2008

Reaching an timely agreement on setting up an effective global climate protection system will be "very difficult", a senior UN official said on Wednesday ahead of the Budapest session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Angry protesters, riot police, mass demonstrations, arrests for disorderly conduct — it hasn't  exactly been smooth sailing for the Olympic-torch relay. If people are looking for another reason to be pissed at China, how about this: By the time this pyro parade is over, it will have produced about 11 million pounds of carbon emissions.

Part of the law is fanciful. It calls for the creation of 25,000 so-called green jobs by 2020 without specifying where those jobs will come from, or what they will be. In any case, it's ridiculous to think that the government can create thousands of jobs with the flick of a pen, unless we are talking about bureaucrats.

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.

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