Thus, I am thankful to Al Gore for proving that even in a high profile demonstration project these "solutions" won't work. The Tennessee Center for Policy Research reports that Gore's home in Nashville has increased its energy usage by 10% in the past year.
William Yeatman
Taking a break for a moment from domestic politics, let's turn to our supposed model for rationing GHG emissions: Europe. The EU has just released its report to the UNFCCC, “Annual European Community greenhouse gas inventory 1990–2006 and inventory report 2008” (summary here). The short version of the story is that the report does not support either a claim that the EU is “on track” to meet emission reduction promises, or that the ETS is a success.
This is true although the document claims a 2006 GHG emission reduction of 08.% over 2005, following on an equivalent reduction in 2005 over 2004.
That of course won't get them anywhere near where they need to go, and I'm still poring over details (though already I've encountered extensive explanations of wholesale revisions of past claims, "no explanation offered" about certain important claims, and an admission that certain reduction data is facially suspect and likely to be the subject of revision).
But notable is how different this is from preliminary indications, detailed earlier here. One possible explanation for the discrepancy is one reality that jumps out in a first reading of the report, that the GHG reductions largely did not come from CO2.
Still, those early reports from industry just don't jibe that well with the official Brussels claim of a reduction. As I wrote here, there is every reason to take this and all EU GHG reports with a grain of salt given the EU's rather breathtaking willingness to fudge its numbers.
Now what will the environmentlists do? China’s lead in CO2 emissions keeps growing. Reports the New York Times:
China has clearly overtaken the United States as the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas, a new study has found, its emissions increasing 8 percent in 2007. The Chinese increase accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the year’s global greenhouse gas emissions, the study found.
The report, released Friday by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, found that in 2007 China’s emissions were 14 percent higher than those of the United States. In the previous year’s annual study, the researchers found for the first time that China had become the world’s leading emitter, with carbon emissions 7 percent higher by volume than the United States in 2006.
Many experts had been skeptical of the earlier study, whose results were less clear-cut than those released Friday. The International Energy Agency had continued to say only that China was projected to overtake the United States by the end of 2007. Now there is little doubt.
“The difference had grown to a 14 percent difference, and that’s indeed quite large,” said Jos Olivier, a senior scientist at the Dutch agency. “It’s now so large that it’s quite a robust conclusion.”
China’s emissions are most likely to continue growing substantially for years to come because they are tied to the country’s strong economic growth and its particular mix of industry and power sources, the researchers said.
So remind me again why the U.S. is supposed to wreck it’s economy in an attempt to lower CO2 levels …
Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) today announced that he wants to end the federal government’s moratorium on offshore drilling for oil and gas. Instead of a blanket ban, he prefers that states decide for themselves whether or not to allow exploration and extraction of fossil fuel deposits off their coastlines.
In light of McCain’s new federalist offshore drilling policy, his continued support for the federal government’s moratorium on drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge doesn’t make much sense. After all, an overwhelming majority of Alaskans want to lift the ban.
By McCain’s reasoning, Florida and California should get to dictate drilling policy on federal lands 100 miles off their coasts, but Alaska shouldn’t be afforded the same privilege on federal land located within its borders.
Apparently, McCain believes that some states have more rights than others.
For a quarter-century, drilling for oil and gas off nearly all the American coastline has been banned in part to protect tourism and to lessen the chances of beach-blackening spills.
In the year since Al Gore took steps to make his home more energy-efficient, the former Vice President’s home energy use surged more than 10%, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.
This movement has become a religion and the faithful will never listen to logic and/or reason. Most are not aware that this movement is an anti-capitalist, anti-free enterprise movement. It has nothing to do with climate change but everything to do with weakening America. When the Berlin wall fell in the late '80s, the communists had no where to go but soon found that the environmentalists were getting a foothold with our political leaders. It has become the perfect venue to alarm the folks on doom and gloom. The sad thing is that most people buying into this madness are so emotional and unwilling to listen to reason, that any conversation or contradiction is met with scorn and halted. My conclusion is that these folks are sadly misinformed and if common sense doesn't come into play soon, we will cripple our economy and a millions of people will be hurt beyond repair. You will see food shortages, fuel shortages and a depression that will dwarf the 1930s.
In the final week of May, environmental ministers from the world’s richest industrialized nations met to prepare a common international climate policy in advance of the G8 Summit this July in Japan. After three days of talks, they agreed on a long-term target of halving global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and the meeting chairman told reporters that there was “strong political will” among the G8 countries to meet this ambitious goal. The following week, energy ministers from these same nations met to prepare a common international energy policy in advance of the G8 Summit. In a joint statement, the ministers expressed “serious concerns” over the high price of oil, and they asked major oil producers “to increase investment to keep markets well supplied in response to rising world demand.”
Of course, “well supplied” oil markets are antithetical to emissions reductions, because cheaper oil means more of it will be used, thereby resulting in more greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, the most popular climate change solution among G8 countries—a “cap-and-trade” scheme—is designed to increase the price of gas, so that consumers use less and emit less.
The G8 can have emissions cuts and expensive oil, or emissions increases and cheap oil, but it can’t have both.
President Bush's hopes for reaching a climate-change agreement among the world's biggest economies got a boost from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe's leading global advocate for tough new greenhouse-gas limits.
The Courant's June 9 editorial ["The Senate's Shame"] was wrong to imply that the leading climate legislation in Congress, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, failed because of partisan opposition from the Republican Party.
On June 6, 10 Democratic senators wrote an open letter declaring they could not support final passage of the Climate Security Act. That's 20 percent of the Senate Democratic caucus.
Rather than partisan politics, the act failed because a bipartisan group of senators refused to pass a bill that would have reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by increasing the price of energy
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