last night’s presidential debate a “horrible travesty” for the excruciating tedium created by the event’s artificiality. Given the dreariness generated by the two candidates and moderator Tom Brokaw, last evening’s showdown was a travesty for any viewer who stuck it out to the bitter end.

Putin’s Useful Idiots

by William Yeatman on October 8, 2008

It is said that Vladimir Lenin once called Soviet sympathizers in Western countries “useful idiots” for unwittingly advancing the cause of revolutionary Russia. Were the Bolshevik leader alive today, he might apply the same label to German environmentalists, whose influence over their country’s energy policy has been an inadvertent, but essential factor in Moscow’s post-Cold War rise.

EU Climate Plan Further Disintegrates

by William Yeatman on October 8, 2008

The European Union’s promise to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 20% by 2020 looks doubtful as member countries increasingly dilute their climate strategies to allay economic concerns.

Half the 2020 emissions reductions are supposed to come from the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), a continent-wide cap-and-trade scheme that would cover industrial users and suppliers of energy. The ETS occurs over three phases, but all the significant emissions cuts have been postponed until Phase Three, which starts in 2012. Yet phase three is already in dire straits, four years before it is set to begin. Two weeks ago, Germany, the EU’s largest economy, indicated that it will opt-out of phase 3 of the ETS, by granting heavy industry free carbon permits after 2013. In defending the policy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that she “could not support the destruction of German jobs through an ill-advised climate policy”.

In calling for industrial exemptions, Germany has been joined by Poland, which gets 95% of its electricity from coal. Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic have also expressed reservations about phase three of the ETS.

A major portion of the 2020 target would also derive from stringent fuel efficiency standards applied to all EU countries. This week, however, France proposed an auto emissions plan that both postpones and weakens the existing regulations. The French plan was hashed out with Germany over the summer, and it reflects the concerns of German’s powerful automaker lobby.

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