The recent European Union climate agreement provides a useful warning to incoming President Obama and his team when they consider what to do about global warming. The rhetoric from the EU may sound nice, but when it comes to translating words into action, Europe has shown that the job is harder than it looks. EU member states have found it very difficult to reduce emissions, meet renewable energy targets or create lasting green jobs.
See the full story at the Washington Times.
The Los Angeles Times today reports that the California State Lands Commission overturned a proposal by county officials and environmentalists for expanded oil production off the Santa Barbara coast. Environmentalists helped craft the measure, which allowed a Texas energy company to drill new wells in exchange for the eventual retirement of four platforms. Despite broad, bi-partisan support for the agreement in Santa Barbara, the State Lands Commission objected to the deal because its approval would have sent “a message heard very, very clearly by those who call for ‘drill, baby, drill,’” said Lt. Governor John Garamendi (D), who sits on the Commission, and who intends to run for Governor.
The European Union Commission this week outlined a diplomatic framework for negotiations to craft an international climate change treaty. The document cites an independent calculation that it could cost 175 billion Euros a year by 2020 to fight climate change. Yet the Commission dodges the key question of who will pay for this “green” revolution in energy production, stating only that, “international financial support for actions exceeding a country’s domestic capabilities should come from sources including public funds and international carbon crediting mechanisms.”
So the question remains: Who’s going to pay what? The United States Senate remains unlikely to ratify any international agreement to ration energy that doesn’t also include rapidly developing countries responsible for an ever-greater share of global emissions. Developing countries, however, refuse to put global warming over poverty reduction and their “right to develop.” The EU procrastinates. Global emissions continue to rise (while temperatures stay the same).
President Barack Obama kicked off another fun-packed week on Monday by directing the Environmental Protection Agency to re-open California’s request for a waiver from the Clean Air Act so that it can begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions from new vehicles. In December 2007, then-EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson denied California’s request. If it is allowed to go into effect by EPA, California’s law would require that emissions from new vehicles be cut by 30% by 2016. The way California’s economy is going this should be easy to do without regulation by selling a lot fewer new cars.
President Obama also directed the Department of Transportation to publish the regulations implementing the higher Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for new cars and trucks that were included in the anti-energy bill enacted in December 2007. Either granting the California waiver request or implementing the new CAFÉ standards should be enough to make America’s domestic auto industry a permanent ward of the federal government. It appears that Obama is determined to do both and to pour however much money it takes to keep Detroit going.
James Hansen of NASA is one of the leading climate alarmists, and possesses a scientific credibility lacking in the Goracle. But Hansen really has become a parody of himself, more activist than scientist. His supervisor at NASA was a skeptic. And as Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review wrote a year ago:
If you’ve paid any attention to the global warming debate, you’ve heard of James Hansen.
Hansen is the politicized NASA climate scientist who virtually invented the global warming issue in the broiling summer of 1988 when he was the star doomsayer at Senate hearings called by Al Gore.
Since then, Hansen has received better press than Mother Teresa. In hundreds of interviews and glowing profiles, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has been treated as objective and/or infallible by an adoring mainstream liberal media.
Yet Hansen’s not even close to being an objective scientist. He is openly ideological and rabidly partisan. His political pals and financial patrons are liberal Democrats — Gore, John Kerry and left-wing groups funded by George Soros and Teresa Heinz.
Nor is Hansen part of the hallowed scientific “consensus” on global warming. He’s much more apocalyptic. He still predicts faster and much greater sea-level rises, ice-sheet meltings and species extinctions than the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Hansen’s Teflon credibility wasn’t even scratched after the August revelation that since 2000 he and his fellow scientists had been incorrectly crunching the data from about 1,200 ground weather stations that NASA uses to take the country’s annual average temperature — and which the unquestioning mainstream media used as “proof” the country has been getting hotter every year since 1998.
Maybe Hansen will be proved right. But these days he seems more interested in ideology than science.
James Hansen of NASA has become one of the leading climate alarmists. Quite simply, the world is about to end. That being the case, industry executives who don’t toe the line (only wrecking the economy can save humanity from destruction) should be tried in a kind of environmental Nuremberg Trial.
It turns out that Hansen’s supervisor, at least, was not so enamored of his work. Reports the Spectator in London:
But now the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works reports that James Hansen’s former supervisor, retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon, former Chief of the Climate Processes Research Programme at NASA who was responsible for all weather and climate research in the agency from1982 to 1994, has said he thinks man-made global warming theory is anti-scientific bunk:
‘I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man-made,’ Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. ‘I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation… Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress…
Theon declared ‘climate models are useless.’ ‘My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,’ Theon explained. ‘Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,’ he added.
It’s too bad Dr. Theon’s views don’t get the same attention as those of Dr. Hansen.
Al Gore has a new argument for why carbon dioxide is the global warming boogeyman — and it’s simply out of this world.
Al Gore braved a midwinter snowstorm yesterday to tell a Senate committee that the world is heating up and the only thing that can save us is “conservation and renewables.”
The Obama/Pelosi green stimulus is taking shape as it winds two paths through the House and the Senate. Both chambers agree with President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s staff that the government should shower winners in the renewable energy industry with about $30 billion in taxpayer money.
The well paid lobbyists for wind and solar energy producers deserve a round of applause—they did a great job.
There is, however, one small kink: The House and Senate disagree on how to give this money away.
According to E&E News, legislators on the House side want to fund up to 30 % of the construction of renewable energy projects, using grants, or direct give-aways. On the Senate side, leading members of the party in power are indicating that grants are an inappropriate mechanism to pick winners and losers in the energy business. They would prefer some other pork delivery format, probably a refundable tax credit, which is but a grant by another name.
The only good news is that the House and Senate have a history of jurisdictional disputes over give-aways to the renewable industry. Maybe they’ll get so worked up with territoriality that they’ll prove resistant to compromise, and this crummy stimulus bill will die.
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