It’s no secret that actors have superhero-sized egos – especially when they actually play a superhero. Case in point: Mark Ruffalo, who picked up an Academy Award nomination for his role in last year’s Oscar-bait The Kids Are All Right, and who has now thrown himself into the role of his career – The Incredible Hulk.
Ruffalo will be the latest actor to portray Marvel Comics’ Jolly Green Giant in next year’s big budget spectacular, The Avengers, which will bring the cinematic versions of Marvel’s characters, including Robert Downey, Jr.’s Iron Man, together to save Earth from an intergalactic menace.
But Ruffalo the actor has an enemy in his crosshairs more insidious than any supervillain: Hydraulic fracturing. Yep, the process by which natural gas is extracted from rock via pressurized fluid, commonly known as “fracking,” has aroused the especial ire of the environmentalists, Ruffalo included. On November 30th The Capitol reported:
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In the wake of EPA’s announcement that it intends to regulate how drillers dispose of the millions of gallons of wastewater (or flowback water) created by shale gas production, the Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee’s recent hearing on the issue focused on how such added regulation will negatively impact the American economy: “Ensuring Regulatory Approaches That Will Help Protect Jobs and Domestic Energy Production.” This added federal regulation can only be seen in the wasteful light of a phantom problem.
According to E&E News, there are currently no national standards set for the disposal of shale gas drilling wastewater; dumping it into rivers and streams is prohibited. States currently have the jurisdiction of choosing what drilling regulations to adopt. To Representative Tim Bishop’s (D-NY) question of why a national minimum standard would not succeed, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Michael Krancer shot back: “Because of our long history of oil and gas development and comprehensive regulatory structure, Pennsylvania does not need intervention to ensure an appropriate balance between resources development and environmental protection is struck.”
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Do biofuel mandates and subsidies inflate food prices? Do they increase world hunger ? There was a rip-roaring debate on the food security impacts of biofuel policies in 2007-2008, when sharp spikes in wheat, corn, and rice prices imperiled an estimated 100 million people in developing countries. Food price riots broke out in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, Mozambique, Senegal, Somalia, and Yemen.
Experts attributed the rapid rise in food prices to several factors including high petroleum prices, drought in Australia, a weak U.S. dollar, commodity speculation, and rising demand for grain-fed meat by China’s rapidly expanding middle class. But some also laid part of the blame on biofuel policies, which artificially increase global demand for corn and soy while diverting those crops and farmland from food to fuel production. A July 2008 World Bank report argued that biofuel policies accounted for as much as two-thirds of the 2007-2008 price spike. A July 2010 World Bank report, on the other hand, concluded that rising petroleum prices were the dominant factor. “Biofuels played some role too, but much less than previously thought,” the report stated.
Where does the debate stand today? Recent reports by the National Research Council (NRC), the New England Complex Systems Institute (CSI), the UN Committee on World Food Security (CWFS), and Iowa State University (ISU) all acknowledge that biofuel policies put upward pressure on food and feed prices. The NRC and ISU studies argue that U.S. biofuel policies have only modest impacts on grain prices whereas the CSI and CWFS studies indicate that biofuel policies contributed significantly to the 2008 global food crisis and/or pose significant risks to global food security today.
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Electricity rates now depend more on public policy and regulatory decisions than on actual costs.
Based on a newly released report from Oliver Wyman, a leading global management consulting firm, “There is a growing need to increase electricity prices. These rate increases are largely being driven by environmental, regulatory, and security requirements.” And they are adding to “financial strain at the worst possible moment.”
The report, designed to help utility companies deal with customer wrath, states that “the increases have been the most significant in the residential segment”—where they grew more quickly than other sectors. Despite declining pricing on some fuels, such as natural gas, electricity rates have risen 2.7% per year with some regions experiencing average price increases of 5.1% annually. In contrast, the consumer price index—excluding food and energy—rose by 1.7%.
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The individual (or individuals) who, in November 2009, released 1,000 emails to and from IPCC-affiliated climate scientists, igniting the Climategate scandal, struck again earlier this week. The leaker(s) released an additional 5,000 emails involving the same cast of characters, notably Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, and Michael Mann, creator of the discredited Hockey Stick reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature history. The blogosphere quickly branded the new trove of emails “Climategate 2.0.”
The timing in each case was not accidental. The Climategate emails made painfully clear that the scientists shaping the huge — and hugely influential — IPCC climate change assessment reports are not impartial experts but agenda-driven activists. Climategate exposed leading U.N.-affiliated scientists as schemers colluding to manipulate public opinion, downplay inconvenient data, bias the peer review process, marginalize skeptical scientists, and flout freedom of information laws. Climategate thus contributed to the failure of the December 2009 Copenhagen climate conference to negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. Similarly, Climategate 2.0 arrives shortly before the December 2011 climate conference in Durban — although nobody expects the delegates to agree on a post-Kyoto climate treaty anyway.
Excerpts from Climategate 2.0 emails appear to confirm in spades earlier criticisms of the IPCC climate science establishment arising out of Climategate. My colleague, Myron Ebell, enables us to see this at a glance by sorting the excerpts into categories. [click to continue…]
Federal agencies are not supposed to be overtly partisan. They are also not supposed to legislate. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood apparently didn’t get the memo. Or maybe they just don’t give a darn.
In a press release announcing their plan to raise fuel economy standards to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, the agency heads boast: “Today’s announcement is the latest in a series of executive actions the Obama Administration is taking to strengthen the economy and move the country forward because we can’t wait for Congressional Republicans to act” [emphasis added]. Jackson and LaHood even title their press release, “We Can’t Wait.”
‘What do we want? Energy independence! When do we want it? Now!’ Even if that means trashing the separation of powers, the essential constitutional foundation for accountable government.
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Yesterday morning, television magazine energyNOW! ran a surprisingly* good segment on the oil boom in North Dakota. Long story short: technological advances in drilling have made possible the recovery of vast reserves of oil, which has caused tremendous job creation. According to the segment, the average oil and gas worker makes $75,000, and there is a huge demand for labor. The whole northwestern part of the state is like a wild-west mining town. At one point, a supervisor at one rig offered a job to the energyNOW! cameraman. As a result of this oil rush, North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the country–a paltry 3.5 percent.
Compare this to California. Despite possessing mineral wealth, the Golden State wants nothing to do with the production of “dirty” hydrocarbons. Instead, it is the self-proclaimed leader in expensive “clean” energy technologies, like wind turbines and electric cars. To that end, the State next month is expected to finalize a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme. The idea is to make conventional, hydrocarbon energy more expensive, and thereby boost demand for green energy. The cap-and-trade scheme was originally planned to have been a regional policy, but last week, Arizona became the sixth State (after New Mexico, Washington, Oregon, Montana and Utah) to withdraw. In a statement, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality said it acted to “[avoid] the economic costs to industries that are subject to cap and trade.” Now, California will absorb these “economic costs” alone. This energy tax will only worsen the state’s unemployment rate: 11.9 percent, second worst in the nation.
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This morning, Energy Secretary Steven Chu was grilled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee over his role in the ongoing Solyndra debacle. In September 2009, the California-based solar panel manufacturer received a $535 million loan guarantee from a stimulus-funded green bank operated by the Department of Energy. Last September, Solyndra declared bankruptcy, and now taxpayers are on the hook for almost a half billion dollars. Lawmakers on the Energy and Commerce Committee want to lay responsibility for this fiasco at the feet of Secretary Chu, but they have misidentified the perp. In fact, the Congress has only itself to blame.
This is not to say that Secretary Chu is faultless. His stewardship of the stimulus-funded green bank was rash. From the outset, the Energy Secretary intended to rush money out the door, which is conducive to fiscal mismanagement. Two weeks after the creation of the green bank, Secretary Chu promised to “start cutting checks” within months, despite the fact that the Department of Energy was essentially creating an investment bank from scratch.
Secretary Chu’s need for speed, however, wasn’t enough for Members of Congress. In September 2010, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing decrying the supposedly languid pace of loans from the Energy Department’s green bank. A month before that, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) bemoaned that, “They [the Department of Energy] have been, in my opinion, very, very slow in putting that money out.”
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Last week, after three years of environmental review, public meetings, and public comment, President Obama postponed until first quarter 2013 a decision on whether or not to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline — the $7 billion, shovel-ready project to deliver up to 830,000 barrels a day of tar sands oil from Canada to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. Obama’s punt, which Keystone opponents hope effectively kills the pipeline, is topic-of-the-week on National Journal’s Energy Experts Blog. So far, a dozen “experts” have posted, including yours truly.
Now, if you’ve been paying attention at all over the past 40 years, you may suspect that most Keystone opponents want to kill the pipeline just because they hate oil and oil companies — even as they fill up their tanks to drive to the next demonstration. Bill McKibben, lead organizer of the anti-Keystone protest rallies outside the White House, lives in Vermont. On the Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert asked McKibben: “You’re from Vermont? Did you ride your bicycle down here? Or did you ride ox cart? How did you get down here? Or do you have a vehicle that runs on hypocrisy?”
If we take them at their word, McKibben and his climate guru, NASA scientist James Hansen, oppose Keystone because they believe it will contribute to global warming. How? The cutting-edge method for extracting oil from tar sands is a process called steam assisted gravity drainage. SAGD uses natural gas to heat and liquefy bitumen, a tar-like form of petroleum too viscous to be pumped by conventional wells, and burning natural gas emits carbon dioxide (CO2). So their gripe is that replacing conventional oil with tar sands oil will increase CO2 emissions from the U.S. transport sector. Maybe by only 1% annually,* but to hard-core warmists, any increase is intolerable.
Enter the Law of Unintended Consequences. If McKibben and Hansen succeed in killing the pipeline, petroleum-related CO2 emissions might actually increase! [click to continue…]
Stimulus spending on environmentalist policy is a green albatross around the neck of President Barack Obama. Inspectors General are having a field day auditing stimulus-funded programs for so-called “green jobs,” and the media LOVES stories about wasted taxpayer money. What started as a sop to his environmentalist base, now threatens to become a slow-drip nightmare of negative press. The timing couldn’t be worse for the President. It takes time to disburse scores of billions of dollars, so we are only now starting to scrutinize stimulus spending. By November 2012, we’ll be able to account for most of the money, and unless the current trend changes radically, the Executive in Chief is going to look conspicuously incompetent.
Here’s the back-story: In early 2009, the Executive and Legislative branches of government had a popular mandate to defibrillate America’s moribund economy with a huge injection of taxpayer dollars. Instead of limiting this “stimulus” to state bailouts and infrastructure spending, the Obama administration (led by climate “czar” and former EPA administrator Carol Browner) and the Congressional majority (led by House Energy and Commerce Chair Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills)) also sought to advance environmentalist policy. As a result, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a.k.a. the stimulus, included almost $70 billion in spending for green jobs and renewable energy infrastructure.
Every single link along the green energy supply chain was showered with subsidies. There was funding for green jobs training, funding for factories to make green products, and funding to incentivize demand for green goods and services. It was as like a green Gosplan!
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