With his choices of top aides in the areas of economics and national security, President-elect Barack Obama veered toward the center of the Democratic Party. He’s mostly appointed people who initially supported the misbegotten Iraq war (and keeping nominal Republican Robert Gates on) to national security posts and people with Clinton-era experience to positions dealing with economic issues.
William Yeatman
In the News
Obama Nominates Climate Alarmists for Science Posts
Juliet Eilperin & Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, 19 December 2008
EPA Goes Man-Hunting
Steven Milloy, FoxNews.com, 18 December 2008
Not Evil, Just Wrong
Hannity’s America, 15 December 2008
Cooling on Global Warming
Benny Peiser, Wall Street Journal, 16 December 2008
No Rush to New Kyoto?
Chris Horner, Human Events, 16 December 2008
Obama Makes Appointments for Energy, Environment Posts
Oil and Gas Journal, 16 December 2008
Power to the People
William Yeatman & Wayne Crews, Fredericksburg Free Lance Star, 14 December 2008
News You Can Use
Chu on China
“China’s addition of 90GW of coal-fired power plants installed in 2006 alone is expected to emit over 500 million tons of CO2 per year for their 40 year lifetimes. This is (sic) compared to the entire European Union’s Kyoto reduction commitment of 300 million tons of CO2.”—From Dr. Steven Chu’s congressional testimony March 2007. President-elect Barack Obama has nominated Dr. Chu to become Secretary of Energy.
Inside the Beltway
Obama’s Energy and Environment Team
Myron Ebell
Earlier this week, CEI sent out a press release headlined, “Obama Interior, Agriculture Appointees Complete Anti-Energy Team.” I don’t know what I was thinking. President-elect Obama clearly is not finished staffing his anti-energy team.
Today, Obama announced that he would nominate John Holdren to be his science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Jane Lubchenco to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Dr. Holdren is a physicist who has become a radical apostle of global warming alarmism and energy-rationing policies, which Rob Bradley of the Institute for Energy Research detailed in a paper for CEI. Currently, he is Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center. The Woods Hole Research Center should not be confused with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, although the name was chosen so that you would confuse it. The Woods Hole Research Center is an environmental group that is tricked up to look like a scientific organization. Holdren was also a co-chairman of the self-styled National Commission on Energy Policy.
Dr. Lubchenco is professor of marine biology and zoology at Oregon State University. The Heinz Center, another scientific-appearing environmental group, gave her their Heinz Award in the Environment in 2002. She and Holdren are both past presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Holdren and Lubchenco are on the scientific fringe of global warming alarmism. They make claims that are not supported by the scientific literature. My colleague Julie Walsh has assembled some quotes from Holdren here. We’ll try to put together some from Lubchenco as well and post them on the globalwarming.org blog.
Much more can be said about them individually, but suffice it to say that the Obama Administration’s energy and climate team is a disaster. While he has chosen moderate establishment Democrats for the macro-economic jobs, his micro-economic policy appointees on energy policy will wreck the economy for a generation if President Obama and the Congress adopt their policies.
Around the World
EU’s Climate Plan Is All Smoke and Mirrors
Iain Murray
So if the EU has just put together an agreement to reduce emissions by 20% by 2020, why are the climate alarmist groups calling it “a dark day” and “an embarrassment”?
Well, the answer is because the actual agreement is for a 4% reduction (also explained in the last link, but Roger Pielke Jr does it better). And that may be null and void if a global agreement doesn’t emerge at Copenhagen next year, which it probably won’t.
Note also that the “rich” countries of the EU-15 have actually failed to make any dent in their emissions since the early 1990s and that the former Eastern bloc countries have failed to reduce emissions since 2000. Of course, they have a recession that will reduce emissions over the next couple of years, and if they’re silly enough to adopt the policies that will turn it into a Great Depression, they might just hit their targets. There will be singing and dancing among the ruins, I am sure, when that takes place.
Across the States
California, New Jersey
Los Angeles has a solar power measure on the ballot for the city referendum this March. Measure B, titled “Green Energy and Good Jobs for Los Angeles,” would require the LA Department of Water and Power to build 400 megawatts of distributed generation on publicly owned rooftops. The LA Times reports today that Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller warned that the solar measure could result in “substantial increases” to the electricity bills of DWP customers. In 2000, L.A. announced it would become the “Solar Capital of the World,” with solar panels on 100,000 rooftops by 2010. Three years and $80 million later–to outfit 600 rooftops at a cost of $13,000 each–the city cancelled the project as cost-ineffective, 99,400 buildings short of its goal.
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection released its plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The proposals were crafted by former DEP head Lisa Jackson, who was tapped this week by President-elect Barack Obama to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. The plan has three components. The first is Governor Corzine’s Energy Master Plan (read here why it’s a boondoggle). The second part of the plan is to regulate tailpipe emissions from cars, but a federal court have yet to decide whether states have the authority to regulate fuel efficiency, and even if they did, the $100 billion regulatory burden would ruin the American auto industry. The final component is New Jersey’s participation in a regional energy rationing program that is designed to increase the price of energy.
Not evil, just wrong.
From the author of the New York Times bestselling Politically Incorrect Guide(tm) to Global Warming (and Environmentalism) comes Red Hot Lies, an exposé of the hypocrisy, deceit, and outright lies of the global warming alarmists and the compliant media that support them. Did you know that most scientists are global warming skeptics? Or that environmental alarmists have knowingly promoted false and exaggerated data on global warming? Or that in the Left's efforts to suppress free speech (and scientific research), they have compared global warming dissent with "treason"? Shocking, frank, and illuminating, Chris Horner's Red Hot Lies explodes as many myths as Al Gore promotes.
Click here to purchase.
President-elect Barack Obama’s nominations of Senator Ken Salazar to be Secretary of the Interior and of former Governor Tom Vilsack to be Secretary of Agriculture complete a team that opposes affordable energy. As Governor of Iowa, Mr. Vilsack was a leading promoter of the ethanol boondoggle. Colorado Senator Salazar says he is for more oil production on federal land, but has tried to stop one oil and gas project after another on federal land in Colorado.
Senator Salazar and Governor Vilsack will join Dr. Steven Chu, who has been nominated to be Secretary of Energy, and Carol M. Browner, who has been appointed White House energy and global warming “czar.” Ms. Browner is a close ally of former Vice President Al Gore, who advocates closing down all coal-fired power plants and banning new ones, even though coal provides half of America’s electricity. Dr. Chu has declared that coal is “his worst nightmare” and supports European levels of gasoline taxes of four or more dollars a gallon.
If President Obama allows his energy team to pursue their goals, American taxpayers will be required to pay tens of billions of dollars to special interests such as ethanol producers and windmill owners and American consumers will see huge increases in electricity and gasoline prices.
It is only fitting that amid the talks over a successor to the 2008-2012 Kyoto “global warming” treaty in Poznan, Poland — where the Poles were lectured how they should leave that abundant coal in the ground since their friendly Russian neighbors have a reliable gas supply for them to burn instead — that we should see eye-popping rhetorical revisions to join such ignorance of history.
Yesterday, as expected, President-elect named Carol Browner and Dr. Steven Chu to lead his administration's energy and global warming team. They are well-qualified and capable. The problem is that Ms. Browner and Dr. Chu enthusiastically support President-elect Obama's energy and global warming policies, which would push America in the wrong direction.
Mr. Obama has said that he wants to lower oil prices, yet his policies would raise gasoline prices to European levels of five or six dollars a gallon. His other global warming policies would send electricity prices through the roof. Mr. Obama proposes to achieve energy independence from foreign oil, yet he has consistently opposed increasing domestic oil production. He proposes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions drastically, yet hasn't noticed that emissions are going up in the European Union and Canada, which ratified the Kyoto Protocol requiring emissions cuts. He wants to create 2.5 million green jobs (down from the campaign promise of 5 million), yet doesn't recognize that this will be a net negative to the economy. Forcing consumers to pay more for "green" energy will mean less money in their pockets to spend at their local Starbucks or Wal Mart or on vacation travel.
Browner, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator under President Bill Clinton, is Obama’s pick to head a new White House post overseeing energy and environment policy. Chu, who runs the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, will be nominated to head that agency.
Participants at last week's United Nations climate conference in Poznan, Poland, were taken aback by a world seemingly turned upside-down. The traditional villains and heroes of the international climate narrative, the wicked U.S. and the noble European Union, had unexpectedly swapped roles. For once, it was the EU that was criticized for backpedalling on its CO2 targets while Europe's climate nemesis, the U.S., found itself commended for electing an environmental champion as president.
The European Union held negotiations this week to finalize the third and final phase of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). The first two phases of the EU’s cap-and-trade program were turned into boondoggles by influential business lobbies, according to a recent article in the New York Times.
Industry lobbyists again triumphed this week in Brussels. Coal-fired power plants in East and Central European countries won the right to a delayed payment schedule for emissions credits. German industry won the right to future concessions if a study deems that the EU ETS renders them less competitive on the global market. Although it was never entirely clear what Italy wanted (some believed that the Italian delegation threatened to veto the package to win concessions for the Italian car industry in upcoming negotiations), Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told AFP that "Italy is on the way to getting all it wants.” The gutted agreement infuriated environmentalists.
This was a predictable result. Almost two years ago, CEI president Fred Smith testified before the U. S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and warned that cap-and-trade is a lobbyists’ dream, because its complexity creates ample space to negotiate concessions for individual companies.
President-elect Barack Obama has reportedly settled on his environment and energy team, with the exception of Interior Secretary. Newspapers, citing sources in the Obama transition team, have reported that Carol M. Browner will be appointed to the unofficial (and hence not subject to Senate confirmation) position of White House energy and global warming czar. Lisa Jackson, currently serving as Commissioner for Environmental Protection for the State of New Jersey, is Obama’s choice for Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. For Secretary of Energy, Obama has picked Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner. And Nancy Sutley, Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles for energy and the environment, will be Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
This is a very capable, experienced, and energetic group of people. Browner headed the EPA during the full eight years of the Clinton-Gore Administration. She also worked for Al Gore when he was in the Senate and helped with the research and maybe the writing of Earth in the Balance. Jackson worked at EPA for 16 years in senior enforcement positions in the Washington, DC headquarters and in the New York regional office. Chu heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is funded by the Department of Energy. Before that he was professor of physics at Stanford University, where he won the Nobel in 1997. Sutley has held a number of other appointed positions at the federal, state, and local levels. She was a senior policy adviser to Browner at EPA and also worked for former California Governor Gray Davis.
It’s too bad they’re so capable, experienced, and energetic because the energy and global warming policies that President-elect Obama wants them to pursue are radical, economically disastrous, and pointless. As the Washington Post sub-headlined David A. Fahrenthold’s article on Obama’s picks, “Their goals will be radical, but the three officials tapped to lead effort are experienced regulators.”
The fact that three of the four are experienced regulators should not be taken to imply that some or all of them don’t also share Obama’s radical views. Browner worked closely with Gore, and Chu is a global warming true believer.
The only good news is that the global warming fad has clearly peaked. Reality is setting in around the world, as temperatures continue flat and efforts to reduce emissions prove costly and ineffective. Let’s hope that our elected leaders in Congress see what’s happening before they turn off the lights.
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