Al Gore, Greenpeace, and the “consensus of scientists” tell us that global warming endangers agriculture and global food security. A study published last week in Science magazine finds global warming has taken significant bites out of potential global corn and wheat production since 1980.
The study also finds, however, that climate change has not adversely affected U.S. corn and wheat production. How so – because of Yankee ingenuity? Not according to the study. The explanation, rather, is that America has been a “notable exception” to climate change. The USA “experienced a slight cooling” during the study period (1980-2008).
This is bizarre. Here we have an alarmist study that finds a “lack of significant climate trends” in the USA for the past 30 years. If true, that makes hash out of all those dire pronouncements by Gore and others that global warming is already contributing to hurricanes, tornadoes, snow storms, forest fires, floods, etc. in the USA. Are the study’s authors aware of this implication? Are the editors of Science? Apparently not.
How do the authors know that climate change is depressing corn and wheat production globally, even if not in the USA? The biggest loss in wheat production, according to the study, is in Russia. Do they adjust Russian crop yields for the Russian economic meltown and financial crisis of the 1990s? As far as I can tell, they don’t. I would not bet the farm on the validity of this study. [click to continue…]
[This guest post is by Christopher Prandoni, the Federal Affairs Manager for Americans for Tax Reform. It is a response to Myron Ebell’s May 7 post, “A Response to Conservative Defenders of Tax Credits.”]
Americans for Tax Reform asks every candidate running for Congress to sign the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a promise to their constituents that they will not raise taxes on Americans or their businesses. The Pledge, signed by 235 Members of the House and 41 Senators, reads:
I___ pledge to the taxpayers of the state
Of___ , and to the American people that I will:
ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax
rates for individuals and/or businesses; and
TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and
credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.
The Pledge is by no means a panacea to America’s tax and spending problems, it is a stopgap which identifies tax increases and looks to prevent them. It is the second clause of Pledge that has caused a limited fuss within the conservative movement and, thus, is worth reexamining. Before we proceed, it is important to make the distinction between two types of tax credits—refundable and nonrefundable—as conflating them can lead to unnecessary confusion. A tax credit is employed to reduce a taxpayer’s tax liability, ie reducing the amount of money they must pay to the government. A refundable tax credit allows the taxpayer to reduce their tax liability below zero, meaning the taxpayer is owed money from the government. The outlay effect caused by refundable tax credits is spending. Americans for Tax Reform has unambiguously opposed outlays resulting from refundable credits. I recommend readers take a look here at which refundable credits trigger these outlay effects.
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According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the finest writer in American history, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” By this criterion, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) is a real genius, because he manages to function in the Congress, despite the fact that he thinks the price of gasoline should go up and down, simultaneously.
As one of the Congress’s foremost global warming alarmists, Rep. Markey believes that hydrocarbon energy is the cause of the supposed “problem” that is global warming. Due to this belief, he is a staunch supporter of energy policies designed to make hydrocarbon energy more expensive, so that Americans use less of it, and thereby fight global warming. For example, he co-authored the American Clean Energy and Security Act, a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme passed by the House of Representatives in June 2009. (Thankfully, the bill died in the Senate.) Because the entire point of this policy was to “put a price” on carbon, it would have increased the price of gasoline, by design.
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There is a highly controversial natural gas bill floating around the House of Representatives, with over 180 cosponsors, written about here (also here and here).
The Daily Caller’s Chris Moody summarizes the debate:
The measure has 180 bipartisan co-sponsors, including many of the chamber’s most conservative Republican members. But some are crying foul over the special treatment that the government would be providing to the natural gas industry, arguing that it is not Washington’s role to “choose winners and losers” by offering tax credits to promote one energy industry over another. The bill’s proponents, however, say promoting natural gas — a plentiful resource in the United States — will help wean the country off foreign oil, provide resources to alternative energy sources and increase the nation’s energy security.
A coalition of nearly two dozen free-market and conservative groups sent a letter to members of Congress in March urging them to avoid new subsidies and tax credits, and they plan to blast anyone — especially Republicans — who do.
The divide is so deep in fact, that it has even split the libertarian advocacy group Campaign For Liberty, a co-signer of the March letter, with its founder, Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, who is co-sponsoring the tax credit bill. Paul discussed his support for tax credits during a recent interview with MSNBC, arguing that they are not subsidies, as his critics would call them, but rather another form of tax reductions.
Quebec, long an economic basket case kept afloat by Canada’s federal government, has decided to open up its northern interior to resource development. Quebec Premier Jean Charest announced on Monday an ambitious 25-year “Plan Nord” to build highways, airports, and other infrastructure so that the area can be developed.
According to Montreal’s Gazette, “Investments in energy development, mining, forestry, transportation, and tourism in the 1.2-million-square-kilometre region – twice the size of France – will create 20,000 jobs a year, generating $162 billion in growth and tax revenues of $14 billion.” Large parts of northern Quebec are heavily forested, and there are major deposits of iron, nickel, gold, platinum, cobalt, zinc, vanadium, and rare earths.
The Obama Administration should follow Quebec’s good example. The Department of the Interior and the U. S. Forest Service (an agency of the U. S. Department of Agriculture) control nearly 30% of the land in the United States, most of it in the West and Alaska, plus the Outer Continental Shelf. Federal lands and offshore areas contain colossal reserves of energy and minerals plus the most productive forests in the world. But the Obama Administration is locking up more and more federal lands and offshore areas in order to prevent oil and gas production, hardrock mining, and timber production. And they’re trying to block coal mining in Appalachia by inventing new pollutants to be regulated.
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Last Thursday, the Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee of the House Transportation Committee held a hearing on “Environmental Protection Agency Mining Policies: Assault on Appalachia.” Video and written testimony are available here. For detailed descriptions of the EPA’s outrageous war on Appalachian coal production, click here, here, or here. Suffice it to say, EPA has subverted the Administrative Procedures Act to enact a de facto moratorium on mining. It engineered a new Clean Water Act “pollutant,” saline effluent, which the EPA claims degrades water quality downstream from mines by harming a short lived insect that isn’t an endangered species. The hearing on Thursday was part 1; this Wednesday, the subcommittee is scheduled to hear from EPA administrator Lisa Jackson.
I attended the hearing, and at the media table, I picked up a Sierra Club “Beyond Coal Campaign” press release, by Director Mary Anne Hitt. It is an excellent window into the lying and exaggerations frequently employed by environmental extremists in order to demonize coal. Below, I reprint the entire press release, sentence by sentence (in bold), each followed by a rebuttal (in italics).
Sierra Club: “This Committee’s leadership is trying to stack the deck against Appalachian miners, families and businesses.”
Stacking the deck!? This is absurd. To be sure, all four witnesses before the Subcommittee were opposed to the EPA’s war on Appalachian coal, but that was by BIPARTISAN agreement. Indeed, the only Democrat to show up was Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV), the Ranking Member of the full Committee, who opposes the EPA’s machinations more than Republicans, due to the fact that his State is the largest coal producer in Appalachia, and is, therefore, harmed most.
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Between the time this is written and the time you read it, gas prices will have undoubtedly risen again. They have been on an upward spiral for months and not likely to drop long term without some bold, decisive action as was taken on July 14, 2008. Instead of encouraging the development of our own natural resources, politicians of both parties are once again betting that we will not notice if they play the antibusiness card—but 2011 is not a year for politics as usual and the rules have changed. This is no longer a back-room game. It is the poker channel. People are watching.
With their cards close to the vest, Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Harry Reid (D-Nev.) are bluffing. They want America’s citizens to believe their hand is filled with spending cuts—cut subsidies from big oil companies. Somehow we are supposed to think this will lower gas prices?
Part of their bluff is to use the term “subsidy”—which in the house-of-cards economy/debt crisis they’ve built translates to spending. Concerned Americans do not want more spending, they want cuts. We’ve anted up all we can. Politicians are betting we’ll fall for the deception.
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Republicans in the New Hampshire Senate continue to dither like a eunuch in a brothel lobby, more than two months after the State House of Representatives enacted HB 519, legislation that would withdraw New Hampshire from a regional energy-rationing scheme known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, by a 246 to 104 vote. In late February, after the Republican-controlled House acted, it was widely thought that the Senate would quickly follow suit, as Republicans hold a 2 to 1 majority in the upper chamber. However, the environmentalist lobby mobilized and frightened many Members of the Legislature. Last week, the Senate Natural Resources Committee voted against HB 519 companion legislation. Nonetheless, the full Senate is expected to enact the measure this week, although it is unclear that there will be enough votes to override a promised veto from Governor John Lynch (D), even though Republicans have a veto-proof majority.
Corn Ethanol: Who Pays and Who Benefits?
Ken Glozer, MasterResource.org, 9 May 2011
Losing Indicators
Lawrence Solomon, National Post, 9 May 2011
Death of Climate Nut Osama To Revive Obama Climate Agenda?
Chris Horner, AmSpecBlog, 5 May 2011
April Auto Sales and Washington’s Fuelish Failure
Henry Payne, Planet Gore, 5 May 2011
Obama’s Anti-Energy Policies Are Bankrupting America
Rob Bluey, The Foundry, 5 May 2011
Alarmists Offer a Perfect Global Warming Challenge
James Taylor, Forbes, 4 May 2011
For years, I’ve been arguing that a multilateral response to global warming is a pipe dream. According to the International Energy Agency, the “solution” to this supposed problem would cost $45 trillion through 2050. Yet there is ZERO historical precedent for burden sharing of this magnitude, short of war, and the specter of warmer winters simply doesn’t engender the sort of desperate international cooperation as does a threat like the Nazis. (See here, here, here, and here for my take on the fecklessness of climate diplomacy)
So it was with no surprise that I saw this Reuters headline last Friday: Rich Nations Miss Climate Finance Deadline.
By way of background, the December 2009 United Nations Copenhagen Climate Conference was supposed to have been the deadline for a legally binding, multilateral treaty to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the Conference was a complete and total bust, for the reason explained above. Instead of a concrete pledge, the Copenhagen Conference ended with nations agreeing to commit $100 billion to a global warming adaptation fund for poor countries. The deadline for contributions was May 1, 2011. Only two countries, Russia and the Ukraine, bothered to acknowledge the deadline, and they did so by sending a letter to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, informing it that they would not be donating any money.
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