President Barack Obama last Saturday revealed that his economic stimulus plan commits $32 billion to create enough new renewable electricity by 2012 to power 6 million homes.
By comparison, the Navajo Nation in the Four Corners region plans to build enough coal-fired power by 2012 to supply 4 million homes in the rapidly growing southwest.
Both plans would power a similar number of households by 2012. The difference between the two plans is that Obama’s renewables need $32 billion in taxpayer money to compete with conventional energy sources, whereas the Navajo Nation’s coal projects can make a profit without lavish government handouts.
Perhaps Obama's team of the best and the brightest can make sense of it, but I, for one, am very confused: How does expensive energy stimulate the economy?
Several House committees marked up the Democratic leadership’s $825 billion stimulus package this week. The number and cost of the so-called green jobs to be created by the bill is a little less mysterious thanks to the good work of my colleagues Iain Murray and Jonathan Tolman. Iain has listed the line items that could be construed as reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These items total $57 billion, of which new programs totaling $32.3 billion have job numbers attached. These programs would create 353,000 new green jobs at an average cost of $91,000 per job. That’s a small start to the Obama campaign’s pledge to create 5 million green jobs at a cost to taxpayers of $15 billion per year for ten years. After the election, the campaign lowered that pledge to 2.5 million green jobs, but the cost remained the same.
The House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday voted for $20 billion in tax breaks for wind and solar power and energy-efficiency improvements. Since loans for new windmills have dried up, the bill tries to spur investment by allowing an immediate 30% investment tax credit in place of the current production tax credit taken over ten years. According to a Reuters story, Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, today unveiled his version of the $275 billion tax cuts that are part of the stimulus package. It includes “about $30 billion in tax breaks and incentives aimed at creating energy jobs.” We’ll have to wait to see how many green jobs they claim will be created by the House and Senate tax provisions.
The House has scheduled a floor vote on the whole stimulus package for next Wednesday, 28th January. The Senate will begin committee mark-ups next week.
Boy, that wacky Paul Krugman. The newly-crowned Nobel laureate (they should be allowed to wear a laurel wreath everywhere they go, so we’d know of their brilliance), fresh from revealing how little he understands the history – or purpose – of liberalism, shows he knows diddly-squat about Air Traffic Control.
In today’s column he argues, plonkingly,
Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.
Unfortunately for Krug, the fact is that the public sector does a pretty poor job of Air Traffic Control. Not because of large numbers of accidents – that doesn’t happen anywhere much these days – but in terms of waste and inefficiency. American ATC is based on a system of beacons from the early days of air transport. Those have long since been superseded in safety terms by GPS and other innovations, but the system is still based on them. Liberalizing ATC actually makes a huge amount of sense, which is why plenty of governments around the world have done it, without seeing mid-air collisions, erm, explode. As I say in the new Agenda for Congress:
Liberalize Air Travel. … Privatization and modernization of the air traffic control system not only would allow faster flights and less delay at airports but save up to 400,000 barrels of oil per day, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions accordingly. And there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Canada’s successful air traffic control privatization offers a useful model.
You can only really object to that if you’re a socialist dogmatist, or your thinking is stuck in the 1930s. I’m not sure which is the case with El Krug.
For a broader picture, Jon Henke does a great job of commenting on the entire column over at The Next Right.
Barack Obama in his inaugural speech promised to “roll back the spectre of a warming planet.” In this context, it is worth contemplating a passage from his book Dreams from My Father. It reveals a lot about the way we view the world’s problems.
At the end of “Science and Government,” his Godkin Lectures at Harvard nearly a half-century ago that revealed some disastrous wartime scientific misjudgments of the British government, Sir Charles P. Snow offered one reason why it is important to have scientists in government: They have something to give that “our kind of existential society is desperately short of: That is foresight.”
Last week at the state capitol in Little Rock, Arkansas, lawmakers on the Joint Committee on Energy heard expert testimony from scientists and policy experts, including CEI’s Chris Horner, who challenged conventional views on global warming and the real world experience of global warming policies.
Dr. Richard Ford, an environmental economist and member of the Governor’s Commission on Global Warming, had originally requested the hearing. He and several other members of the GCGW opposed some of the recommendations in the Commission’s recently-released policy report. The report recommended that Arkansas lawmakers support a carbon tax, a regional “cap-and-trade” scheme, and renewable energy portfolio mandates for Arkansas utilities.
In his opening remarks, Ford told lawmakers the Commission hadn’t followed the intent of its statutory charter, which required it to “study the scientific data, literature and research on global warming to determine whether global warming is an immediate threat to the citizens in the state of Arkansas.” He also explained that none of the policy recommendations included a cost-benefit analysis.
Climatologist Paul Knappenberger and Robert Ferguson, both from the Science and Public Policy Institute, laid out the evidence to show that climate in Arkansas hadn’t changed for over 100 years. Knappenberger specifically challenge GCGW’s policy recommendations claiming that if enacted into law, they would not appreciably reduce greenhouse gases or do anything to stabilize global climate change.
Dr. Roy Spencer, climate scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, presented lawmakers with his technical findings from his work on the NASA’s Aqua satellite, which point to natural—as opposed to man-made— causes of global warming.
In the hearing’s final presentation, Chris Horner reviewed Europe’s experience with cap-and trade. He cautioned lawmakers that its net effect has been to drive jobs off the continent while having little, if any, impact on lowering carbon emissions. In fact, he showed how covered EU emissions actually rose even while economy-wide emissions dipped.
The only audible response from lawmakers during the presentations came when Horner read from e-mails from his former boss, Enron’s CEO, Kenneth Lay, a tireless advocate of a U.S. cap-and-trade system. Lay, Horner explained, had hoped that now-defunct energy giant could profit from a cap-and-trade scheme once it was up and operational.
After the hearing, one lawmaker commented that he was glad the other side of the science on global warming was given a fair hearing. What isn’t known at this point is how much, if any, of the GCGW’s recommendations will show up in legislation.
President Barack Obama in his brief inaugural address on Tuesday mentioned energy and global warming several times, but gave no specifics. He vowed to “restore science to its rightful place,” yet has nominated Dr. John P. Holdren to the post of White House Science Adviser. He later faintly echoed Holdren’s Malthusianism when he said, “…[N]or can we consume the world’s resources without regard to the effect.” The effect of consuming the world’s resources has been unprecedented prosperity and well-being and an expanding abundance of those resources.
The President said that,”…[E]ach day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet,” thereby tying global warming policy to national energy security. But our most abundant domestic energy source is coal. Instead of using coal, “We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” Insofar as those energy sources require taxpayer subsidies and cost more to consumers than conventional energy, it is hard to see how this is going to contribute to the economic revival Mr. Obama promised in his speech.
Finally, the president said, “With old friends and foes, we’ll work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat and roll back the specter of a warming planet.” That last phrase is code for negotiating a new U. N. agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol after 2012. The problem with a new agreement is the same as the problem with the Kyoto Protocol. The countries that ratified Kyoto aren’t meeting their commitments to reduce emissions. If they did, it would wreck their economies. If the United States Senate ratified such an agreement, it could be enforced in federal court by a lawsuit from a private person, such as an environmental pressure group. That would force the U. S. to reduce its emissions at ruinous cost, while other countries continued to express the best of intentions to reduce emissions.
Greenwire has a long lead story (subscription required) in today's edition by Daniel Cusick about the plans of the Navajo Nation to build three huge new coal-fired power plants totaling 5,300 megawatts in order to exploit their enormous coal resources. These new plants could supply enough electricity for approximately four million homes in the rapidly growing cities of the Southwest.
In an interview accompanying the story, Navajo President Joe Shirley, Jr., responded to a question about whether he was concerned about all the greenhouse gas emissions that these plants would produce by saying:
“That's a resource that was put there by the Creator for us to use. … To have the Creator bring that about, and then to say, 'Hey, we don't want that,' I don't think that's right. We need to develop it.”
While many of the nation's major utilities advocate energy-rationing policies, such as cap-and-trade, that would price coal out of the market and thereby lead to rapid increases in electricity prices for consumers and manufacturers and probably to chronic regional blackouts, it's great to see the Navajos stepping forward to help supply the energy that America needs.
Andrew Revkin of the New York Times has just posted a piece on Dot Earth that discusses a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that finds that global warming has dropped to the bottom of people’s concerns. Asked to rate their top priorities from a list of twenty issues, only 31% listed global warming as one of their top priorities. That’s down five percent from last year. The biggest drop was for protecting the environment, which dropped fifteen points to 41%. For comparison, the top concerns were the economy at 85%, jobs at 82, and terrorism at 76%.
That’s the background for trying to enact energy-rationing programs that can only work if they raise energy prices considerably. Perhaps Al Gore needs to raise more than the $300 million goal of his We can Solve It advertising campaign, which is designed to convince people that they agree with him that global warming is our most serious problem and demands immediate and radical action (such as replacing all the coal-fired power plants that supply half of America’s electricity within ten years). Although Mr. Gore has insisted that the American people already agree with him on global warming, this poll demonstrates that his mass media advertising campaign is going to be an uphill climb.
The case for global warming alarmism depends on models that attempt to simulate a dynamic climate with mathematical formulas plugged into super-computers. According to the best of these models, increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases could cause a 2 degree warming by 2100. In a present beset by breast cancer, poverty, and mental illness, I really don’t care about warmer winters in a richer world 100 years from now, but that’s beside the point.
More to the point, I think climate models are bunk. Specifically, I doubt a mathmatician's ability to mimic the myriad interactions between the abiotic and biotic that drive the earth’s climate system, using numbers and equations. Then again, I am not a scientist, so it doesn’t really matter what I think about models that I don’t understand.
Roger Pielke Jr, however, is a scientist. And over at his blog, Prometheus, he is making some global climate modelers look silly. In yesterday’s post, Pielke commented on a new study in the journal Nature, which suggests that Antarctica is in fact warming, whereas before the icy continent was thought to be cooling.
In the post, which is available here, Pielke juxtaposes an earlier claim on a prominent alarmist science blog that Antarctic cooling was consistent with global warming with the claim that Antarctic warming is consistent with global warming made by the authors of the Nature paper.
Asks Pielke:
“So a warming Antarctica and a cooling Antarctica are both "consistent with" model projections of global warming. Our foray into the tortured logic of "consistent with" in climate science raises the periennel question, what observations of the climate system would be inconsistent with the model predictions?”
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