2008

EU Climate Policy Update

by William Yeatman on November 4, 2008

The European Union’s climate agenda further disintegrated this week after member states watered down a major renewable energy law. In 2007, EU countries agreed to ambitious greenhouse gas emissions cuts of 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. In early 2008, the EU Commission developed a comprehensive strategy to achieve the emissions targets, which must be accepted by member states before it is implemented. Like all policies that call for significant greenhouse gas emissions reductions, the EU Commission’s climate plan is economically harmful—Open Europe, an independent think tank, estimates that the Commission’s policies would cost the EU $93 billion a year by 2020. With that much at stake, member states have spent all of 2008 protecting their economic interests by weakening the Commission’s strategy with exceptions and exemptions.

First, Germany and France agreed to weaken the fuel efficiency standards in order to protect Germany’s powerful auto industry. Next, Germany unilaterally declared that it would exempt its energy-intensive industries from the most onerous provisions of a continent wide cap-and-trade scheme. Last month, Poland led a group of coal-dependent states including Greece, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, opposing the Commission’s proposal to price coal out of the electricity generation market by 2013. These rebellious states have since been joined by Italy, which fears that the EU’s climate plan would harm the competitiveness of Italian industry on the international market. Together, these states won the right to amend the Commission’s plan to make it more “cost-effective.”

And this week, member states significantly weakened a directive to generate 20% of the EU’s energy from renewables by 2020 by allowing for a progress review in 2014. The review would allow member states to pull the plug on the directive if the directive proves too expensive because the technology is not yet there.

Attack of the Energy Rationers

by William Yeatman on November 4, 2008

in Blog

Whomever is elected tomorrow will face — and probably support — the next enviro-whacko catastrophe, the Dingell-Boucher bill. If you liked McCain’s global warming bill, you’ll just love this. 

Are Evangelicals On the Global Warming Bandwagon?

by William Yeatman on November 3, 2008

in Blog

For more than three years, a number of politicians and media observers have prophesied about the fracturing of the coveted “Evangelical Vote” over the issue of environmental stewardship.  And during the same period, a handful of evangelicals have toiled to persuade the faithful that manmade global warming is such a serious threat that it deserves top priority in their social witness.

Obama: Electricity Bills to “Skyrocket”; Power Plants To Go “Bankrupt”

by William Yeatman on November 3, 2008

In a January 17, 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Senator Obamasaidthat “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under his plan to fight global warming.  He also said that under his plan, “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them.”  “An Obama spokesperson said that Obama’s remarks were taken out of context.” 

Is there something in the water in San Francisco that makes officials utter explosive disclosures?   Earlier, Obama attracted controversy for saying at a San Francisco fundraiser that people in “small towns in Pennsylvania” and Ohio “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

Schadenfreude

by William Yeatman on November 3, 2008

T Boone Pickens has a simple business plan: convince the government to force Americans to buy his wind power and natural gas, so he can get rich.

Already in Texas, he benefits from a law that requires that Texans get 20% of the electricity from wind power—T Boone’s wind power. He even convinced the State to spend $5 billion in taxpayer money on transmission lines to deliver his wind power to consumers.

In California, he is spending millions on Prop 10, which would mandate that the Golden State use natural gas—T Boone’s natural gas—in public vehicles. If Prop 10 passes, the real windfall for T Boone would be the scores of millions that the State spends on a compressed natural gas (CNG) infrastructure (fuel trucks, fuel stations and the like), which could pave the way towards greater use of CNG—and greater profits for T Boone.

But T Boone’s biggest score is the “Pickens Plan,” his vision to have Congress force all of America to get a fifth of its electricity from wind energy—T Boone’s wind energy—and then forcing Americans to use natural gas—T Boone’s natural gas—to fuel their cars and trucks. T Boone is spending more than $50 million on a public relations campaign for his Plan, but that’s chump change compared to billions his Plan would make him if Congress heeded his wishes.

Obviously, I don’t care for T Boone’s business model. That’s why I derive no small amount of pleasure from an article in the Charlotte Observer that reports T Boone’s mega-wind project (which is being built only because it benefits from mega-mandates and mega-government subsidies) is in big trouble because of the economic crisis. The tough economic environment means that demand for energy is lower, so natural gas prices have dropped, thereby making wind energy even less economically viable that it is already. Financing is also more difficult to obtain, which is bad news for T Boone’s capital intensive wind farms.

As a result, T Boone has scaled back plans significantly.

The Week in D. C.

by William Yeatman on November 3, 2008

Washington remains quiet as everyone awaits the election returns. Environmentalists are talking about making any second stimulus bill that may be taken up by Congress in its lame duck session (scheduled for the week of November 17th) into a “green stimulus” package. Lots of new money for make-work “green jobs,” new and higher subsidies for “green energy,” and so on. It should be fun to watch the pushing and shoving at the trough, but the outcomes of these spending sprees are always depressing. It’s hard to see how wasting money and replacing lower-cost energy with higher-cost energy can revive the economy.

T. Boone Pickens will probably be back in Washington rattling his tin cup. The Charlotte Observer reports that Pickens is scaling back his plans to build a wind farm in Texas because of a lack of financing.   

The other way of looking at a “green stimulus” is that it indicates that the air has been sucked out of the climate issue by the credit crunch and looming recession. Cap-and-trade legislation now looks less likely to be a front-burner issue in the next Congress. So the environmental pressure groups are left to scramble for anything they can get. They should take comfort in the fact that global greenhouse gas emissions are certain to decline for as long as the recession lasts.

Save Us, Please, from Those That Would Save the Earth

by William Yeatman on November 3, 2008

in Blog

Snow fell on London this last week, a beautiful blanket of snow — the first to fall in the month of October since the year of grace 1922 — while the Mother of Parliaments gave third reading to an extraordinary piece of legislation, which will put a huge new bureaucracy in place to monitor and fight global warming, sucking taxes from a shrinking British economy.

China Sends Global Warming Ransom Note

by William Yeatman on November 3, 2008

China has now destroyed Western hopes for a new global warming agreement, just weeks before global talks in Poland aimed at writing a successor for the Kyoto Protocol- which expires in 2012. China has attached a ransom not to its Polish meeting RSVP: They might go along with a new warming pact if the rich countries agree to hand over 1 percent of their GDP-about $300 billion per year-to finance the required non-fossil, higher-cost energy systems the West wants the developing countries to use.

Anti-Energy Collaborative Effort in Colorado

by Paul Chesser, Heartland Institute Correspondent on October 31, 2008

in Politics

Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch

Over at my Web site I've posted a long, blow-by-blow account of how Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter and his administration repeatedly enlisted the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to pay for his global warming alarmist agenda (a "new energy economy") and for his efforts to keep the federal Bureau of Land Management from leasing for oil and gas exploration on the Roan Plateau. It's sometimes a dry recitation but there are a ton of documents linked that I obtained from the governor's office and from CDNR.

The quick-'n-dirty summary: Almost immediately after he took office Ritter had a "Climate Action Plan" he wanted to pursue, which included two new positions in his administration: a cabinet-level climate policy adviser to create "a bold and visionary climate action policy," and a liaison to the Public Utilities Commission to "develop a climate-wise utility policy." He asked for, and got, two annual grants from Hewlett for $200,000 ($400,000 total) to fund the positions. Ritter worked through Hewlett's environmental program director Hal Harvey — a far-left, Obama-supporting (and -contributing) environmental extremist who founded the Energy Foundation and is president of the crackpot enviro/population control-advocating New-Land Foundation — to pay for his climate people. I guess the state budget process would not come up with the money fast enough for Ritter.

Within a few months Ritter had another environmental cause to fight: obstructing and delaying the Bureau of Land Management from leasing the rights to oil and natural gas exploration on the rich Roan Plateau. It had been ten years already since BLM was given the mandate to lease the Naval Oil and Shale Reserves, and it was finally ready to start doing so after years of environmental study and review. But that still wasn't long enough for Ritter, his eco-cronies, Reps. Mark Udall and John Salazar, and Sen. Ken Salazar (pictured). All got involved in trying to further delay BLM.

Part of the strategy was for Ritter's administration to make the case for much slower "phased leasing" of acreage on the Roan, as opposed to the BLM's somewhat quicker but still limited and methodical approach. The governor's Department of Natural Resources sought out (and found) a cheap economist who would be willing to put together a vague case that showed phased leasing was a better idea that would reap better revenues for the state. And can you guess who they asked to pay for said cheap economist? Yep — the Hewlett Foundation, with Hal Harvey more than happy to help out. In fact, Harvey wanted to help so much that he gave campaign contributions to both Salazars and Udall as well.

The congressmen worked at the federal level to implement Ritter's phased leasing goals, with Sen. Salazar's legal counsel begging for the suspect economic analysis to buttress his case. But the congressmen's and Ritter's efforts fell short of their goals, as BLM moved forward with the leasing, which netted nearly $114 million for both the federal and state governments — "the highest grossing onshore oil and natural gas lease sale in BLM history in the lower 48 states."

Nevertheless, it's a sorry tale of how environmental extremists will fight together to the death for measures that would cripple our access to our own sources of affordable energy.

Cooler Heads Digest

by William Yeatman on October 31, 2008

in Cooler Heads Digest

In the News

MIT Scientists Baffled by Sudden Rise in Greenhouse Gas
Rick C. Hodgin, TG Daily, 30 October 2008

Green Energy Crashes
Reuters, 30 October 2008

Stranger than Fiction
Brendan O Neil, Planet Gore, 29 October 2008

San Francisco: The Epicenter of Stupid Ideas
Alan Caruba, Canadian Free Press, 26 October 2008

News You Can Use

On October 29, the U. S. broke 168 cold-temperature records and 63 snowfall records. The first snowfall in October in London since 1934 started at about ten PM on October 28, just as the British House of Commons passed a new climate bill that mandates 80% cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Inside the Beltway
CEI’s Myron Ebell

Washington remains quiet as everyone awaits the election returns. Environmentalists are talking about making any second stimulus bill that may be taken up by Congress in its lame duck session (scheduled for the week of November 17th) into a “green stimulus” package. Lots of new money for make-work “green jobs,” new and higher subsidies for “green energy,” and so on.  It should be fun to watch the pushing and shoving at the trough, but the outcomes of these spending sprees are always depressing. It’s hard to see how wasting money and replacing lower-cost energy with higher-cost energy can revive the economy.

T. Boone Pickens will probably be back in Washington rattling his tin cup. The Charlotte Observer reports that Pickens is scaling back his plans to build a wind farm in Texas because of a lack of financing.  

The other way of looking at a “green stimulus” is that it indicates that the air has been sucked out of the climate issue by the credit crunch and looming recession. Cap-and-trade legislation now looks less likely to be a front-burner issue in the next Congress. So the environmental pressure groups are left to scramble for anything they can get. They should take comfort in the fact that global greenhouse gas emissions are certain to decline for as long as the recession lasts.

Political Science
CEI’s Julie Walsh

Climate science has been politicized more thoroughly than most people realize, as Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, enumerates in his recent paper, “Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?” A few revelations from it include:

•    The primary spokesman for the American Meteorological Society in Washington is Anthony Socci, who is neither an elected official of the AMS nor a contributor to climate science. Rather, he is a former staffer for Al Gore.
•    John Firor was the administrative director for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and frequently spoke as an NCAR expert on the dangers of global warming.  But he didn’t mention that he also served as chairman of the board of Environmental Defense,
•    The UK Meterological Office’s board’s chairman, Robert Napier, was previously the chief executive for World Wildlife Fund – UK.
•    Bill Hare, a lawyer and campaign director for Greenpeace, frequently speaks as a scientist representing the Potsdam Institute, one of Germany’s leading global warming research centers.
•    Michael Oppenheimer is now a professor at Princeton University and is often referred to as a leading climate scientist.  Oppenheimer previously occupied the Barbra Streisand Chair at Environmental Defense.  His scholarly publication record does not include any significant contributions to climate science.
•    The myth of scientific consensus is perpetuated in the web’s Wikipedia where climate articles are edited by William Connolley, who regularly runs for office in England as a Green Party candidate. No deviation from the politically correct line is permitted.
•    The National Academies of Science had a “Temporary” Nominating Group for the Global Environment which bypassed the usual procedures for vetting candidates and thereby provided a back door for the election of candidates who were prominent environmental activists but otherwise fell short of the qualifications necessary for election. Lindzen details how many of these new Academicians exerted control over the NAS and were elected to high positions.

More highlights from Lindzen’s paper will be noted in future issues. 

Around the World

EU

The European Union’s climate agenda further disintegrated this week after member states watered down a major renewable energy law. In 2007, EU countries agreed to ambitious greenhouse gas emissions cuts of 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. In early 2008, the EU Commission developed a comprehensive strategy to achieve the emissions targets, which must be accepted by member states before it is implemented. Like all policies that call for significant greenhouse gas emissions reductions, the EU Commission’s climate plan is economically harmful—Open Europe, an independent think tank, estimates that the Commission’s policies would cost the EU $93 billion a year by 2020. With that much at stake, member states have spent all of 2008 protecting their economic interests by weakening the Commission’s strategy with exceptions and exemptions.

First, Germany and France agreed to weaken the fuel efficiency standards in order to protect Germany’s powerful auto industry. Next, Germany unilaterally declared that it would exempt its energy-intensive industries from the most onerous provisions of a continent wide cap-and-trade scheme. Last month, Poland led a group of coal-dependent states including Greece, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, opposing the Commission’s proposal to price coal out of the electricity generation market by 2013. These rebellious states have since been joined by Italy, which fears that the EU’s climate plan would harm the competitiveness of Italian industry on the international market. Together, these states won the right to amend the Commission’s plan to make it more “cost-effective.”

And this week, member states significantly weakened a directive to generate 20% of the EU’s energy from renewables by 2020 by allowing for a progress review in 2014. The review would allow member states to pull the plug on the directive if the directive proves too expensive because the technology is not yet there.

China

Last week the EU signaled that they expect significant greenhouse gas emissions reductions from developing countries before the EU will sign onto an international treaty to fight climate change. This week, China countered. On Monday, Chinese officials announced that China would cooperate, but only if developed nations spend 1% of their collective GDP—about $300 billion—on the transfer of clean energy technologies to developing countries. To lend urgency to this demand, China also released a white paper warning of the catastrophic impact that climate change has already had on the Middle Kingdom. China has long held that historical emissions from developed countries are responsible for climate change, so the implication of the government study is that wealthy countries have harmed China.

UK

On Monday, the British House of Commons passed the Climate Change Bill, marking a solemn undertaking to reduce British emissions by 80% by mid-century (unless decided otherwise) by the clear majority of 403 to 3. The bill is designed to make hydrocarbon energy sources like oil and gas more expensive, so that consumers use less and emit less. Yesterday, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) demanded that oil companies reduce the price of gasoline.

In the Community

The Texas Public Policy Foundation this week released a major study on wind energy, “Texas Wind Energy: Past, Present, and Future,” by Drew Thornley. To read the document, click here.

 

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