William Yeatman

A cap-and-trade scheme is a lobbyist’s dream. For those of you unacquainted with how these boondoggles work, it goes something like this: (1) regulators assign an emissions quota to tens of thousands of individual industrial suppliers and users of energy (because emissions are synonymous with conventional energy use, an emissions “cap” is the same as energy rationing); (2) these businesses then purchase the right to emit their allotment in the form of permits disbursed by a government-run auction; (3) these businesses are allowed to trade permits among themselves (ie, a company that exceeds its emissions quota can buy permits from a company that emitted less than its quota); and (4) the government spends revenue raised in the auction of emissions permits-as much as $300 billion a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office-on green technologies and mitigation of the cap-and-trade’s adverse economic impact.

Lobbyists love cap-and-trade because of its complexity. At every step of the process, there are myriad nooks and crannies into which they can stuff special favors for their corporate clients. Industrial suppliers and users of energy will hire lobbyists to claim that they deserve free permits for some reason or another. And the auction-generated revenue would create a huge money trough coveted by every conceivable special interest and their pricey lobbyists.

Given that the President last night announced that legislation for “a market-based cap” on greenhouse gas emissions is a priority for his administration, it should come as no surprise that there has been an explosion in climate lobbying on Capitol Hill. According to an article in today’s Politico,

“A Center for Public Integrity analysis of Senate lobbying disclosure forms shows that more than 770 companies and interest groups hired an estimated 2,340 lobbyists to influence federal policy on climate change in the past year, as the issue gathered momentum and a bill came to a vote in Congress.

That’s an increase of more than 300 percent in the number of global warming lobbyists since 2003, when Congress previously voted on climate change legislation, and means that Washington can now boast more than four climate lobbyists for every member of Congress.”

Let that last line sink in: Four climate lobbyists for every member of Congress!

“A Matter of Fact,” a new report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund, challenges the Washington Post to correct George F. Will’s “Dark Green Doomsayers” column, published February 15^th. The report, by CAP’s Brad Johnson, asserts that George Will made three factual errors:

• Current “global sea ice levels” equals those of 1979
• There hasn’t been warming in “more than a decade”
• “Global cooling” joins a list of well publicized “planetary calamities that did not happen.”

Will’s column is not perfect, and Johnson raises some valid questions. For the sake of intellectual honesty, however, Johnson should broaden his fact-checking scope to incorporate misstatements on both sides of the global warming debate—including his own fudging of the truth.

But first, let’s address CAP’s critique of Will’s column.

Error 1. It seems that Will is guilty of delay. On the one hand, the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center, the source of his assertion that global sea ice levels haven’t changed in 30 years, publically disavowed Will’s claims. On the other, ACRC reported on January 1, 2009 that global sea ice levels were “near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979.” Will’s column appeared 45 days later, during which the discrepancy between current levels and 1979 levels grew by 8%.  If anything, this demonstrates the perils of reporting on an ever-changing global climate.

Error 2. CAP and George Will have it wrong. Will wrote that it hasn’t warmed in “more than a decade,” while Brad Johnson claims that “global warming is continuing.” According to data from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, compiled by NASA’s Dr. Roy Spenser, there has been no statistical warming of lower atmosphere temperatures over the past seven years, despite the fact that global greenhouse gas emissions have increased.

Error 3. Will is right and CAP is wrong. Johnson notes that there was never a “scientific consensus” on global cooling, but that’s not what Will claimed. He only wrote that some scientists and media outlets warned of global cooling, which is true.

I am an unabashed global warming “denier,” but I nonetheless applaud Brad Johnson’s efforts. On the topic of global warming, misrepresentations of the science abound, and we in the energy/global warming policy community should root them out and expose them with vigilance.

With that in mind, I have a “Matter of Fact” list of my own:

Fiction: Al Gore claims in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, that “there is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others and it is this. When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer ….”

Fact: It hasn’t warmed in 7 years, despite a steady increase in global greenhouse gas emissions. Where’s the Warming, Al?

Fiction: Dr. James Hansen, ultra-alarmist, has suggested that a 2-3 degree warming would cause sea levels to rise by 80 feet. Hansen then lowered his estimation to 20 feet. His most recent estimate is “at least” 3.2 to 6.4 feet.

Fact: The preeminent body of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggests that a 2-3 degree warming would cause sea levels to rise 7 to 23 inches.

Fiction: In 1986, Dr. John P Holdren, President Barack Obama’s choice to become White House Science Adviser, is quoted as having said that global warming could cause the deaths of 1 billion human beings by 2020. During his confirmation hearing two weeks ago, Holdren was questioned about this claim, and said that “it is still possible.”

Fact: To fulfill Holdren’s alarmist warning, climate change would have to kill twice as many people as died in World War Two, each year, for the next ten years.

Fiction: The Center for American Progress’s Brad Johnson last summer reported that the death of two Boy Scouts in Iowa was “evidence” of “the consequences” of global warming.

Fact: As recently noted on Roger Pielke Jr’s Prometheus, the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters cautions that “justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading.”

The ultra powerful enviro-lobby has a big problem: So far, it hasn’t been able to convince the Congress to enact energy-rationing policies to fight “global warming” (I am using quotation marks because it hasn’t warmed in 7 years, despite a steady increase in global greenhouse gas emissions).

Last year, a bi-partisan group of Senators spurned a cap-and-trade scheme written by California Senator Barbara Boxer’s staff because they couldn’t countenance imposing higher energy costs on their constituents at a time when gas cost $4/gallon. Given current economic woes, a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme is even more unlikely to make it through the Congress.

Faced with this political and economic reality, the eviros have adopted a new strategy. They want to pull an end run around Congress by having the executive branch regulate green house gases without a legislative mandate.

It’s a complicated process, but here’s the gist: They are trying to get the Environmental Protection Agency to find that greenhouse gas emissions are “pollutants” that “endanger” public welfare, a ruling that automatically results in regulation under the Clean Air Act. This is not a good thing. As noted by my colleague Marlo Lewis, if the EPA were to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, it would result in a regulatory nightmare.

The EPA simply could declare that greenhouse gases endanger public welfare, but there are also a number of circuitous pathways by which the green lobby could force the EPA’s hand.  In today’s DC Examiner, former CEI Warren Brooks Fellow Jeremy Lott and I have an opinion piece that explains one such round-about route to a regulatory nightmare-the California tailpipe emissions waiver.

A sample:

If the EPA allows California to regulate greenhouse gases from automobiles, it will tacitly acknowledge that greenhouse gases are “pollutants” — and under the Clean Air Act anything considered a pollutant is automatically subject to regulation. Environmental groups will be sure to have their lawyers sue the EPA to make this explicit.

Once greenhouse gases are classified as a “pollutant,” big construction projects (power plants, high schools, apartment buildings, hospitals) will be delayed and perhaps halted while federal regulators try to decide whether they comply with the Clean Air Act. New construction jobs? Forget about it.

Before the EPA takes this drastic step, shouldn’t our nation’s representatives in Congress debate and vote on whether to substitute this California regulation for federal law? Environmentalists don’t think so.

Rather than have Congress deliberate, the environmental groups want the courts to decide. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and other well-funded, litigation-happy green groups think the California waiver is a dream come true.

Click here to read the rest.

I have been a steak snob ever since I apprenticed under a master butcher in Ojai Valley, California a few years back. Indeed, I’m the kind of guy who orders his steak so rare that the people dining at the table next to me get uncomfortable.

So it is with rising dread that I witness the greenies’ assault on the beef industry. Enviro-types have long hated cattlemen for treating cows like animals, but recently, they’ve found a new motive to attack providers of delicious red meat: climate change.

According to the latest in the “It’s easy being green” series run by the Center for American Progress, “it’s worth taking a closer look” at beef production, for “the planet’s sake,” because industrial scale livestock farming has a big carbon footprint. The piece references a 2006 study that compares “a Toyota Prius, which uses about one fourth as much as fuel as a Chevrolet Suburban SUV, to a plant-based diet, which uses roughly one-fourth as much energy as a diet rich in red meat.”

How about a steak tax, America? After all, the greens put gas-guzzling SUV’s (God bless ‘em) in their cross-hairs, and came out on top-they forced through new fuel efficiency regulations that have saddled an ailing Detroit with a $100 billion burden. Can the cattleman be far behind?

Taken from CCNet, a scholarly electronic network edited by Benny Peiser. Every day Peiser sends out the latest news on the science, economics and politics of global warming. To subscribe, and I recommend that you do, send an e-mail to listserver@ljmu.ac.uk (“subscribe cambridge-conference”).

Like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, the nation is becalmed, a painted ship on a painted ocean and we have gone back a century, hewing the same coal that first put Britain on the fast track to the Industrial Revolution. The reason why we are still stuffing black lumps of carbon into furnaces is simple: it makes economic sense and the financial markets are shouting this message louder than ever before.

–Carl Mortished, The Times, 18 February 2009

Italian police on Tuesday arrested mobsters, businessmen and local politicians who allegedly used corrupt practices and bribes to gain control of a project to build wind farms in Sicily. Police in Trapani said the local Mafia bribed city officials in nearby Mazara del Vallo so the town would invest in wind farms to produce energy.

—Associated Press, 17 February 2009

THE collapse in the international price of carbon is threatening the Federal Government’s ability to pay for compensation packages in the emissions trading scheme without drawing on the budget. Compensation for households, trade-exposed industries and high-polluting coal-fired electricity generators was expected to be drawn from auctioning carbon credits, which the Government estimated would initially generate $12 billion a year. But the assumed price of carbon – $25 a tonne – is now under threat because the Government’s proposal allows polluting businesses to offset an unlimited proportion of emissions by buying international credits.

–Tom Arup, The Age, 18 February 2009

AUSTRALIA’S second-biggest steelmaker says the Rudd Government’s emissions trading scheme is likely to cause job losses and force new investments offshore. “We understand the Government’s intentions, but the practical effect of the scheme as it stands is that we will bear a cost not borne by our competitors,” he said. “We would be the only steelmakers in the world to have these costs and that would put us at a material disadvantage.”

–Lenore Taylor, The Australian, 18 February 2009

As more and more discoveries are made about global warming, scientists and political organisations have been clamouring for stronger and more immediate actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Amid this rising call for action, there has been surprisingly little attention given to recent work suggesting that future peak carbon dioxide levels may have been overestimated by a factor of four to five.

–Thomas Crowley, The Guardian, 17 February 2009

For years, CEI has been warning that industrial suppliers and users of energy only support cap-and-trade climate policies because they think they can manipulate these schemes to their benefit and to their competitors’ detriment. CEI President Fred Smith persuasively made this argument before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works in February, 2007. Last Tuesday, I made a similar argument on a panel debating government subsidies for green jobs.

Thankfully, it seems the message is finally catching on. To wit, read today’s great column by Tom Borelli, in the DC Examiner. Here’s a taste:

“Failing companies such as AIG, General Electric and General Motors, already propped up with tax dollars, have partnered with radical environmentalists in a scheme their CEOs believe will allow them to profit on fears about global warming.

Corporate members of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a coalition of over 30 businesses and environmental groups urging federal regulation to combat global warming, hope to make money through a government-mandated reduction in greenhouse.

Emissions such as carbon dioxide would be capped, and companies using more emissions than allotted by the government must purchase credits from other businesses.

USCAP and its cap-and-trade agenda were the focus of a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on January 15 – the committee’s first since the more radical Rep.Henry Waxman, D-CA, ousted longtime chairman, Rep. John Dingell, D-MI.

Companies hope to profit from selling their excess emissions credits to businesses with high carbon dioxide emissions, such as coal-based utilities.  Companies burdened with purchasing these credits will then pass the added costs to consumers.”