2009

Thanks to a regulatory assault by the Obama administration, the coal industry’s very existence is now in doubt. On the demand side, the EPA is trying to use the Clean Air Act to squeeze coal out of the energy business (to learn more, click here). On the supply side, Obama’s EPA wants to use the Clean Water Act to close coal mines.

It’s unprecedented-never before has the government acted so forcefully to destroy an American industry this large. All so Obama can placate the global warming alarmists for whom coal is evil.

Yesterday, my colleague Myron Ebell spoke at the 2009 Coal Summit in Bluefield Virginia. More than 150 representatives from businesses all along the coal supply chain were there, and their spirit in the face of adversity was heartening. There is no quit among Appalachian coal miners-they are determined to fight.

To read more about the coal summit, here’s a write up on the event from the Bluefield Daily Telegraph.

When Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), came out in 2006, I expected to see some hard-hitting criticism by scientists of Gore’s unfounded alarmism and by economists of his blithe disregard of the human suffering that energy rationing (cap-and-trade) and mandatory reliance on costly and under-performing renewable energy would inflict on low-income households and poor countries. However, with a few notable exceptions, Gore’s film got mostly rave reviews, earned an Academy Award, and later helped bag him the Nobel Prize.

Because few specialists in the science and economics fields took Gore to task, I jumped into the breach. At first, I thought I could write an adequate expose of Gore’s errors and exaggerations in about 20 pages. But as I dug into the book version of AIT, I found that nearly all of Gore’s assertions about climate change and climate policy were either one-sided, misleading, exaggerated, speculative, or just plain wrong. My critique-published by CEI in March 2007 under the title Al Gore’s Science Fiction: A Skeptic’s Guide to An Inconvenient Truth [1]-grew to 150 pages.

I gave several talks based on this research, including an hour-long presentation on C-SPAN [2]and a minute and fifteen seconds of fame on the Oprah Winfrey Show [3],* along with several video shorts [4]produced by CEI.

Conversations with friends and colleagues persuaded me, though, that the best strategy was to fight fire with fire-produce our own “documentary” about global warming.

We teamed up with Jared Lapidus, a talented young New York-based filmmaker. Jared and I interviewed over 20 experts during 2008 and early 2009. The result is a film titled Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself. To view the film, click here [1].

Policy Peril reviews the science to assess whether global warming is the “planetary emergency” Al Gore claims it is. We take a critical look at what Gore and other alarmist claim regarding heat waves, global temperature forecasts, air pollution, malaria, hurricanes, ice sheet disintegration, sea level rise, and the paradoxical scenario in which global warming causes a new ice age. We conclude that global warming is not a catastrophe in the making. There is no climate “crisis.”

We then review the human costs-the health and safety risks as well as adverse impacts on jobs and growth-of Al Gore’s proposed “solutions”: carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, fuel economy standards, bans on new coal-fired power plants, mandates to “repower America” with renewable energy, and carbon tariffs.

The film concludes that these policies have potentially devastating impacts on human welfare, especially to the extent they are exported to developing countries-which they must be if the world is to reduce global emissions 50% by 2050, as Gore and others advocate.

Finally, the film examines alternative strategies to enhance human well-being in a warming world. It concludes that “focused adaptation”-solving with proven methods existing health and environmental problems that global warming might aggravate (such as malaria and hunger)-would save far more lives at less cost than Kyoto-style energy rationing schemes. Moreover, the best climate protection strategy for the world is free trade and economic growth.

Over the next two weeks, I’ll be posting one excerpt from the film a day along with comments and links to newer information that has since come out. The global warming debate is very far from “over.” In fact, the scientific, economic, and moral case against Kyoto-style energy rationing keeps getting stronger.

I look forward to your comments on the film, the individual segments, and the supporting materials.

– Marlo Lewis, Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute

[1] Al Gore’s Science Fiction: A Skeptic’s Guide to An Inconvenient Truth: http://ceiondemand.org/2009/07/17/policy-peril-the-truth-about-global-warming/

[2] C-SPAN : http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_climatechange04.htm

[3] Oprah Winfrey Show: http://www.oprah.com/slideshow/oprahshow/oprahshow1_ss_20061205/12

[4] video shorts : http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=askepticsguide

[5] last word : http://www.oprah.com/slideshow/oprahshow/oprahshow1_ss_20061205/13

[6] Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXw17pIuL0w

EDIT: Links to the individual segments.

Part 1 — Heat Waves

Part 2 — Air Polution

Part 3–Hurricanes

Part 4–Sea Level Rise

Last Friday, I launched a blog series on CEI’s film, Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself.  The film is our antidote to Al Gore’s Scare-U-Mentary, An Inconvenient Truth. The blog series highlights 10 short segments of the film, one each day this week and next.

Yesterday’s blog was on the hype about heat waves–the claim that people will drop like flies from heat stress in U.S. cities unless urgent action is taken to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Today’s segment rebuts a related scare–the claim that global warming will sicken and kill thousands of us by increasing air pollution. Click here if you want to watch Policy Peril in its entirety. Click here to watch the segment on air pollution.

Here’s the text:

Narrator: But maybe the heat will get us by creating more air pollution. That’s what the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, said in a report titled Heat Advisory. It sounds plausible because smog forms when emissions of nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds bake in the heat of the Sun. However, the NRDC report is fundamentally flawed.

Joel Schwartz (American Enterprise Institute): NRDC uses emissions from 1996 to “predict” ozone levels, smog levels, in the 2050s. So we’re already below the emissions of 1996, and emissions continue to drop because of fleet turnover to cleaner vehicles, because power plants are getting cleaner. And most of those emissions are going to be gone even in about 20 years. And in the 2050s there’s going to be hardly any pollution in the air. But NRDC assumes we’re going to have 1996 emissions levels in 2050.

Narrator: Like heat-related mortality, air pollution levels have fallen as cities have warmed. U.S. air quality should keep improving regardless of climate change.

Commentary

NRDC’s Heat Advisory report (September 2007) claims that, under a likely global warming scenario, the number of “bad air” days” (days when ozone levels exceed the 8-hour health-based air quality standard set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) would increase by as much as 155% in some of the 10 cities studied. NRDC further states that, “by mid-century, people living in 50 cities in the eastern United States would see a 68 percent (5.5 day) increase in the average number of days exceeding the health-based 8-hour ozone standard established by EPA.” This means the number of unhealthy (”Red Alert”) days would “double.”

Joel Schwartz masterfully debunked Heat Advisory in two columns published in National Review. In the first column (September 14, 2007), Joel showed that NRDC used 1996 emissions to “predict” ozone levels in the 2050s and 2080s, even though “actual emissions of ozone-forming pollutants are already more than 25% lower than they were in 1996 and will drop another 70%-80%  in just the next 20 years, based on already-adopted and implemented federal requirements.”

Could this be an innocent mistake? Does NRDC not know that laws and regulations already on the books have cut emissions since 1996 and will keep on doing so for decades to come? No way.

As Joel documents, in press release after press release, NRDC enthusiastically applauds various new EPA rules that will dramatically reduce smog-forming emissions from automobiles, diesel trucks, off-road diesel engines, diesel fuel, and power plants.

“Most egregious of all,” Joel comments, “the NRDC report was authored by prominent university and government climate and public health scientists.” These seemingly non-political researchers (Joel names names) lent “the color of their scientific credentials and government and university affiliations” to NRDC’s effort to mislead the public.

Joel also cites a more realistic appraisal of global warming’s impact on air quality–an article in the Journal of Geophysical Research by researchers from NESCAUM (Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management) and Georgia Tech. These analysts project that, from the year 2000 to 2050, “The combined effect of climate change and emissions reductions lead to a 20% decrease (regionally varying from -11% to -28%) in the mean summer maximum daily 8-hour ozone levels over the United States.” They also project a 23% decrease in mean annual fine particulate (PM2.5) concentrations. Joel comments that these estimates are conservative, because “pollutant emissions and ambient levels are dropping much faster than they assume in their study (a fact which I show here). 

The decline in polluting emissions, despite increases in urban summer air temperatures, is quite dramatic, as Joel illustrates in the figures below.

Figure description: Trends in Estimated U.S. Air Pollutant Emissions, 1970-2006. Data Source: U.S. EPA, Air Quality and Emissions – Progress Continues in 2006.

The same story of dramatic progress in reducing emissions “continues in 2008,” as EPA tells us on its Web site.

Percent Change in Emissions

                                                        1980 vs 2008           1990 vs 2008

Carbon Monoxide                              -56                                 -46

Lead                                                     -97                                 -60

Nitrogen Oxides                                -40                                 -35

Volatile Organic Compounds         -47                                 -31

PM 10                                                   -68                                 -38

PM 2.5                                                   NA                                -57

Sulfur Dioxide                                     -56                                 -50

Source: EPA, Emission Trends, http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/aqtrends.html#comparison

Dan Lashof, director of NRDC’s Climate Center, tried to rebut Joel’s critique. He did not challenge Joel’s central points–emissions are already well below 1996 levels, current policies ensure emissions will continue to drop, and, therefore, air quality predictions assuming that 1996 emissions will persist into the 2050s and beyond are completely unrealistic. Instead, Lashof argued that Heat Advisory presents “projections,” not “predictions,” and that the researchers had to use emissions data from an actual year, such as 1996, because “there are no reliable estimates of [ozone] precursor emissions extending to the mid-21st Century.” Moreover, holding emission levels constant is the only way to isolate the effect of global warming on ozone concentrations.

In the second of his National Review columns (September 26, 2007), Joel rips these lame excuses to shreds. He cites several statements in Heat Advisory and the accompanying press release in which NRDC clearly presents its findings as predictions of what will happen in a warming world.

Joel also pokes fun at Lashof’s excuse that NRDC had to use 1996 emissions because who the heck knows what emissions will be 50 years from now. This is emphatically not what NRDC says about the CO2 emissions that allegedly control our climate destiny. Can you even imagine NRDC saying that climate models must use 1996 CO2 emissions to estimate CO2 concentrations in 2050 or 2080 because mid-century estimates of CO2 emissions are uncertain? Joel comments:

Climate activists have no problem trying to force the people of the world to spend trillions of dollars for CO2 reductions based on the presumption that climate models are accurate. But when it comes to ozone, NRDC pleads uncertainty and then chooses increases in future ozone-forming emissions that are grossly at odds with any plausible future scenario. If anything, the statement that “there are no reliable estimates … extending to the mid-21st Century” is far more applicable to greenhouse gas emissions and climate models’ predictive skill than it is for smog-forming emissions.

What about the claim that researchers must hold smog-precursor emissions constant to isolate the global warming impact on future ozone concentrations? EPA offers the same rationale on p. 78 of the Technical Support Document (TSD) for its proposed finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare (EPA’s official response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, 2007). However, the only accurate way to isolate the “global warming effect” on ozone concentrations would be to compare ozone levels in warming and non-warming scenarios based on plausible projections of precursor emissions in the 2020s, 2050s, and 2080s.

Again, EPA would not pay any attention to climate change scenarios that assume 1996 or even 2009 CO2 emissions in 2020, 2050, 0r 2080. So why put any credence in “studies” that assume 1996 ozone precursor emissions in perpetuity even though today’s emissions are already significantly below 1996 emissions? By the 2050s and 2080s, the “global warming effect,” if any, on ozone formation, will likely be negligible. The real point of holding emissions constant is not to isolate a warming effect, but to scare the public.

Those interested in additional information should find the following items useful. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce provides an excellent literature summary on global warming and air pollution in its detailed review of EPA’s endangerment proposal and TSD. Joel Schwartz’s book, No Way Back, explains why air pollution will continue to decline in the decades ahead. Finally, Joel presents his critique of the warming-will-destroy-air-quality scare in this video from the Heartland Institute’s first annual International Conference on Climate Change.

As announced last Friday, each day this week and next I’ll post an excerpt of CEI’s film Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself. The film is our antidote to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth . If you want to watch Policy Peril in its entirety, click here.

Today’s segment is on heat waves. Gore and others claim that global warming will make heat waves more frequent and severe, leading to a massive increase in heat-related mortality. Click here to watch the Policy Peril segment on heat waves.

Here’s the text:

Narrator: We often hear that global warming will increase the frequency and severity of heat waves. People will drop like flies! Sounds plausible, doesn’t it? But wait a minute. Summer air temperatures in U.S. Cities have been rising over the past three decades, in part because cities generate heat islands, which expand as cities grow. Yet heat-related mortality has gone down.

Dr. Patrick Michaels (Cato Institute): Bob Davis and I did some work at UVA [University of Virginia] on heat-related mortality, and published it in the refereed literature, showing that the more frequent heat waves are, the fewer people die. That’s because they adapt. And in the average American city–the average of all American cities–heat-related mortality is going down, significantly, not up.  In fact, in the cities in the southern United States–Phoenix, which has a very old population, Tampa–there’s hardly any heat-related mortality at all.

Narrator: As long as politicians don’t make electricity so costly that low-income households can’t afford to run their air conditioners, heat-related death rates should continue to decline, even in a warming world.

Commentary

In An Inconvenient Truth (p. 75 of the book version), Gore states, “We have already begun to see the kinds of heat waves that scientists say will become more common if global warming is not addressed. In the summer of 2003 Europe was hit by a massive heat wave that killed 35,000 people.”

Gore implies that global warming killed 35,000 people. Yet heat waves have occurred in Europe (and elsewhere) from time immemorial. How does Gore know that global warming caused the 2003 heat wave? Or, if global warming was a contributing factor, how does Gore know how much extra oomph the 2003 heat wave got from global climate change?

In fact, it is impossible to link any single heat wave or other extreme weather event to global climate change.

However, if global warming were responsible for the 2003 Europe heat wave, we would at least expect that, globally, the summer of 2003 would have been a hot one. In fact, the 2003 summer was about average or slightly cooler than average compared to the previous 23 summers.

During June, July and August of 2003, more than half the planet was cooler than the mean temperature of the period from 1979 through 2003. Europe–a tiny fraction of the Earth’s surface–was the only place experiencing unusual heat. See the Figure below.

Figure description: 1000-500 mb thickness temperature anomalies for June, July, and August 2003. Colors (violet to red) indicate standard deviations below, at, and above the mean summer temperature for 1979-2003. Sources: Chase et al., 2006, World Climate Report. 

There is a simpler, natural explantion for Europe’s hot summer: An atmospheric circulation anomaly trapped a bubble of hot dry air over Europe for several weeks. Here is what the United Nations Environment Program–hardly a bunch of global warming skeptics–had to say:

This extreme weather was caused by an anti-cyclone [high pressure system] firmly anchored over the Western European land mass holding back the rain-bearing depressions that usually enter the continent from the Atlantic Ocean. This situation was exceptional in the extended length of time (over 20 days) during which it conveyed very hot dry air from south of the Mediterranean.

Chase et al. (2006), a team of scientists from Colorado and France, found nothing “unusual” about the 2003 Europe heat wave that would indicate a change in global climate conditions. Among their conclusions: 

• Extreme warm anomalies equally, or more unusual, than the 2003 heat wave occur regularly.
• Extreme cold anomalies in the summer months also occur regularly and occasionally exceed the magnitude of the 2003 warm anomaly in standard deviations from the mean.
• Natural variability in the form of El Nino and volcanic eruptions appear to be of much greater importance in causing extreme regional temperature anomalies than a simple upward trend in time.
• Regression analyses do not provide strong support for the idea that regional heat waves are increasing with time.  

The death toll in the Europe 2003 summer heat wave was shockingly high–but part of the blame falls on Europe’s historic distaste for air conditioning and the fact that many able-bodied Europeans go on vacation in August, leaving the elderly and infirm to fend for themselves.

Dr. Patrick Michaels, the expert I interviewed for the Policy Peril segment on heat waves, points out that a heat wave of similar magnitude hit France (the epicenter of the 2003 heat wave) in 2006, yet the death toll was about 2,000 people–almost 4,400 less than the standard weather-mortality model would predict. The reason, Michaels argues, is that the 2003 heat wave taught the French a big fat lesson about air conditioning and spurred public and private action to make people safer:

In response to the tragegy of 2003, the French government implemented the National Heat Wave Plan that included a “set-up of a system of real-time surveillance of health data, compilation of scientific recommendations on the prevention and treatment of heat-related diseases, air conditioning equipment for hospital and retirement homes, drawing up of emergency plans for retirement homes, city-scale censuses of the isolated and vulnerable, visits to those people during the alert periods, and set up of a warming system.” In other words, France adapted to the heat wave by providing information to the population at-large and air conditioning to the most vulnerable. No doubt people were also personally more aware of the dangers of summer heat in 2006 than they were three years earlier.

In the United States, heat-related mortality has been going down, decade by decade, even as urban summer air temperatures have increased.

Figure explanation: Population-adjusted heat-related mortality for 28 maor cities across the United States. Each bar of the histogram for each city represents a different 10-year period. The left bar represents heat-related mortality in the 1960s/70s, the middle bar represents the 1980s, and the right bar is the 1990s. No bar at all (in cities like Phoenix and Tampa) means no statistically significant heat-related mortality during the decade. Source: Davis et al. (2003), Changing heat-related mortality in the United States.

 There is no reason not to expect these trends to continue. Think about it this way. Adaptation is what human beings by nature do. There are very few Eden-like spots on Earth where people can survive and thrive without housing, clothing, and agriculture–all forms of adaptation. In free societies especially, people constantly adapt (innovate, experiment, modify private behavior and public policy) to improve their health, safety, and comfort.

If global warming makes more U.S. cities more like Phoenix or Tampa, we can reasonably anticipate that more cities will have heat-mortality rates like Phoenix and Tampa–practically zero!

For a useful overview of the scientific literature, see the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s comment on EPA’s proposed endangerment finding. The Chamber draws the common-sense conclusion: “Overall, there is strong evidence that populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations” (p. 4).

Air conditioning is one of the great health-enhancing, life-saving technologies of the modern world. Air conditioners run on electricity. What we really have to worry about, especially in a warming world, is that politicians will adopt energy policies–actually, anti-energy policies–that force low-income households to turn off their air conditioners in hot weather.

The cap-and-trade bill Congress is now debating, the Waxman-Markey bill, named for its co-sponsors Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA), would function as a massive energy tax, driving up the cost of gasoline, heating oil, and electricity. A study by the Heritage Foundation finds that Waxman-Markey would increase annual household electricity costs by $468. At the same time, many household incomes would decline as GDP drops by up to $300 billion per year. Similarly, Charles River Associates, in a study for the U.S. Black Chamber of Commerce, estimates that Waxman-Markey would increase electricity prices while decreasing average household purchasing power by $730 in 2015, $800 in 2020, and $830 in 2030. This is a recipe for sickness and death.

It’s just one reason our film is subtitled, “Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself.”

CNN notes that there are “5 freedoms you’d lose in health care reform” as promoted by the Obama Administration: the freedom to choose your doctors, the freedom to choose what’s in your plan, the freedom to keep your existing plan, the freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, and the freedom to choose high-deductible coverage.

Earlier, we described how Obama’s health-care plan would destroy many affordable health-care plans, raise taxes on the middle class, and break Obama’s campaign promises, as well as his recent pledge that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

As CNN notes, “the Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage — including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money — but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can’t have.” “If you prize choosing your own cardiologist or urologist under your company’s Preferred Provider Organization plan (PPO), if your employer rewards your non-smoking, healthy lifestyle with reduced premiums, if you love the bargain Health Savings Account (HSA) that insures you just for the essentials, or if you simply take comfort in the freedom to spend your own money for a policy that covers the newest drugs and diagnostic tests — you may be shocked to learn that you could lose all of those good things under the rules proposed in the two bills” that Congressional leaders have drafted to implement Obama’s plan.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to rush the health-care bill through Congress before most people can even figure out what’s in the bill. That’s how she pushed through Congress the $800 billion stimulus package, which contained hidden provisions that ended welfare reform, and which is now projected to cut the size of the economy “in the long run.” (The stimulus package was supposed to deliver a short-run “jolt” that would quickly lift the economy, but unemployment rose rapidly after its passage, and the package has actually destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, as well as subsidizing welfare and waste.)

The bill may be rewritten at the last moment to provide more giveaways to special interests, like the huge cap-and-trade energy tax that Pelosi recently strong-armed through the House. (As Obama once noted, his version of that tax would make people’s electric bills “skyrocket.”) The energy tax was pushed through before the text of the bill even became available. The bill was over 1090 pages long and contained special interest giveaways to a legion of big corporations and their lobbyists. At the last minute, 300 more pages were added to the bill that few in Congress had even read, and had to be manually inserted into the existing 1000 pages after the bill was passed, based on guesses about where those pages would fit in. Thus, the bill did not even really exist at the time it was passed.

These tax increases are part of a long line of broken promises, such as Obama’s pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” which he flouted with proposed budgets that will explode the national debt through $9.3 trillion in massively increased deficit spending.

Obamacare would also apparently restrict resources for end-of-life care for the elderly, and mandate wasteful end-of-life counseling for the elderly (such as lecturing them about the right to hasten their own death by refusing nutrition).

Earlier, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office gave an honest but “devastating assessment” of the incredibly high cost of the health-care plans backed by Obama, which would cost well over a trillion dollars, to cover just a fraction of the uninsured.

Obama is angry about that truthful conclusion, as well as the CBO’s finding that his wasteful stimulus package will actually reduce the size of the economy “in the long run.” (Obama had claimed that only his stimulus package could save America from “disaster” and “irreversible decline“).

So Obama recently invited CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf, a “Democratic appointee,” to the White House to pressure him to reduce his cost estimates.

It is doubtful that Obamacare would live up to any of Obama’s claims. His other legislation hasn’t. His stimulus package has been a fiasco, as much of the public now realizes: just 25% say it has helped the economy.

And his cap-and-trade energy tax, if passed by the Senate, would cost the economy trillions, while doing little to cut greenhouse gas emissions, since it contains so many special interest giveaways and environmentally-destructive provisions like protections for ethanol subsidies, which harm the environment, destroy forests, and cause world hunger. Meanwhile, Obama has undermined nuclear energy, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions, by wastefully blocking use of the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste disposal site after billions of dollars in taxpayer money had already been spent creating it.

Announcements

The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis today unveiled his new film, Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself. Over the next two weeks, he’ll be posting on globalwarming.org one excerpt from the film a day along with comments and links to newer information that has since come out. The videos present a powerful argument that the global warming debate is very far from “over.”

The Marshall Institute this week released “The Cocktail Guide to Global Warming,” a succinct compendium of replies to questions about climate change.

In the News

The Climate Science Debate Is Just Getting Interesting
Marlo Lewis, MasterRsource.org, 24 July 2009

Cold Shoulder to Climate “Urgency”
George Will, Washington Post, 23 July 2009

NY Mayor as Big a Climate Hypocrite as Gore
Leo Standora, New York Daily, 23 July 2009

Toxic Revenge
Silvia Santacruz, Forbes, 21 July 2009

GOP Targets Cap-and-Trade Supporters
Wall Street Journal, 21 July 2009

Obama’s Wacky Climate Czar
Joseph Abrahams, Fox News, 21 July 2009

Global Warming’s Missing Link
Chris Horner, Energy Tribune, 20 July 2009

Governors Bite Back
Paul Chesser, American Spectator, 20 July 2009

News You Can Use

Department of Inefficient Energy

The Wall Street Journal this week reported on a government audit of the Department of Energy that claims the DOE wasted almost $11 million in taxpayer money in 2009 due to inefficient energy use.

Your Taxpayer Dollars Pay for Alarmist Science
According to a new paper, “Climate Money,” written by Joanne Nova for the Science & Public Policy Institute, the federal government has spent $32 billion on climate research.

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

All Politics Is Local

Senate Democratic leaders said this week that delaying votes on health care legislation until the fall will not derail the global warming express. Sure. Seriously, the question is whether health care will dominate town meetings during the August congressional recess or voters will still be angry about passage of Waxman-Markey. If enough voters still want to give their Senators an earful about cap-and-trade, then my guess is that it will have no momentum in the fall and the leadership will have a hard time rounding up sixty votes for anything related to energy rationing.

A video posted on You Tube of a town meeting that Rep. Michael Castle (R-Del.) held over the Fourth of July recess is instructive in this regard.  Castle was one of the eight Republicans who voted yes on final passage of the Waxman-Markey bill.

A recent whining fundraising appeal from Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense Fund confirms that the House was flooded with calls and e-mails opposing Waxman-Markey: “For some House offices, their calls overwhelmed the switchboard.”  Krupp blames it on an organized conspiracy led by Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and “financed with hundreds of millions of dollars from big polluters.” Too bad he doesn’t mention who those big polluters are. As far as I can tell, many of the biggest companies in the U. S. support cap-and-trade and a couple dozen of them belong to the U. S. Climate Action Partnership. EDF is a member of USCAP and works as a front group for big companies that hope to get rich off the backs of American consumers from the higher energy prices required by cap-and-trade. Hundreds of millions has a nice ring, but does anyone actually believe that the opponents of cap-and-trade have even a tenth of the funding of its supporters?

So here’s hoping that Senators back home in August are going to hear from lots of constituents about Waxman-Markey and what energy rationing will do to them.

A Climate Bill We Can Support

Representative Marsha Blackburn on Thursday filed a discharge petition to bring her bill, H. R. 391, to a vote on the House floor. H. R. 391 would simply prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions using the Clean Air Act.  A discharge petition is used to try to bring a bill to the floor that the chairman of the committee of jurisdiction opposes and won’t permit the committee to vote on. To discharge a bill from committee requires signatures from a majority (218) of House Members, so it’s not easy.

The Waxman-Markey energy-rationing bill that the House passed by a 219-212 vote on June 26th includes pre-emption of the Clean Air Act (albeit a partial and less-than-airtight pre-emption). Thus, the House has already agreed that using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide emissions is a bad idea that needs to be prevented. It could be argued that Members have no reason not to sign the discharge petition to implement a piece of that bill. Doing so could also provide some cover for Members who are being attacked by their constituents for voting for Waxman-Markey.  So although Blackburn’s petition is a long shot, it does present interesting political possibilities.

Around the World

Climate Hero: Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh

Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, this week admonished two diplomatic envoys for insisting that India sacrifice poverty reduction for climate change. During a press conference on Monday, Ramesh told U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that he would “like to make it clear that India’s position is that we are simply not in a position to take on legally binding emission reduction,” after Clinton had pressed for Indian participation in an international effort to reduce emissions.

Yesterday, Ramesh hosted Swedish Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren, who claimed that developed nations were willing to put “money on the table” to help developing nations pay for expensive energy climate policies, but only if developing countries agreed to act, according to the Financial Times. Ramesh dismissed his counterpart’s suggestion, and he even took a shot at alarmist science that predicts the Himalayan glaciers will disappear in 40 years. “Science has its limitation,” Ramesh told Carlgren, “you cannot substitute the knowledge that has been gained by the people living in cold deserts through everyday experience.”

Across the States

California: 1 Step Forward, Two Steps Back

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) and Democratic and Republican leaders of the state legislature agreed this week to a temporary fix for the state’s $26 billion budget deficit.  It includes a provision to allow new oil production within state waters (which extend three miles out from the coastline), which is expected to generate $1.8 billion in royalties over the next ten years plus higher tax receipts from the additional economic activity.

This is quite a change from California’s strong and long-term opposition to drilling in federal offshore areas, even in areas more than fifty miles from shore.  Schwarzenegger wrote a letter to Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.), Chairman of the House Resources Committee, in 2006 opposing Pombo’s bill to open federal offshore areas to oil and gas exploration. The bill would have given States veto power over drilling within fifty miles of their coasts and a share of federal royalties. The bill passed the House, but a big majority of California’s 53 House Members voted against it.

Also this week, the California Small Business Roundtable released a report that estimates that AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act (a climate bill that would reduce California emissions by 25% from current levels through 2020), would cost 1.1 million jobs. The state budget would lose nearly $5.8 billion in taxes.

The Science

New Peer Reviewed Study Throws Cold Water on Alarmist Predictions

Carl Volk
A new paper on climate sensitivity by Drs. Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi of MIT has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters. Their paper compares the observed change in global forcing with the observed change in sea surface temperature to determine that climate sensitivity is low (under 0.5 degrees C for a doubling of CO2) and is dominated by negative feedbacks that work to dampen the effects of increasing CO2. This research runs completely contrary to the conclusions of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and suggests that man-made global warming will be minimal. Lindzen discussed the paper in layman’s terms at Heartland’s recent climate change conference in DC. The accepted paper can be found here.

Springtime in the Rockies

Julie Walsh

Last week, I went heli-hiking near Glacier National Park in the Canadian Bugaboos where they were enjoying spring flowers. A 40-something guide mentioned that their recent spring was the coldest that she had ever lived through. Heartland Institute’s James Taylor recent piece explains the still-receding glaciers despite the long-term cooling trend.

Elsewhere, this graph from the University of Illinois Polar Research Group shows the continued rebound of Arctic sea ice.  And in the Southern Hemisphere, Argentina has been experiencing historic snow.

I could spend all my days hat-tipping Marc Morano at Climate Depot for the treasure trove of climate realism he posts there, but it’s almost like citing a Drudge link — what’s the point of drawing attention to a story that everyone else who follows Web news has already read?

Nevertheless occasionally it’s still worth doing, and today’s reason is Newsweek science editor Sharon Begley. Morano’s link calls her column in the August 3 issue “silly,” but for years Begley has been a doddering old media leftist whose science perspective parallels Helen Thomas’s political taint. Still operating as though weekly newsmags add insightful background to mainstream thought, Begley rambles through tired global warming alarmism peppered with her own clumsy brand of activist exhortation:

The loss of Arctic sea ice “is well ahead of” what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast, largely because emissions of carbon dioxide have topped what the panel—which foolishly expected nations to care enough about global warming to do something about it—projected….

In an insightful observation in The Guardian this month, Jim Watson of the University of Sussex wrote that “a new breed of climate sceptic is becoming more common”: someone who doubts not the science but the policy response. Given the pathetic (non)action on global warming at the G8 summit, and the fact that the energy/climate bill passed by the House of Representatives is so full of holes and escape hatches that it has barely a prayer of averting dangerous climate change, skepticism that the world will get its act together seems appropriate.

Time and Newsweek long ago were consigned to the advocacy bin with The Nation and Mother Jones, but even with their proliferation of Obama fawning, Begley is a curiosity. Rasmussen and Gallup polls show more public skepticism about climate alarmism than concern. Temperatures have gone down over the last ten years and even the New York Times is asking about the sun’s influence. Scientists are clearly divided, debunking the Gore-blustering “consensus.”

But Begley and Newsweek act as though dissent doesn’t exist, or worse, proving that the magazine doesn’t need Stephen Colbert to produce joke journalism.

When Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), came out in 2006, I expected to see some hard-hitting criticism by scientists of Gore’s unfounded alarmism and by economists of his blithe disregard of the human suffering that energy rationing (cap-and-trade) and mandatory reliance on costly and under-performing renewable energy would inflict on low-income households and poor countries. However, with a few notable exceptions, Gore’s film got mostly rave reviews, earned an Academy Award, and later helped bag him the Nobel Prize.

Because few specialists in the science and economics fields took Gore to task, I jumped into the breach. At first, I thought I could write an adequate expose of Gore’s errors and exaggerations in about 20 pages. But as I dug into the book version of AIT, I found that nearly all of Gore’s assertions about climate change and climate policy were either one-sided, misleading, exaggerated, speculative, or just plain wrong. My critique–published by CEI in March 2007 under the title Al Gore’s Science Fiction: A Skeptic’s Guide to An Inconvenient Truth–grew to 150 pages.

I gave several talks based on this research, including an hour-long presentation on C-SPAN and a minute and fifteen seconds of fame on the Oprah Winfrey Show,* along with several video shorts produced by CEI.

Conversations with friends and colleagues persuaded me, though, that the best strategy was to fight fire with fire–produce our own “documentary” about global warming.

We teamed up with Jared Lapidus, a talented young New York-based filmmaker. Jared and I interviewed over 20 experts during 2008 and early 2009. The result is a film titled Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself. To view the film, click here.

Policy Peril reviews the science to assess whether global warming is the “planetary emergency” Al Gore claims it is. We take a critical look at what Gore and other alarmist claim regarding heat waves, global temperature forecasts, air pollution, malaria, hurricanes, ice sheet disintegration, sea level rise, and the paradoxical scenario in which global warming causes a new ice age. We conclude that global warming is not a catastrophe in the making. There is no climate “crisis.”

We then review the human costs–the health and safety risks as well as adverse impacts on jobs and growth–of Al Gore’s proposed “solutions”: carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, fuel economy standards, bans on new coal-fired power plants, mandates to “repower America” with renewable energy, and carbon tariffs. The film concludes that these policies have potentially devastating impacts on human welfare, especially to the extent they are exported to developing countries–which they must be if the world is to reduce global emissions 50% by 2050, as Gore and others advocate.

Finally, the film examines alternative strategies to enhance human well-being in a warming world. It concludes that “focused adaptation”–solving with proven methods existing health and environmental problems that global warming might aggravate (such as malaria and hunger)–would save far more lives at less cost than Kyoto-style energy rationing schemes. Moreover, the best climate protection strategy for the world is free trade and economic growth.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll be posting one excerpt from the film every other day along with comments and links to newer information that has since come out. The global warming debate is very far from “over.” In fact, the scientific, economic, and moral case against Kyoto-style energy rationing keeps getting stronger.

I look forward to your comments on the film, the individual segments, and the supporting materials.

– Marlo Lewis, Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute

* Gore got the first and last word on Oprah, but I replied minutes after the show aired on Youtube.

Update 8/10/09

One of the excerpts from Policy Peril is the wrap up, where I summarize the main points of the entire film. If you’re one of those people who like to skip to the end to see how the story turns out, click here to watch the wrap-up segment. Or just read the text (with links to supporting information), which appears below:

Global warming is not a planetary emergency. To create the illusion of a crisis, Al Gore repeatedly crosses the line between fact and fiction, science and speculation.

There is no know way to make deep cuts in U.S. CO2 emissions over the next few decades without also making deep cuts in our economy.

Banning new coal power plants means banning the most affordable source of new electric power. It could also create an energy crisis.

Mandating a carbon-free electric system in ten years would fail dismally and set a world record for government waste.

Energy rationing schemes would transfer trillions of dollars from consumers to special interests.

Fuel economy mandates can kill by making the average car lighter, smaller, and therefore less safe in collisions.

Biofuel mandates may actually increase CO2 emissions and by inflating food prices threaten the world’s poorest people.

Banning coal plants in China, India, and other emerging economies would trap millions of people in deadly poverty.

Using proven methods to solve underlying problems that global warming might aggravate could save many more lives than Kyoto type policies at far less expense.

The best climate protection strategy for poor countries is rapid economic growth.

On a personal note, I’ve been analyzing public policy in Washington, D.C. for more than 20 years. I have never seen an agenda so lacking in justification, with so great a power for mischief, captivate so many influential people, the way this global warming agenda has.

We are still at the baby steps of this agenda. Yet already climate policies have increased world hunger, fueled deforestation, inflated energy prices, and enriched special interests at consumers’ expense.

The time to demand more reasonable policies from our leaders is now. Don’t be another lemming walking off the cliff of policy peril. Save our prosperity, and we can really improve the state of the world.

Is the science debate on global warming “over”? Politicians, pundits, and academics never tire of repeating “the debate is over” mantra. They could not be more wrong.

As I explain today on MasterResource.Org, all the basic science issues in the global warming debate–attribution, sensitivity, and even detection–are unsettled and more so now than at any time in the past decade.

For those who want to delve more deeply into these and other fascinating issues, check out the marvelous Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) report, Climate Change Reconsidered, authored by Drs. Craig Idso and Fred Singer with 35 contributors and reviewers. On a wide range of issues (nine main topics and 60 sub-topics), the NIPCC report demonstrates that the scientific literature allows, and even favors, reasonable alternative assessments to those presented by the U.N. IPCC, the self-anointed scientific “consensus.”