On yesterday’s Chris Matthews Show, Joe Klein of Time reported that there is a foreign policy angle to President-elect Barack Obama’s selection of Dr. Steven Chu as the Department of Energy chief. Klein claimed that Chu, a Nobel Prize winner, is revered in China, and his superstar status could help in climate change negotiations with the Chinese.
Obama plans climate change diplomacy is still unclear. He has made high profile yet vague commitments to engage the international community, most prominently at an international climate summit hosted by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. And Massachusetts Senator John Kerry was Obama’s emissary to the 14th Conference of the Parties to the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change at Poznan, Poland this past December.
Of course, Obama is constrained by the Senate, which must approve any international treaty. Even in its current composition, it is unlikely that the Senate would go along with any treaty that did not include commensurate sacrifice from China (reducing emissions also reduces economic growth, which is why no one has yet to do it). To date, Chinese leaders have asserted their country’s “right to develop” using inexpensive, hydrocarbon energy.
Klein suggested that Obama picked Dr. Chu because he could break this impasse, get the Chinese to play ball, and thereby win Senate approval for an international climate change treaty.
It will be interesting to see what will be Dr. Chu's role at Copenhagen.
When major green groups charted "greenhouse gas" emissions for 1991 (they sent me a lovely colorful graph, showing America as the "worst offender," of course) they listed the Philippines as a quite small producer, way "down the curve." This is because the Philippines are a "good" country, you understand, where people "know their place" and have properly resigned themselves to living in poverty, mostly doing without private motorcars or air conditioners, fertilizing their rice fields with human feces, etc.
IN ONE OF HIS FIRST public policy statements as America’s president-elect, Barack Obama focused on climate change, and clearly stated both his priorities and the facts on which these priorities rest. Unfortunately, both are weak, or even wrong.
CEI Adjunct Scholar Steven Milloy just sent around an email reporting that Carol Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s new energy czar, is a member of the Socialist International, perhaps the world’s preeminent socialist organization.
Browner is on the SI’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society. See for yourself.
With the holiday season on the wane, 'tis once again the season for fictitious global-warming scares. New Jersey Sierra Club director Jeff Tittel's latest foray into the fictitious world of global warming make-believe ("State's plan to curb global warming tepid," Dec. 26 op-ed) would make even Pinocchio blush.
In last Thursday’s Green Bay Press Gazette, environmentalist Dan Kohler and state Rep. Andy Jorgensen claim that Wisconsin consumers already are saving $200 million a year, thanks to the Doyle administration’s energy policies (Repower America and rebuild state’s economy,” 13/31/2008). Yet they fail to cite this assertion, and I seriously doubt its veracity.
For one thing, they attribute some of these supposed savings to a state requirement to generate 10% of Wisconsin’s electricity with renewables like solar and wind power. But alternative energy is more expensive than conventional energy. How does forcing consumers to use expensive energy reduce their utility bills?
Kohler and Jorgenson suggest that the rest of the $200 million comes from Wisconsin’s Focus on Energy program, an educational outreach designed to teach businesses how to save money with energy efficiency. Yet no such claims are made on the Focus on Energy website.
Perhaps they took credit for the decline in energy use as a result of the economic downturn. Of course, that would be misleading. Then again, fake facts are the only way to defend the claim that we can all get rich by fighting climate change.
Last year’s doozy is almost as good as this year’s but not quite. In June Senator Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, told reporters during the Senate debate on the Lieberman-Warner America's Climate Security Act:
"This bill, in fact, will lead us to a strong economy, with the creation of millions of new jobs."
Partner in crime Senator Harry Reid elaborated:
“The Boxer-Warner-Lieberman bill is also about creating a new and powerful economic engine. It is about creating hundreds of thousands, even millions of high-paying, permanent and sustainable jobs in America… Hundreds of thousands of new jobs in renewable energy have already been created by foresighted investors who see the need for clean energy that doesn't contribute to global warming. Millions more jobs can be created with the enactment of a strong cap-and-trade system.”
The Office of Management and Budget countered, saying the bill would impose economic costs of $10 trillion through 2050 primarily by boosting energy prices and would slash annual household disposable income by nearly $1,400 per household in 2030 and as much as $4,400 in 2050. "This would make S. 3036 by far the single most expensive regulatory bill in our nation's history," OMB said.
The Heritage Foundation calculated job losses under the Act would exceed 500,000 before 2030, even using the most favorable assumptions. And the National Association of Manufacturers predicted that more than 4 million jobs could be lost by 2030.
Talking about the “millions” of jobs that would be created and forgetting to mention the many more millions that would be destroyed truly takes the cake.
I commented in the last issue (19th December) on President-elect Barack Obama’s choices of John P. Holdren for White House science adviser and Jane Lubchenco for administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I would like to say a bit more about the bizarre choice of Dr. Holdren.
Holdren holds the Teresa and John Heinz professorship at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for his leading involvement with the Pugwash nuclear disarmament conferences, earned a Ph. D. in physics from Stanford University, won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship, has served as president and chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has published hundreds of articles and books. He has spent most of his career on areas and issues outside of physics, especially on energy and ecology policy.
Wow! That sounds great, doesn’t it? A man of high accomplishment, wide interests, and long involvement in public policy. Unfortunately, Holdren is also a lifelong doomster and close associate of Paul Ehrlich, who has promoted one nutty cause after another. Ehrlich called Holdren “one of the best scientists in the world,” and his recommendation alone should disqualify Holdren for any position of public trust.
There is something in Western civilization that regularly produces people proclaiming that the end of the world is nigh and that they are the leaders with the knowledge to prevent it. The threat is that people will actually believe these charlatans and sign up to remake the world according to their ideas. Holdren has moved from one looming disaster to another. What remains constant is that the disaster requires radical political action, which always includes massive increases in government.
His latest cause is what he calls global “climate disruption.” He regularly makes outlandish claims about the disastrous disruptions that are already occurring and the even more disastrous disruptions that are about to occur. And from these wild claims, which are not supported in the scientific literature, he jumps immediately to policy prescriptions. In short, the threat posed by global warming to civilization requires that we tear down civilization and rebuild it in a way more pleasing to the tastes of people like Holdren.
In my view, the Senate should not confirm John P. Holdren to be the White House science adviser and chairman of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The Cooler Heads Digest has already reported how the United Kingdom’s huge gamble on wind power will raise electricity prices and undermine reliability (here and here). Unfortunately for energy consumers in that country, it looks like it’s going to take a lot more windmills than the government thought. Experts had calculated that 50,000 wind turbines would be needed to generate 15% of Britain's electricity, to help the government to meet the EU target for a 20% reduction of CO2 emissions by 2020. But the Sunday Telegraph reports that it will take 100,000 turbines to meet the country’s climate goals, because wind power lobbyists in the UK grossly overestimated the benefits of wind power. The British Wind Energy Association had previously estimated that electricity from wind turbines ‘displaces’ 860 grams of carbon dioxide emissions for every kilowatt hour of electricity generated. Now it has revised that figure to 430 grams following discussions with the Advertising Standards Authority.
The Obama transition team continues to talk to House and Senate Democratic leaders about trying to move a big ($850 billion?) economic stimulus package soon after the new Congress is sworn in. Every special interest in the country is trying to stake a claim to a share of the cash, including promoters of “green jobs” and those that claim that transforming the energy economy to rely on much more costly forms of renewable energy would somehow stimulate the economy. As the Washington Post noted this week, our energy and environmental policy is now in the hands of powerful legislators from California, where they actually believe that raising consumer and producer costs and pricing people out of jobs is sound public policy. (And where the State, perhaps co-incidentally, now confronts a $40 billion budget deficit.) We shall see what happens next week.
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