French attempts to craft a global warming pact to make the EU a world leader in tackling climate change are gridlocked, with governments unable to agree on how to share the pain and costs of slashing greenhouse gases by 20% within 12 years.
2008
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.
Two hundred years of glacial shrinkage in Alaska, and then came the winter and summer of 2007-2008.
Have you noticed how environmental campaigners almost inevitably say that not only is global warming happening and bad, but also that what we are seeing is even worse than expected?
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
I plan to address this more in a future post, but it's important to get this information out now, and we have my colleague David Bass at the John Locke Foundation to thank. What is happening is an ACORN-ification of state air quality regulators, where directors of those agencies are hassling the businesses and industries they regulate into reporting their greenhouse gas emissions (and to pay for the privilege of doing so) to The Climate Registry. What is then created is an atmosphere of pressure, even though these air quality regulators claim participation is "voluntary."
In his story today David illustrates how the scam works, focusing on North Carolina's role:
The N.C. Division of Air Quality paid $100,000 to help fund The Climate Registry, a California-based group, and aggressively recruited companies to join as pollutant reporters, public records show.
Records also show that Brock Nicholson, deputy director of DAQ, played a key role in launching the nonprofit. Nicholson, who is on The Climate Registry’s board of directors and executive committee, traveled on behalf of the registry, charged all his costs to DAQ, and tried to recruit surrounding states to join and pay membership fees….
In addition, air quality officials conducted a recruitment seminar last year at (the NC) [Department of Environment and Natural Resources’] offices in Raleigh aimed at persuading companies to join. Nicholson also sent a letter on DENR stationery to more than 3,000 entities in North Carolina, many of them DAQ-regulated companies, asking them to sign on.
So, even though greenhouse gases are not regulated, state air quality agencies are pressuring businesses to report their emissions anyway because of the expectation (and hope) that they soon will be regulated. As the Locke Foundation's vice president for research, Roy Cordato, said, "These are companies that, in may cases, the Division of Air Quality holds the power of life and death over through its emissions permitting process." Think these businesses might believe they get greater favor by signing on to the Climate Registry?
Getting companies to join also turns up the heat on the federal government to implement such regulations, with another environmentalist's justification chit being, "Well, we're already doing it anyway, so you might as well…" The strategy also helps in the case that businesses "voluntarily" turn over otherwise irrelevant data for their environmentalist opponents to use (with the Clean Air Act? The Endangered Species Act?) as a litigation club against them.
As I mentioned earlier, North Carolina is not the only state doing this. In fact, all but a handful are participating — just look at the Climate Registry's list of board members, which includes the air quality regulation official from every state (and Canadian province) that is participating. And what do you have to do to become a board member? Among the requirements (PDF):
- …encourage entities in [state, province or tribe] to voluntarily report their emissions to The Climate Registry…
- Work with The Climate Registry to identify a set of greenhouse gas emissions minimum data quantification standards to be recognized by member states, provinces and tribes in both voluntary and mandatory reporting and emissions reduction programs
- Work to incorporate these minimum data quantification standards into any mandated greenhouse gas reporting and emissions reduction program
- Develop a nationally recognized platform for credible and consistent greenhouse gas emissions reporting
- Broad Engagement: Conduct outreach to other states and tribes and potential reporting entities
The stage is being set for a fight on this front in all three branches of government, and private businesses are turning over ammunition to their enemies unnecessarily. In North Carolina, already our two largest investor-owned utilities — Progress Energy and Duke Energy — have signed on. They are doing their investors and their customers a disservice.
The financial crisis and a deepening economic downturn are threatening to delay efforts to deal with another pressing global crisis: climate change.
The financial crisis and slumping economic activity are threatening Europe's ambitious plans to slash greenhouse gas emissions, with governments eager to avoid saddling companies with additional burdens.
Representatives of German business have called for a moratorium on any European Union legislation that would impose higher costs on companies at a time when they are grappling with the fallout from the financial crisis.
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.
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.
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