January 2009

Iowa
Iowa Governor Chet Culver (D) and leading legislators from both political parties have indicated that they are unlikely to consider seriously the 56 greenhouse gas reduction recommendations made by the state’s Climate Change Advisory Council because of the $4.8 billion price tag.

Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) has re-introduced the gigantic omnibus land grab bill from last year.  It’s now S. 22  in the 111th Congress.  It’s a terrible bill with dozens of awful titles, but the worst is the one that’s relevant to energy and global warming policies.  A provision in Title III would withdraw 1.2 million acres of the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming from oil and gas production.  This is an area with high gas potential.  Natural gas is in tight supply, production continues to decline in many fields, and it’s the only alternative to coal that produces much electricity.  So naturally the first item of business for Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in the 111th Congress is to pass a bill that will constrict gas production.  Curiously, one of Wyoming’s Senators, John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), was supportive of the bill in the last Congress.  

The government is to close a key support programme for renewable energies almost a year before it launches a new regime, creating a funding black hole that the industry has warned could lead to thousands of green job losses.

In his speech on the stimulus package Thursday, President (Elect) Obama promised to double alternative energy use in three years. How likely is this?

Well, for a start we don’t use much alternative energy to begin with – slightly less than 7 quadrillion BTU of the 101 quads we use as a nation annually. Of those 7, 2 quads are related to the use of wood as fuel, something which is not normally viewed as environmentally friendly, and 2.5 are hydropower, an energy source once thought as environmentally friendly but now usually opposed as destructive. Of the remaining 2.5 quads, biofuels provide about 1 quad, and biofuels have become increasingly controversial and opposed – rightly – by many green environmental groups (source for these figures here).

So the more “acceptable” forms of renewable energy – “waste” biomass, geothermal, wind and solar – only provide just over 1 quad between them. Wind provides 319 trillion BTU and solar just 80. If these two forms of renewable energy are going to form the basis of Obama’s promise, the increase in scale needed to provide 7 quads between them in three years is simply inconceivable. A seventeenfold increase in these forms of energy would be a vast achievement, and one that would surely be trailed in the speech. It would presumably also require at least a seventeenfold increase in subsidies ($740 million in 2007 – see Table ES5 here) to about $13 billion annually, about the same as the Detroit bailout.

It seems likely, therefore, that, while there will be some wind and solar investment, perhaps some significant amounts, to meet a target of an extra 7 quads of energy, the only feasible source that is scalable to the intense required will be biofuels, but even that will require a massive expansion, and one that will have significant implications for crop prices, food prices and land use. The consequences may prove unacceptable to all but the agribusiness lobby and farm state politicians.

So it seems likely that the target of doubling the use of renewable energy does not actually refer to the full range of renewables at all, but just to those “acceptable” alternatives. This would imply that the target is only 1 extra quad of renewable energy by 2011, which, while it would represent a significant expansion of those industries, would amount to just a “drop in the bucket” of total US energy use. And, as we hear in the debate over ANWR every time it comes up, a “drop in the bucket” is just not worth doing…

It appears that this part of the stimulus package is, at most, a shibboleth.

President-elect Barack Obama gave a wide-ranging speech on economic policy this week in which he said that, “To finally spark the creation of a clean energy economy, we will double the production of alternative energy in the next three years.”  That seems a modest goal considering how little of the energy we use is currently produced by alternative sources such as ethanol, windmills, and solar panels.  But it’s a ridiculous goal in such a short time considering the capacity limitations of these industries and the higher cost to consumers and taxpayers of the energy that will be produced.  Obama also said that he would begin building a smart electricity grid and require that 75% of federal buildings and two million private houses be modernized in terms of energy efficiency within two years.  Funding for those goals will probably be part of the stimulus spending bill that is currently being cooked up.

Well, that compendium of the Left's snits and snivels, The Huffington Post, has managed to embarrass itself even more aggressively than is their norm. It published a nice walk-through of the skeptic’s view of manmade warming and, I have it on very good authority, having informed world-class meteorologist and hostess Arianna Huffington of its skeptical nature up-front.

Oops. What's that, you say? Ms. Huffington is not a world-class meteorologist? In fact, she's not a meteorologist at all? In fact, she's not even a climatologist? Or a geologist? Or a geographer? Or an atmospheric chemist? Or an atmospheric physicist? Or a physicist or chemist of any kind? She's not even a scientist?! But, wait, the objection to the piece, in HuffPo’s scramble to appease the greens who assailed her for allowing heretical (to the Green Church) images to scald the eyes of the faithful, frothed about the impropriety of a non-scientist opining on the issue (coughGore!Obama!RedfordDiCapriocough). He was a PR guy, Oh, these kids and their pranks!

The author, Harold Ambler, wrote a thoughtful treatment of the issue – particularly given HuffPo standards, as revealed by our PR friend – which made its way somehow through Huffington Post's editors for publication. (Can it possibly be that someone both qualify as an editor at HuffPost and find the piece was well reasoned? Well, yes…until the Left flips out about it.) AGW critics quickly took note, amazed that HuffPost would publish such a piece. Senate Environment and Public Works minority staffer Marc Morano called attention to it in a widely circulated e-mail.

So HuffPost placed a piece with the standard forms of argument in, er … response … to carefully reasoned critiques of AGW: diminish the author (preferably rather personally), appeal to authority without making the argument (and indeed rather ignore the substance of what was written), spout off about the still-undisclosed overwhelming majority of scientists who somehow told this fellow that they disagree, the science is in, the argument's closed. (For a refresher on these forms of argument, flip back to the section on informal fallacies in H.W.B. Joseph's Introduction to Logic.)

Enter Ms. Huffington, owner and editor of HuffPost to arbitrate the dispute she caused by personally agreeing to take a piece by someone she knows to be a climate realist. She explains:

Harold Ambler reached out to me about posting a critical piece on Al Gore and the environment. We are always open to posts that present opinions contrary to HuffPost's editorial view . . . . I myself have written extensively about the global warming crisis, and have been highly critical of those who refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific evidence.

When Ambler sent his post, I forwarded it to one of our associate blog editors to evaluate, not having read it. I get literally hundreds of posts a week submitted like this and obviously can't read them all — which is why we have an editorial process in place. The associate blog editor published the post. It was an error in judgment. I would not have posted it. Although HuffPost welcomes a vigorous debate on many subjects, I am a firm believer that there are not two sides to every issue, and that on some issues the jury is no longer out. The climate crisis is one of these issues. [emphasis added]

So there you have it. Off with the piece’s head, and that of any claims it may have made! Upon further review, balance is bias, dissent and discourse are dangerous (and surely not patriotic!) and she, for one, will have no part of them. At least, when the issue is necessary for so much of her team’s agenda. Ignore that the attempt to document the alleged overwhelming scientific consensus on AGW failed, that an actual survey of climate scientists found there was no such consensus, and that a  survey of relevant scientific publications shows no consensus but a wide range of positions, with growing movement over recent years against AGW. Ignore the 31,000+ scientist signers of the http://www.petitionproject.org/. (“oh, those old names” or else “never heard of him!”, as the case requires, but remember that all are lesser beings on the matter than Al Gore by virtue … of…disagreeing with… us).

Ignore the 100+ meteorologists and other climate-related scientists who signed the Leipzig Declaration. Ignore the 100+ scientists (including 73 Nobel Prize winners) who signed the Heidelberg Appeal. Ignore the 47 atmospheric scientists who signed the Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming. Ignore the 100 scientists who signed  an open letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon rejecting AGW. Ignore the over 650 scientists, including many contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who have published their rejections of AGW. (These total far more than the number of scientists with any meaningful involvement with the IPCC's Scientific Assessment and its more alarmist and more widely read Summary for Policymakers.)

We have it on Ms. Huffington's and Al Gore's impeccable authority as mystics, alchemists, whatever, they’re the right kind of scientists, they know that’s something is so if they say it’s so: There is no debate, there is no evidence against AGW, and, for the sake of the planet, PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!